Baroque noble residence
It is incredible how many wonderful landscapes and architectural masterpieces South Moravia dazzles us with! Today I visited Buchlovice, a town in the Uherské Hradiště district, Zlín region. It is located 78 kilometers (~ miles) from Brno at the foot of the Chřiby Mountains and is crossed by the Buchlovický stream and the Dlouhá river. It is a tiny town with only 2,400 inhabitants, which has a rich folklore life and natural spas. Here you can find the breathtakingly beautiful two chateau buildings and the chateau park of Chateau Buchlovice. The chateau was built in the 16th century by Jan Dětřich of Petřvaldi for his wife, Agnes Eleonora from the Venetian Colonna family. It was designed in the Italian Baroque style by the famous Italian master builder Domenico Martinelli from Lucca in Tuscany. The last member of the Petřvald family died childless, so the estate passed to his nephew, Leopold I of the Berchtold House. The Berchtold family was an old noble family from Tyrol, Austria.
In the 20th century, the architect Dominik Fey carried out renovations to the chateau, which gave it its present form. It consists of two buildings facing each other, the Upper Castle and the Lower Castle. The buildings are connected by a courtyard with a magnificent fountain in the center. Previously, the Upper Castle housed reception rooms for economic purposes, while the Lower Castle served as a representational residence and was the residence of the noble count family. Baroque furniture is characterized by richly decorated oak and walnut furniture, with carved decorations and gilding. Gold-framed mirrors, elegant candlesticks and expensive foreign porcelain. In addition, numerous frescoes, paintings and sculptures decorate the rooms.
The chateau garden was founded at the beginning of the 18th century, with a terraced layout, originally designed in the regular French Baroque style, but by the end of the 18th century it was transformed in the spirit of the fashionable sentimental mood. The author of the concept and sculptural decoration of the park was the Brno sculptor Ondřej Schweigl. Only one commemorative obelisk with the coat of arms of the Petřvaldský family survived from his work after the English-style transformations of the Berchtold family. The area of this natural landscape park was 19 hectares. Its dendrological collection contains exotic and rare tree species, the seeds and seedlings of which were brought by the Berchtold family during their travels abroad.
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
– Camille Paglia