Eclectic Eccentric

Everybody (well, nearly everybody) has heard of mad King Ludwig II, the eccentric scion of the Wittelsbachs, who dotted Bavaria's picturesque hilltops with an insanely extravagant clatch of castles, pavilions, hideaways and other architectural follies in the 1870s and 1880s. Was he totally deranged? Not according to Dr. Michael Petzet, 35, the Munich art historian who oversees Bavaria's state-run castle-museums (including Ludwig's). Petzet, pointing out that Ludwig was the patron of Richard Wagner, sees the king as "a creator in his own right, someone who aimed to fulfill what Wagner understood as total art on his own terms."

What Ludwig created was a style. Though politically a puppet, he possessed the taste, the ability and the resources to blend Romanesque, Oriental, Moorish and rococo influences into what later became known as the Jugendstil--the German equivalent of art nouveau. Petzet's point is spectacularly documented in a dramatic display of 907 paintings, drawings, costumes, stage models, furniture and other rarely seen bric-a-brac commissioned and closely supervised in their execution by Ludwig for his many projects. The lot is installed for the summer in a wing of the Wittelsbach family palace, formally known as the Munich Residence. Selected from Ludwig's three castles, from vaults and state theatrical museums, and sumptuously installed in velvet-hung, stagily lit galleries, their magpie splendors represent the culmination of Ludwig's eclectic vision.

The tour begins in the courtyard with the gilded and tasseled coach that served Ludwig at his coronation in 1864, when he was, in Bismarck's words, a "beautiful girl" of 18. Inside, the displays begin with stage models for Wagner's operas. From the age of twelve, Ludwig was enthralled by the work of the composer, whose fascination with medieval legend he shared. Upon his accession to the throne, he summoned Wagner from Stuttgart, installed him in a Munich suburban house, bankrolled the first productions of his most famous operas. Atop the Munich Residence he built a huge greenhouse with a lily pond. Floating in a barge clad as Lohengrin, he watched slides of the Venusberg cast on the walls by a projector, while a hidden orchestra played Tannhaeuser. Though World War II bombs shattered the greenhouse, the red-cushioned barge has been reinstalled on a blue-lit lake of mirror.

Every Eye. Ludwig's most famous effort was Neuschwanstein, whose Romanesque-Moorish turrets bedeck Bavarian travel posters. The carvings and furnishings from its marble and mosaic chapel, study and bedroom display a gaunt tension that clearly foreshadows the Jugendstil 30 years before its prime. Sketches for carved colonnades incorporate fantastic root-and-branch configurations that would have delighted Spain's art nouveau master, Antoni Gaudi. Ludwig's two other palaces both evoke the rococo splendors of Louis XIV of France. From Linderhof come tutti-frutti-colored, specially commissioned Sevres porcelain, embroidered screens inspired by Boucher, and Ludwig's magnificent throne, a Beardsleyan Oriental divan backed by three haughty, blue-and-green-enameled peacocks.

The Victorian idiom was florid, and the ornate encrustations of Neuschwanstein and Linderhof are perhaps no more than expressions of the age. But with Herrenchiemsee, Ludwig's unfinished version of Versailles, the compulsive proliferation of detail reaches a manic excess. Most sickly sybaritic exhibit is its bedroom, with a gilded, tapestried, nymph-encrusted bed. and a ten-foot-high, putti-adorned gilded lamp topped by a grail-like blue globe. Ludwig slept only seven nights in it.

Pale, paunchy and wild-eyed at 40, he had become wont to ride by night in his gilded coaches from one mountain eyrie to another. Only his closest servants ever saw him. Both his behavior and his debts became so extreme that in June 1886 the government had him declared insane, and made his uncle Luitpold regent. Six days later, after an evening stroll through the grounds of Berg Castle, Ludwig and a doctor who accompanied him were both found mysteriously drowned in Lake Starnberg. No one has ever conclusively established whether Ludwig killed the doctor and himself, or whether he was murdered by political assassins. A few superstitious Bavarian peasants still maintain that on frosty moonlit nights, they see his speeding coach, drawn by eight white horses.

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