Ludwig II (Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm; sometimes rendered as Louis II in English) (25 August 1845 – 13 June 1886) was king of Bavaria from 1864 until shortly before his death. He is sometimes referred to as the Swan King in English and der Märchenkönig (the Fairy tale King) in German.
Ludwig is sometimes also referred to as Mad King Ludwig, though the accuracy of that label has been disputed. Because Ludwig was deposed on grounds of mental illness without any medical examination, and died a day later under mysterious circumstances, questions about the medical diagnosis remain controversial.http://picturesofswans.blogspot.com/
Ludwig used his personal fortune to fund the construction of a series of elaborate castles. In 1861 he visited Viollet-le-Duc's work at Pierrefonds, in France, which largely influenced the style of their construction. These projects provided many laborers employment and brought a considerable flow of money to the regions where his castles were built.
In 1868, Ludwig commissioned the first drawings for two of his buildings. The first was Schloss Neuschwanstein, or "New Swanstone Castle", a dramatic Romanesque fortress with soaring fairy tale towers. The second was Herrenchiemsee, a replica of the central section of the palace at Versailles, France, Herrenchiemsee which was to be sited on the Herren Island in the middle of the Chiemsee Lake, was meant to outdo its predecessor in scale and opulence.
The following year, he finished the construction of the royal apartment in the Residenz Palace in Munich, which was followed three years later by the addition of an opulent conservatory or Winter Garden on the palace roof. It featured an ornamental lake with gardens and painted frescoes, and was roofed over using a technically advanced metal and glass construction.
In 1869, Ludwig oversaw the laying of the cornerstone for Schloss Neuschwanstein on a breathtaking mountaintop site overlooking his childhood home, the castle his father had built at Hohenschwangau. The walls of Neuschwanstein are decorated with frescoes depicting scenes from many of Wagner's operas, including the somewhat less than mystic Meistersinger.
In 1872, he began construction for a special festival theater dedicated to the works of Richard Wagner, in the town of Bayreuth. A few years later, he watched early versions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle operas there, though he avoided the public performances. In 1878, construction was completed on Ludwig’s Schloss Linderhof, an ornate palace in neo-French Rococo style, with handsome formal gardens. The grounds contained a Venus grotto lit by electricity, where opera singers performed while Ludwig was rowed in a boat shaped like a shell. In the grounds a romantic woodsman's hut was also built around an artificial tree. The hut, referred to as Hundings Hut, is a reference to a similar structure in der Ring des Niebelungen. There is a sword embedded in the tree. In Walküre, Siegfried's father Siegmund, pulls the sword from the tree. Inside the palace, iconography reflected Ludwig's fascination with the absolutist government of Ancien Régime France. Ludwig saw himself as the "Moon King", a romantic shadow of the earlier "Sun King", Louis XIV of France. From Linderhof, Ludwig enjoyed moonlit sleigh rides in an elaborate eighteenth century sleigh, complete with footmen in eighteenth century livery. Also in 1878, construction began on his Versailles-derived Herrenchiemsee.
In 1879 he travelled to Britain and visited Sir Richard Wallace, to whom he had written for advice on Britain's medieval architecture. Wallace advised Ludwig to take a tour of the countryside in order to survey a variety of ecclesiastical buildings, that he might draw inspiration from them for future building projects. In a letter to Wallace, Ludwig expressed particular admiration for the buildings of Hertfordshire, which he toured extensively.
In the 1880s, Ludwig’s plans proceeded undimmed. He planned construction of a new castle on the Falkenstein near Pfronten in the Allgäu (based on the the tower of St Mary's Church, Baldock), a Byzantine palace in the Graswangtal and a Chinese summer palace in Tyrol. By 1885, demolition for the beginning of the Falkenstein project was underway, and the road to the site had been graded.
Neuschwanstein Castle (German: Schloss Neuschwanstein) is a 19th century neo romanticist palace on a rugged hill above the village of Hohenschwangau near Füssen in southwest Bavaria, Germany. The palace was commissioned by Ludwig II of Bavaria as a retreat and as an homage to Richard Wagner.
Neuschwanstein embodies both the contemporaneous architectural fashion known as castle romanticism (German: Burgenromantik), and Ludwig II's immoderate enthusiasm for the operas of Richard Wagner.The suite of rooms within the Palas contains the Throne Room, Ludwig's suite, the Singers' Hall, and the Grotto. Throughout, the design pays homage to the German legends of Lohengrin, the Swan Knight. Hohenschwangau, where Ludwig spent much of his youth, had decorations of these sagas. These themes were taken up in the operas of Richard Wagner. Many rooms bear a border depicting the various operas written by Wagner, including a theater permanently featuring the set of one such play. Many of the interior rooms remain undecorated, with only 14 rooms finished before Ludwig's death. With the palace under construction at the King's death, one of the major features of the palace remained unbuilt. A massive keep was planned for the middle of the upper courtyard but was never built, at the decision of the King's family. The foundation for the keep is visible in the upper courtyard.
Neuschwanstein is a global symbol of the era of Romanticism. The palace served as a model for the Sleeping Beauty Castle of Disneyland and became a location for films such as Helmut Käutner's Ludwig II (1955) and Luchino Visconti's Ludwig (1972) as well as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).
pictures of swans
