Today's Diana's Garden is a 19th century remodeling of the garden Henry IV created. (Henry adored Fontainebleau and probably did the most additions.) Henry replaced the original garden created by Catherine de Medici who is usually known for two evil inventions: the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and the invention of the high heel.
Catherine is long gone, but here is a picture of our favorite Italian female, the Countess de Polizzi near the long entrance to Diana's garden:
The 19th century remodeling created another English garden. It replaced a number of renaissance statues created under the direction of Primaticcio (now in Diana's gallery). These were so popular that Fontainebleau had the nickname of the "New Rome" during its early days. Here's a photo of much of the garden. The building in back was where Napoleon had his apartments and throne room:
The garden abuts the Trinity Chapel shown below. This chapel faces the White Horse Courtyard as opposed to the back chapel which faces the Grand Parterre):
The garden owes its name to the statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt, which explains why all those dogs are there (it does not explain, however, what those dogs are doing to keep the water supply moving through the fountain.) The front of the statue is shown at top (the 1684 original is inside Diana's Gallery; this copy dates from 1813.) Here's a picture of the back of statue:
See what we mean about those dogs!
Here's a few pictures of Diana's Gallery (or Deer Gallery) now used to store statues and other paraphernalia taken from the garden. (Some of the statues are also in the Louvre as well):
And a little closer:
Just so you know these were created in the Renaissance, we include a few nudes with ample BMI:
That's all the pictures we took. We ran out of battery power before we could get inside after the lunch break. We'll go back someday and show you the inside which was pretty well stripped during the French Revolution but quickly refurnished by Napoleon a little later.
Not all of the Fontainebleau gardens are in that good of shape. If you'd like to see some of the warts of this place, please click here.
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