Friends of the Castle of Freÿr / Meuse (Belgium)

Main Yard at Het Loo Palace

• Het Loo Palace is in many aspects a counterpoint to Versailles, both places being the product of their respective historical and cultural environments:
• Calvinistic in the Low Countries, where the sobriety of pictureless temples implied also a relative simplicity of the houses, especially since human power from any kind of authority was limited in the Reformed World.
• Contra-Reformation in Southern Europe, where God's glory was pictorially encouraged, allowed authorities to claim an absolute power of "divine right" to be reflected in their buildings and arts.
• Comparing Het Loo and Versailles, the former is basically a place where most rooms are dedicated as living places, while in the latter the majority of the rooms are used to show off that the castle is the siege of the state power as expressed by the Sun King: "the State, am I" .