Among the views and plans of garden art in the Haupt Collection, which were already digitised in 2017 and made available online in the portal "Kulturerbe Niedersachsen", is the large-format Plan de Versailles by Abbé Jean Delagrive (1689-1757). Created in 1746 during the reign of Louis XV, the print shows the ground plan of the gardens, the palace and the part of the city of Versailles close to the palace, as it was built by his grandfather Louis XIV. Considering the enormous extent of the garden, the palace plays only a minor role. As a point of reference, however, the fragile-looking structure underscores all the more the gigantic dimensions of the gardens.
The plan not only shows impressively the central, baroque features of the entire complex, but also documents in detail the internal structures and the distribution of the sculptural decoration. In a detailed legend on the lower right, more than 190 numbers explain the genre, iconography and the artists who executed the sculptural decoration. The final number (no. 191) is the equestrian statue of Gianlorenzo Bernini, ordered by Louis XIV but then spurned by him, which – although reworked by François Girardon into the Roman legendary figure of Marcus Curtius – was banished to the southern end of the so-called Piece des Suisses (bottom right).
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