Harmlos

The Harmlos stands in a small park beside the Prinz-Carl-Palais, just south-west of Munich’s Englischer Garten. It is a marble statue in the Greek style by Franz Jakob Schwanthaler, showing Antinoos, the favourite of Emperor Hadrian, life-size and draped in classical folds. A tablet rests against the figure’s left leg, and the inscription carved there gives the statue its popular name. The park itself was once the official entrance to a planned public park, and the wording on the tablet refers to the authorities’ decision to allow city dwellers a place of rest. The work was commissioned in 1803 by Count Theodor Heinrich Topor von Morawitzky to mark the tenth anniversary of the Englischer Garten. At that time the road from the Hofgarten barracks passed close by, and visitors entered the park through the Hofgartentor with its surviving bastion walls. Soon afterwards the Finanzgarten and the building now called the Prinz-Carl-Palais were built nearby. The original marble now lives indoors in the Residenz museum; the copy that visitors see today was put up in 1983. Visitors find the Harmlos on a grassy clearing known as the Harmlos-Wiese. The statue faces Von-der-Tann-Straße, separated only by a narrow strip of lawn. Behind it the Prinz-Carl-Palais shows its classical façade to the park, while ahead the trees of the Englischer Garten begin. The surrounding walls and the distant bastions recall the military setting of two centuries ago.