Georgina

Masson

Italian

Gardens

Foreword

Introduction

Roman Gardens

Medieval and Early Humanist Gardens

Tuscan Gardens

Roman Renaissance Gardens

Gardens of the Marche and Veneto

The Gardens of Northern Italy

Postscript

Flowers Grown in Italian Gardens

Bibliography

Plans

Index of Places

Index of People

Photographic Credits

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

6

10

26

60

84

154

232

276

322

330

343

346

355

355

360

Contents

27

It was no mere chance that a crystal spring chattering in the shade of an oak treeprovided the inspiration for what is probably the best-known and loved lyric in theLatin language. The music of Horace’s Fons Bandusiae holds a special magic for the

Mediterranean world whose scorching summer heat makes shade and water not only afavourite poetical theme, but also the necessary adjuncts of pleasure – especially ofpleasure gardens, which since their earliest origins have in Italy always been associated withpoetry and the arts.

When Horace wrote his poem this conception of a garden as a place of inspiration andrepose was still quite new to the Roman world. Gardens in the practical sense of a hortus orenclosure for growing vegetables, pot herbs, fruit and probably a few flowers had, of course,existed for centuries and so had the concept of the sacred grove, dedicated to a god orgoddess or surrounding a tomb, but the stern world of the early Republic with its cult ofthe ancient Roman virtues of austerity and frugality was little calculated to produceanything so ephemeral and non-utilitarian as pleasure gardens, and these only made theirappearance towards the end of the second century B.C. when the influence of theHellenistic world began to penetrate Roman society.

In Greece, as in Italy, springs and groves of trees had long been dedicated to the gods,and temples, especially of deities associated with nature or fertility, often had gardensattached to them. Most famous of these was the park dedicated to Artemis at Scillus, whichXenophon had laid out after his return from the Persian expedition; his military exploitshad evidently not prevented him from admiring the fabulous gardens of the Oriental kings– the pairidaeza from which our own word paradise is derived. These great enclosures, filledwith running water and planted with planes, aromatic shrubs and blossoming fruit trees –the haunt of animals and ornamental birds – were often divided into four to represent theregions of the earth – and used partly as pleasure gardens and partly for hunting. No doubtthe memory of these Oriental parks inspired Xenophon’s design for that of Artemis atScillus, with its wooded game preserve and fruit trees symmetrically planted round thetemple.

Through Xenophon’s own writings and his friendship with Socrates the Persiangardens were, however, to exert a much further-reaching influence upon the future ofgardens in Greece and indeed in all Europe in classical and modern times. Their place inthe intellectual world was finally established when Plato began teaching in the tree-planted gymnasium of the Academy, thus creating the association between philosophy andgardens that was to outlive even the thousand years’ existence of the School of Athens andto be revived by the humanists of the Italian Renaissance.

Where Plato led, successive generations of philosophers followed, and the gymnasiawith their colonnaded palaestrae, that had originally been designed as shelters from thesun and rain where athletes could exercise, became the accepted places of philosophical

Roman Gardens

iii hadrian’s villa

85

Of the early renaissance gardens of Tuscany, and even those of later periods, fewhave survived that have not been altered, sometimes almost out of recognition,by changing fashions and particularly by the nineteenth-century craze for the

‘English’ garden. In attempting the impossible by trying to create an English landscapeeven in the confined limits of the gardens of many small Tuscan villas, the formal parterres,which were an integral part of the original design, were destroyed and their place was takenby meandering paths and ugly irregular beds that bear no relation to the scale, character orsite. It is usually only in very remote places, owing to the stout conservatism of past owners,or sometimes simply neglect, that part or all of the original layout has survived; and today,happily, it is usually recognized as a work of art to be cherished.

Tuscan Gardens

v villa garzoni

36 il trebbio

A lunette in the Museo Topografico inFlorence, probably painted by Utens at the endof the sixteenth or the beginning of theseventeenth century, showing the house andgarden of the Medici villa of Il Trebbio, nearCafaggiolo. This hunting lodge was restored byMichelozzo for Cosimo de' Medici probablyabout the year 1451. It is one of the very rareexamples of an Early Renaissance villa whichhas survived more or less untouched since thefifteenth century. It now belongs to SignorScaretti. Photo Alinari.

Tuscan Gardens

142

xxvii, xxviii villa torrigiani

Tuscan Gardens

143

Roman Renaissance Gardens

218

Roman Renaissance Gardens

219

conception of man and his creations’ place in the natural scheme of things. There are alsoterraces and walks on the hillside, but, unlike a Renaissance garden, these are simply grassyalleys lined at first by clipped trees and hedges and gradually merging into woodland paths.

The evolution of the Baroque Italian garden from that of the Renaissance can best bedescribed as a gradual blurring of the outlines or – as Lugi Dami did – a softening of theedges. The basic principles are still the same and near the house man’s order still reigns, butas the garden recedes from it the architectural features gradually disappear, giving way to lessviolent contrasts of light and shade as the clipped alleys merge into the natural growth of thewoods and the surrounding landscape. It is the logical development of the process that beganat Villa Lante and in it one can perceive the beginnings of the taste for the picturesque.

By the second half of the seventeenth century, natural growth and the beginnings ofthe decay that was later to submerge many villas had already changed the aspect of theseRoman gardens, increasing precisely this picturesque aspect that appealed so strongly tothe French taste and artists of the time Hubert Robert had stayed at Villa Aldobrandiniwith the French Ambassador the Duc de Choiseul, as well as at the Villa d’Este. Pierrede Nolhac, in his book on the French painters in Italy, quotes a passage that not onlysums up the fascination which these gardens exercised upon his compatriots of theperiod, and later generations, but could well serve as a warning to many would-be‘restorers’ of Italian gardens. It reads as follows: ‘What increases the charm of theRoman gardens is that venerable impression of the hand of time. Created during thecenturies of opulence, with a disposition according to the regular forms of art, thechange of fortune and other natural causes have caused their upkeep to be neglected,and nature has in part resumed her rights. Her conquests over art and the interminglingof their effects produces the most picturesque scenes. This negligence, this antiquity,and this impetuous vegetation compose the most wonderful pictures’ and, it might beadded, in them resides the magical charm of the old gardens of Italy.

John Evelyn and Président de Brosses, who saw Villa Aldobrandini at about a century’sinterval from each other, reflect not only the differences in taste of their day but also thechanges which have since come over the gardens. To the English seventeenth-century diaristthe Aldobrandini garden was ‘full of elegance, groves, ascents and prospects surpassing in my

121 villa aldobrandini

The ‘room of the winds’ in Villa Aldobrandinidescribed by Evelyn, print by Falda from LeFontane di Roma, part 2, edited by G. deRossi, 1675. By kind permission of theAmerican Academy.

122 villa mondragone

The ‘theatre’ of the fountains in the BorgheseVilla of Mondragone, at Frascati, with thewater game as described by Evelyn. Engravedby Falda, in Le Fontane di Roma, 1675.The villa is now a Jesuit college. By kind permission of the AmericanAcademy.

233

The remote adriatic province of the Marche had contributed two of its greatestnames to Renaissance Rome – Bramante and Raphael, both of whom were bornwithin a few miles of the Ducal Palace of Urbino where Laurana had laid out one

of the earliest Renaissance gardens. Though both of their working lives were spent farfrom Urbino, which had been one of the greatest cultural and artistic centres of thefifteenth century in the glorious days of Federico di Montefeltro, they must have seen thisgarden in their youth and perhaps some memory of it lingered when they were designingthe Cortile del Belvedere and Villa Madama.

By the beginning of the sixteenth century the Montefeltro dynasty had become extinctin the male line, and through marriage the duchy had passed to Pope Julius II’s great-nephew Francesco Maria Della Rovere who, in keeping with the family tradition, was torevive the cult of gardens in the Marche. In this he was aided by his wife, Leonora Gonzaga,the daughter of another family of garden lovers – the Gonzaga ones in and around Mantuawere famous – and together they created two remarkable gardens. One of these, nearFossombrone, was still a tourist sight for foreign travellers in the seventeenth century buthas since disappeared; the other at Villa Imperiale near Pesaro happily still exists.

According to tradition, Imperiale owes its name to the Emperor Frederick III having beenentertained there, on the way to or from his coronation in Rome, in 1452, by AlessandroSforza, who was then Governor of Pesaro. Certainly when about 1522 Francesco Maria andLeonora decided to convert the place into a villa in the Renaissance style the old fifteenth-century house still existed. Although Laurana’s garden at Urbino had been remarkable inits day, by the first quarter of the sixteenth century Rome had far surpassed the Italianprovincial capitals in villa and garden design and it was to the Eternal City that all eyes nowturned for inspiration. Corroborative evidence of this is shown by the fact that in 1522Francesco Maria wrote to Castiglione, his Ambassador in Rome, asking him to try toprocure a letter which Raphael had written shortly before his death describing the VillaMadama. Castiglione got a copy from Raphael’s cousin, and this the Duke handed over tohis Court architect, Girolamo Genga, who had the additional advantage of having seenRaphael’s work at the Farnesina and Villa Madama when he was studying painting inRome. In view of this it is not surprising to find that the work of Genga and his assistantson the Villa Imperiale owes much, both in the interior decoration of the old villa and inthe new building and gardens that were made beside it, to the Farnesina and VillaMadama.

The original Villa Imperiale had consisted of a semi-fortified country house with atower, built round a courtyard. Its rooms were now entirely redecorated with frescoes in

Gardens of the Marche and Veneto

Villa Imperiale - Pesaro

xl villa cuzzano

The Gardens of Northern Italy

300

lii, liii isola bella

The Gardens of Northern Italy

301

The Gardens of Northern Italy

310liv, lv villa san remigio

9 781870 673570

57500

£35.00 / $75.00

ISBN: 978-1-870673-57-0