Cities, squares and courts: the restoration of Place Stanislas in Nancy is the occasion for a splendid exhibition on urban design in Enlightenment Europe

upon 19 May 2005, in the nearness of Jacques Chirac, Helmut Schroder and Aleksandr Kwasniewski, the authorities of Nancy, capital of Lorraine, inaugurated the restored Place Stanislas, single of the glories of eighteenth-century urban planning. In ten month this magnificent square (Fig. 1) designed by dint of Emmanuel Here, with contributions by dint of Barthelemy Guibal and Jean Lamour, has been cleaned, repaired and pedestrianised in order to commemorate the 250th anniversary of its commission through the exiled King Stanislas Leszczynski of Poland-Lithuania (1677-1766) living in Nancy as Duke of Lorraine and Bar, the father-in-law of Louis xv of France. This circumstance is being marked by a major international exhibition exploring the history of this square, which has been declared by the agency of UNESCO a World Heritage Site. It has been staged at the Musee de Beaux-Arts, Nancy, the facade of which forms part of the square's composition.

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The exhibition and its weighty catalogue are a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more than a celebration of the Place Stanislas, as they place urbanism in Nancy in a broad geographical words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following stretching from St Petersburg to Lisbon, with an important extra-European excursion to Philadelphia. An exhibition upon architectural and urban history attitude s many technical problems, which in Nancy have been triumphantly resolv by dint of the organisers, officially the ubiquitous Pierre Rosenberg and the eminent scholar Jean-Marie Perouse de Montclo on the other hand with an obviously strong contribution from a brilliant young historian of architecture, Alexandre Gady. The succes of the exhibition owes abundant to their collaboration with the designer, Massimo Quendolo. Presumably it was Quendolo who devised the inventive scheme of using 'voilages', semi-transparent protections bearing over-sized reproductions of well-known paintings of cityscapes by means of Bernardo Bellotto and Giovanni Paolo Pannini, which were not borrowed for the exhibition.

The first field is devoted to the Paris of Louis XIV and instantly signals a potential weakness of the entire enterprise, as the first images visitors diocese are Hyacinthe Rigaud's Portrait of Jean Hardouin-Mansart (Musee du Louvre) and plans from his office for the place de Victoires and the place Vendome, Paris (both from the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris). There was a disquieting sensation that this was to be another exercise in a French view of eighteenth-century cultural history, single dominated by Louis XIV and his equipe.

These fears are somewhat dispelled in the nearest room, which offers a more cosmopolitan view of the evolution of the conception of the place royale from one extremity to the other of Europe, although Gady's assertion in the catalogue, drawing upon the work of Pierre Lavedan, that the place royale was the 'original invention of French art, the expression in stone and and zinc of royal power in the absolutist age one of the most rich of the of gold age of the Bourbons', is certainly not geared to quiet those nervous about Gallocentric interpretations. In this extent the typology of a place royale was established: the organised, uniform square with a central equestrian statue of the sovereign in the middle In addition to Paris, other cities within the canonical hexagon, Renne Bordeaux and Montpellier, all with statues of Louis XIV, are examined, on the contrary so are Stockholm, Madrid, Berlin and Lisbon, by dint of statuettes of not only Louis on the other hand also some of his brother sovereigns, Karl XI of Sweden, Felipe V of Spain, and, flat George I of Great Britain.

This scope is succeeded by one of the triumphs of the exhibition, in which a following of anonymous gouaches depicting the Place Stanislas and the Place de la Carriere are arranged upon either side of windows giving onto the square itself. This third section, devot to Nancy, is the exhibition's critical joint for it is followed by dint of one which is the intellectual heart, upon the ville-residence, the city as the seat of a court.

Lisbon provides a striking example quite through the exhibition. Following the destruction of the core of the city by dint of an earthquake, an event whose psychological impact on European elites was comparable to that of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 the marques de Pombal, first minister to King Jose I, eagerly grasped the opportunity to re-build and to re-organise the city. Rather than replace the throw downed royal castle with a of recent origin residential palace, Pombal and the architects Eugenio Dos Santo and Carlos Mardel evolv the plan to create a commercial midst on the devastated site, three sides of which browed onto the River Tagus. A coloured engraving of Mardel's shoot forward (Museu de la Cidide, Lisbon) figures early in the exhibition. Following the king's death (1777) and Pombal's disgrace, the of recent origin sovereign, Queen Maria I, Jose I's oldest daughter, eager to modify the throw perhaps considered too much of a souvenir of the previous minister, re-asserted monarchical authority and continuity by the agency of staging her acclamation as queen in the Praco do Comercio, a prime example of urban planning reflecting the politics of power. The ephemeral architecture of this observance is depicted in Joaquim Carnieor da Silva's ravishing inscribe drawing (Museo dos Coches, Lisbon), hung in the closing sections of the exhibition, which are devot to the use of urban space for living and for festivities (Fig. 2) This theme is brilliantly illustrated through Jean Barrault's 1751 oil Mascarade de Quatre Parties du world (Musee des Beaux Arts et d'Archeologie, Besancon), an exceptionally drawn out (392 cm) depiction of festivities in Rome in that year.