Kunstmuseum Insel Hombroich or the "Symbolic Garden” of the Third Millennium.

The expression “symbolic garden” refers to the trend that took root in Europe and Italy between the end of the XVI century and the second half of the XVIII century in which ‘hortus conclusus’ was designed as a real and true “theatre of virtue”. Here the human journey was represented in the space of ‘natura artificialis’ by taking the allegorical form of “garden or topiary theatres”. The Venetian examples in the area around Padua are celebrated, that is, in the ‘locus amoenus’ of Valsanzibio (Padua, I) created by Luigi Bernini in 1669 on behalf of Cardinal Gregorio Barbarigo as well as the masonic park of Treves de’ Bonfili completed in 1809 for a rich local Jewish family to the design of Giuseppe Jappelli. It remains a “symbolic garden” – in the size and shape of the territorial park, qualifying as “Land art” – which the German entrepreneur-patron K.H. Müller developed with the sculptor Erwin Heerich and various architects at the Kunstmuseum Insel Hombroich (Neuss, D) from 1982 to 2004. It lies on the re-naturalised site of a former NATO missile base, and the disturbed relationship between humans and nature in the “post-Hiroshima” age was to be restored in the arts and architecture competition. The fragments, or rather, the remains of the “Cold War” machine are transformed into a meeting place with humanity and the universe reconciled in a synthesised spirit of renewal.