The Amber Room_ The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure - Cathy Scott-Clark [15]
Sophie Charlotte wanted Berlin to ring with music and its drawing rooms to be nourished by intelligent conversation. Her palaces were to be intimate, divided into small but elaborate salons decorated with muted bronze and burnished gold. It was Charlottenburg, a maison de plaisance and the Prussian equivalent of Tsarskoye Selo, that was to be the expression of these ideas. In 1696 Sophie Charlotte asked Schliiter to begin working on the interior designs of the building.
However, in 1699 Johan Friedrich d'Eosander, a brilliant Swedish architect and Sophie Charlotte's favourite, returned to Berlin from study leave and took over the Charlottenburg project. Schliiter was so rankled at being usurped by a man twenty-five years his junior that he abandoned Charlottenburg and reverted to the Royal Palace renovations. He was determined to create something eye-catching, lavish and innovative - rooms embellished with luxurious and novel materials: rare minerals, wood and fabrics. However, the idea for the Royal Palace's most radical feature, the one that he hoped would outshine the work of Sophie Charlotte's favourite, would come to him only by accident.
Searching the cellar stores of the Royal Palace for raw materials, Schliiter found dozens of chests packed with nuggets of golden resin that he recognized from his days in Poland. It was East Prussian amber, scooped from the Baltic Sea, a substance whose trade was controlled by the Hohenzollerns. More than 40 million years ago this region had been part of Fennoscandia, a vast forest that stretched from the Norwegian coast to the Caspian Sea. For centuries this humid, coniferous jungle, teeming with reptile and insect life, exuded hundreds of millions of droplets of resin on to the heavy clay floor, trapping countless frozen moments: a fly touching down on to a branch, the brush of a lizard's skin against it. Then the landmasses separated, ice sheets froze and thawed, flooding the Baltic, creating seas and inland lagoons, fossilizing and scattering the Gold of the North, throwing it towards the spits of land that would later be home to the cities of Danzig, Konigsberg and Memel.13
Because of the primitive methods used to collect amber - it was fished from the Baltic Sea by men wielding giant nets - it was exorbitantly expensive and used almost exclusively to create small decorative or devotional objects like altar sets, cabinets and rosaries. However, in this cellar lay more amber than Schliiter had ever seen before.
Schliiter would have appreciated that Baltic amber had a particular resonance for Prussian aristocrats. In 168E the Great Elector Frederick William had used amber to forge diplomatic ties with Russia, sending Fedor III in Moscow a throne made from the resin that was proclaimed by the tsar to be 'the greatest curiosity in the world'. When reports reached Prussia the following year that Fedor was sick, Frederick William sent more amber to nine-year-old Grand Duke Peter, who spies told him was to be the tsar's successor. An amber mirror was dispatched, accompanied by a deal: access to strategic, unfrozen Baltic ports in exchange for Russia's support for Prussia's claim to a crown.14
In the cellar, Andreas Schliiter must have conceived his idea. There was enough amber here to panel an entire chamber. His plan crystallized on 18 January 1701, when Frederick was at last crowned 'King in Prussia' at Konigsberg Castle, with Queen Sophie Charlotte at his side, resplendent in amber jewellery. The monarch had consciously chosen the historic capital of his forefathers on the Baltic coast and crown jewels fished from the Baltic Sea. Schliiter immediately sent to Copenhagen for a carver.
Gottfried