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Show of force in stone

267 larger-than-life statues, 196 putti, 244 angel heads on the capstones above the window.
The delicate palace of Sanssouci with its sparingly, precisely placed decoration was commissioned by the art-loving philosopher king Frederick. When the same monarch a few years later built the New Palace (Neues Palais) he did that as a statesman demonstrating his strength. This new commission did not earn him praise by his architects Heinrich Ludwig Manger and Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff. Manger referred to the New Palace and its figural decoration as “a strange lump of stone where a fun fair with puppets is held on the balustrades”; Knobelsdorff reportedly raged about the enormous number of 244 heads that “it does not resemble the residence of a Christian king of Prussia but rather looks like a Turkish serail where a multitude of cut off heads can be found”.