Last May, Rundale Palace, a 18th-century Baroque palace in Latvia, celebrated the completion of 50 years of renovation work with the opening of the Duke's Library, one of several rooms finally open to the public for the first time. The Duke in question was Ernst Johann von Biron, the Duke of Courland, for whom the palace was built between 1736 and 1740 by the Italian architect Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli as a summer residence. It boasts 54 rooms, including a 1770s-era billiards room and a banquet hall known as the Great Gallery, which have also finally been restored to their original splendor. Some have called the palace the Versailles of Latvia.
The person primarily responsible for this miraculous facelift is Imants Lancmanis, a 73-year-old painter, art historian and director whose involvement with Rundale began in 1964 when he was an art student in Riga. First hired as a research assistant, he became the palace's director in 1975. "I had my personal visual image of Rundale," he says. The restoration of one ceiling painting took six years; stucco decorations in the White Hall, a chapel turned ballroom with pastoral scenes above the windows, took about a decade. Because there were no wall fabrics, the restoration team had to order 4,400 meters of old pattern replicas. The entire tin roof also had to be replaced.
The European treasures inside the palace include a portrait of Catherine the Great alongside Russian rulers and a chest of drawers designed by Jean-Henri Riesener, who worked for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The Lancmanis family selected many of the paintings, furniture and textiles from auctions, gathering others from Latvian museums and Russian private collections. Romantic mythology fills the place: there is a ceiling painting of Venus and Adonis in the Reception Room, while the pink-hued Rose Room is dedicated to Flora, the goddess of spring and flowers. In the gardens outside, Lancmanis says, there are are 2,400 different varieties of roses, and 10,000 in all. "It really is the largest in northeast Europe."
With understatement, he adds, "I was lucky to have time to participate in the restoration."
Rundale Palace is open year-round. For more information, visit rundale.net.
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