Stamp - France-Japan Joint Issue - Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte

The art of the garden is inseparable from the representation of the world that underlies it. And, in Japan as in France, it reflects the essence of the culture that produces it. A stroll through the garden of Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion temple on the outskirts of Kyoto, is enough to appreciate the restraint of the gesture that presided over its design, the role of the layering of planes and perspectives, the interplay of concealment and gradual revelation of elements, the dialogue of voids, solids, vegetation and water, symbol of purification, with the buildings. The ensemble was composed in 1482 during the Muromachi period (1336-1573), the apogee of Japanese garden architecture, by Soami, one of its great masters, for the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa. Inspired by Zen Buddhism, the garden favors the expression of beauty through calm and serenity, inviting meditation, and is famous for its sandy parterre adorned with a symbolic representation of Mount Fuji. The site became a temple on the death of the shogun, and was rebuilt after a fire in the mid-16th century. Vaux-le-Vicomte, on the other hand, embodies a different tradition, a different conception of nature and its magnificence. Perspective doesn't play with illusion, it imposes itself with geometric rigor, drawing embroideries of shrubs, pruning, cutting, organizing terraces, water games in basins, as was done in Renaissance Italy, symbolizing man's rationality and power, his manifest destiny that determines the social order. Far from blending into nature, the buildings impose themselves on it. At Vaux, Louis XIV's superintendent of finances, Nicolas Fouquet, invited the greatest names in classicism, notably the gardener Le Nôtre, who also designed the gardens at Versailles, to create one of his most brilliant creations.

Création Manon Diemer, d'après photo (c) Vaux le Vicomte