Shapes of Earth and Time in European GardensAuthor(s): Esther Gordon DotsonReviewed work(s):Source: Art Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3, Earthworks: Past and Present (Autumn, 1982), pp. 210-216Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/776580 .

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Shapes of Earth and Time in European Gardens

A ll gardens are earth art. Gardeners and gardeners, and landscape architects alike

-detach er an area of ground from its natural surroundings and give it a new order of bound- aries, interior divisions, and plantings. Often they create sculptured earth forms: the flat shelf with retaining bank, drainage channels, and mounded beds of an efficient kitchen garden; the elaborate step-terracing of the hill-slope villa gardens of the Italian Renais- sance; the subtly manipulated planes designed to reduce and regularize variations in slope and level in Le Notre's formal gardens; or the calculated contrasts of rolling landscape with flat water plane in the characteristic English "natural" garden of the eighteenth century.

At different times in the history of garden design, earth shapes have provided special accents within the garden. Many Renaissance gardens had a mount, a centrally located sculptured mound of earth to be climbed by the visitor. Grottoes were hollowed into a hill or built above ground in such a way as to suggest deep cavities penetrating the earth, their rough-sculptured walls evoking natural caves in volcanic rock. In several early eigh- teenth-century English gardens, a hillside was carved in stepped circles framed by a stepped hemicycle, a traditional outdoor theatre form executed in grass-covered earth.

These modes of design and earth-shaping devices can be understood as expressing ideal relationships between man and nature. They make visible certain patterns of interaction between the two. Even the utilitarian order of the productive kitchen garden or the well- stocked herb garden is an expression of har- monious cooperation between man and nature. Many traditional pleasure gardens-spaces for untroubled enjoyment of leisure remote from the demands of city life, for otium and the release from negotium-recall Eden or the Golden Age, an imagined pre-cultural past

Fig. 1 Tarquinio, The Villa Lante, Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes.

when man's harmony with nature was un- troubled and effortless. On the other hand, the subtle interplay between artifice and accident, between art and nature, between illusion and reality in European garden traditions from the Renaissance onward embodies changing cul- tural patterns for coping with nature as adver- sary, as the given material for the activity of human reason, as the untamed realm con- fronting the human will.

The interaction of human skill and calcula- tion with the vitality and variety of nature has been shown in several recent studies to be a recurrent or even constant theme of Renais- sance villas and gardens, pervading whatever poetic or mythic worlds are called up in their architecture and decoration. Claudia Lazzaro

interprets the Villa Lante at Bagnaia (Fig. 1), with its contrast of formal garden and irregular wooded grove (the bosco), as an allegory of the opposition between art and nature, between "civilization and the hand of man, and ... a state untouched by civilization."1 Formal gar- den and bosco were the standard components of the Italian Renaissance garden. The bosco did not represent merely an untouched natural setting into which the garden has been inserted but was an essential part of the garden as a whole, balancing the formally treated area. Thus, one of Joseph Furttenbach's Italianate garden designs for noble patrons (Fig. 2), a complex to be built within a moat and fortifi- cations, includes a "wild" area with woods, hilly terrain, and roaming beasts just inside

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Fig. 2Joseph Furttenbach, Architectura Civilis, Ulm, 1628, Plate 13: "Ein Lust und Thiergarten."

the battlements, to complement the adjacent formal garden in front of the palace.2 More elaborate conceits can express the same theme, for example, the artificial grotto built at the Medici villa of Castello beginning in the 1540s (Fig. 3), where trickling springs issuing from rough rockery fill crisply carved basins and a sculptured menagerie of familiar and exotic beasts come to drink. Elisabeth MacDougall has called attention to a contemporary humanist's witty appreciation of such plays of art and nature, in a letter of Claudio Tolomei of 1543 praising

the ingenious skill newly rediscovered to make fountains, in which mixing art with nature, one can't judge if [a fountain] is the work of the former or the latter; thus, one appears a natural artifact act and another, man-made nature. Thus they strive nowadays to assemble a fountain that appears to be made by nature, not by accident but with masterful art.3

Tolomei's praise is for artistic invention, but for invention that presents an image of nature. And Bagnaia and Castello contain (or originally contained) images associated explic- itly with the Golden Age of natural abundance and natural purity, such as the acorns of one of the fountains of the bosco at Bagnaia and, at both Bagnaia and Castello, the unicorn whose horn purifies the waters.4 David Coffin has suggested that the theme of the Golden Age was especially characteristic of the sixteenth-cen- tury villas of Central Italy.5

An unusually imaginative embodiment of the themes of the Golden Age and of the

interaction of man and nature can be discovered in the enigmatic garden of Vicino Orsini, created in the years between about 1550 and Vicino's death in 1584, on the slopes below his palace

Fig. 3 Medici Villa at Castello, side niche of the Grotto.

at Bomarzo, near Viterbo.6 Like so many Italian Renaissance gardens, it has a grotto-two, in fact. But they are carved in the living rock of the hillside, and both are shaped on the exterior as monstrous gaping masks. One of these has the form of a hell-mouth (Fig. 4) and was apparently inscribed with a parody on the words over the entrance to Hell in Dante's Inferno.7 Such familiar Italian garden themes as Pegasus on a mount, dolphins, a battle of giants, and reclining figures beside fountain basins also appear at Bomarzo, shaped from rocky outcroppings or huge boulders and with bizarre variations on their usual forms. In- scriptions on rock walls and plinths refer to "marvels," and more explicitly to "monsters," "strange wild beasts," "frightful faces, ele-

phants, lions, bears, orcs and dragons."8 When these were rediscovered on an over-

grown hillside some forty years ago, they gave rise to the legend of Vicino Orsini as a sadistic prince out of a Webster tragedy, projecting his cruelty and rage in sculptured monsters. The title Parco dei Mostri used by the present owner seems still to embody associations of this sort. Contemporary references and his own letters, however, give a very different picture of Vicino Orsini: an aristocrat admired for his literary culture, moving in the circle of such men of letters as Claudio Tolomei and Annibal Caro; a familiar guest at the nearby villas of the Farnese at Caprarola and Cardinal Madruzzo at Soriano; a voracious reader with a special taste for extravagant narratives and accounts of things distant in space and time.9 His garden was cited by Annibal Caro as an example for Torquato Conti to follow in his own garden at Poli. What Conti had in mind for his garden, Caro complained, were ordinary things; he should try instead to compete with the bizzarrie of Signor Vicino's boschetto.10 The garden of Bomarzo evidently satisfied the most sophisticated Renaissance taste.

In many of the great Italian Renaissance gardens the formal, axially organized section contained the most elaborate display of foun- tains, sculpture, and plantings. Vicino Orsini, however, lavished his attention on the bosco. A formal garden seems also to have existed, though it has long since disappeared into the sloping meadow to the north of the grove. Aerial photographs show a central axis de- scending the slope and a series of axes per- pendicular to it,"1 presumably lines along which the soil is shallow, concealing the buried stone- work of terrace-retaining walls. The familiar contrast of artificial formal garden and natural bosco is the more striking at Bomarzo, however, since the hillside of the bosco is rugged, with cliffs, a rocky stream and scattered boulders. Some of the large rocks remain in their natural form, both within the bosco and on the slopes above it; some establish the levels for grassy platforms or sloping ramps; and some have been carved into representational sculpture or architectural elements, both often pieced out with additional blocks or sculptured shapes from the native stone. The body of the sculp- tured Cerberus behind the little temple at the highest point of the bosco is shaped of a stone mass that protrudes from the ground; its triple head has apparently been added as a separate piece (Fig. 5). Between the present entrance and the tempietto, right-angled recesses have been cut into a large rocky outcropping, but no particular object or architectural feature is represented.12 In these various treatments of the stone and earth of the site, whether it was so intended or not, the visitor can see the stages in the process by which human art has transformed a rock-strewn hill into a "sacred grove," as it is called in one of its inscriptions.13

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Other processes in the interplay of art and nature are clearly evoked intentionally.

Close to the partly shaped outcropping men- tioned above, an oblong rock mass has been carved to represent a fragment of an edicula with a sculptured pediment, fallen on its side and half buried in the ground (Fig. 6). Such an image implies a succession of events over a long period of time: an original human building activity; the action of natural forces by which the building has become ruined, split in two, and overthrown; and its settling into the earth or the deposit of earth around it so that only this fragment remains visible. This series of events is not, like the shaping of the bosco's architecture and sculpture out of the natural materials of the site, a process that has actually taken place, but an imagined, centuries-long history represented by the form that we see. A slightly more complex sequence of the same sort is embodied in two benches that face each other on either side of the path along the lower edge of the bosco. Each has a heraldic lion at one end and at the other a volute incorporating a female torso and head (Fig. 7). One would expect to say "crowned by a female torso and head," for this familiar architectural element is normally positioned as a vertical bracket supporting a lintel. Here, however, placed horizontally, it is a makeshift and asymmetrical arm-rest, as if a fragment from a previous structure had been reused and pieced together with other fragments-the lions-to make up the terminations of the benches. The temporal succession implied here starts with an original building in which the caryatid-volutes were used in the normal way and goes on to its crumbling into ruin, the retrieval of its fragments, and their reuse in a new structure in which the volutes lie down instead of stand upright.

The edicula and benches are not the only representations at Bomarzo of processes that did not in fact occur. The exposed faces of the living rock, cut to become the walls or part of the walls of the garden's architecture, are generally grooved to represent blocks, as if this architecture had been built rather than excavated and sculptured. In at least one place, large irregular blocks are represented at the lower level, whereas the level above has grooves representing smaller units of masonry. The wall thus resembles those of many ancient Italian towns, which reflect a long history of successive building stages. The back wall of the Nymphaeum on the lower level of the bosco resembles a smooth veneer of marble or limestone, whereas one side wall is carved in imitation of the rubble construction one might find under such a veneer (Fig. 8). The smooth surface turns the corner and terminates in a zigzag edge, as if the veneer layer had broken away, exposing the rough masonry core. Both "veneer" and "core," however, are carved in the bedrock. Again, a type of con- struction and its deconstruction over time have been simulated.

Fig. 4 Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, Hell-Mouth.

Fig. 5 Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, Cerberus and the Tempietto.

Still another simulation of masonry con- struction is particularly paradoxical: the mount of Pegasus, of which the lower part, carved from a single boulder and pierced by irregular -i.e. "natural"-arches, is deeply scored to look like voussoirs roughened to imitate natural rock (Fig. 9). We are surely intended not to conclude that Helicon was an artificially built mountain but to be reminded of the Pegasus mount in the typical Renaissance garden, built of separate blocks to represent a rough natural formation, whose joints may become widened by the action of time and weather and thus betray the artificiality of the construction. This is an imitation in natural rock of an imitation of natural rock, and of that imitation unmasked by the activity of nature over time. Needless to say, neither the process of artificial construc- tion nor the process of its disjunction actually happened. Furthermore, although Pegasus and the rock mass immediately beneath him appear to be carved from a separate rock mass attached above the boulder pierced by arches, a darker

vein visible in the arched boulder seems to continue in the upper mass. Thus the separa- tion, too, may be only simulated.

It has been suggested that the collapse im- plied by the famous tilted house at Bomarzo (Fig. 10) was a real event. Jacqueline Theurillat cites in this connection a letter of Vicino Orsini dated 9 October 1564. Describing his return to Bomarzo after a brief absence, Vicino says he paused to look down on his bosco and "found the loggia of my fountains falling down (che va a terra)." The passage continues: "so that Vignola is wiser than I thought because he wanted iron pins in the loggia."14. Theurillat interprets this to mean that the little house next to the fountain terrace had settled on one side as a result of a subsidence of the earth. The sentence reads more naturally, however, to mean that the upper storey of the house, from which one looks out on the fountain terrace as from a loggia, had fallen because it was not anchored to its substructure by iron pins. A close examination of the leaning house reveals that the whole lower section is a single enormous boulder, or perhaps outcropping, cut to form the three straight faces of the bottom storey (which has no interior), whereas the upper storeys are laid up in stone masonry. The joints are masked by a layer of stucco. The top edge of the boulder, or rock ledge-as it now shows through breaks in the stucco sur- face- is not at all level. It seems likely that the mortar joining the superstructure to the slanting upper surface of the rock mass gave way, and the upper storeys or part of them slid off, andavano a terra. The time of year when this occurred is consistent with the softening of the mortar by seepage from the autumn rains, a circumstance that might not call for special mention, whereas a subsidence of the earth would be more likely to be remarked on. Pre- sumably, when the building was repaired after this accident in 1565, the metal pins missing from the first construction were supplied.

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Fig. 7 Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, the volute- armrest.

Fig. 6Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, the "Fallen Pediment. "

rig. 8 Farco dez Mostri, Bomarzo, t[e Nvympbaeum.

This interpretation of the letter means that the leaning house was set at its present angle from the beginning, an angle perhaps suggested by the original form of the great rock that composes its lower storey. The bizarre angle nevertheless suggests a natural upheaval: we expect a house to be built in plumb and to lean only as a result of some accident, such as a movement of the earth. Such upheavals are suggested elsewhere in the bosco as well. The basin and the "natural" arched base of the Pegasus lean and seem to slide down the hill. It has been pointed out, however, that the support directly under the winged horse is perfectly vertical, so that there is no actual instability.15 The basin and arch must, like the leaning house, have been built at a leaning angle. A mounded disc topped by a cylinder, carved in the living rock just to the north of the Pegasus basin, tilts in the opposite direction (Fig. 9),

and both contrast with the perfectly level rock platform of the giant tortoise a few yards southeast of Pegasus and with a precisely verti- cal tree trunk carved in a stone ledge next to the tilted disc. The contrary angles of the Pegasus and the mounded disc cannot be the result of actual upheaval or subsidence; yet they, again, suggest such natural activity and thus a succession in time in which nature overturns the work of human art. That the voussoirs simulated on Pegasus's mount also evoke a sequence of human construction and natural deconstruction has been noted. The mounded disc, set on a squared plinth and topped by a cylinder with incised rings and a projecting square knob, resembles nothing so much as a gigantic (and very archaic) Tuscan capital detached from the column into which its knob was keyed and turned upside down, another ruin from an imagined lost structure

overturned in the course of time. The slanting circular planes framed by the theatre hemicycle next to the leaning house (Fig. 11) may be a similar invention, countering the angle of the house and suggesting the effect on the garden's buildings of still another natural upheaval or subsidence.

In this context, the apparently fallen edicula with sculptured pediment discussed above (Fig. 6) is not merely a predecessor of the built ruin of the eighteenth-century English garden, which evoked the grandeur of past history and inspired reveries on the destructive power of time. It is one of several examples of the witty mixture of art and nature so admired in the sixteenth century, in which elements appear (to rephrase Claudio Tolomei) to be shaped by art and reshaped by nature, not by accident but through masterful art. Such simu- lations of successive human actions and suc- cessive natural processes are the "marvels" that fit most closely the inscription in the garden: "Tell me if such marvels are made by deceit or by art."'6 They differ from other Renaissance versions of the interplay of art and nature by the introduction of a theme that seems to be unique to Bomarzo: the represen- tation of long fictitious periods of elapsed time.

Time is also represented in more familiar guise at Bomarzo. Of the six sculptured

heads supporting baskets of fruit, now placed on plinths in an avenue near the present entrance, two have two faces and two have four. Janus, god of time who sees past and future, is regularly represented as bifrons, that is, with two faces looking in opposite directions (Fig. 12); and the four-faced--quadrifrons-heads are here characterized as four ages: a smooth-faced youth, a mustached man in his prime, a deeply seamed but still vigorous face, and the withered bearded head of old age (Fig. 13).

Janus, in Vicino Orsini's time and place, was more than just one of the old gods remem- bered in the calendar. He was the central figure of an elaborate pseudo-history of the Etruscan Golden Age, constructed out of genu- ine and forged ancient texts in a famous publi- cation of 1498, the Antiquities of Giovanni Nanni da Viterbo.17 Nanni pieced together

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Fig. 9 Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, the Fountain of Pegasus and the tilted disc. Fig. 10 Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, the Leaning House.

ancient references to the Etruscans and their gods, and in his forged "rediscovered" texts supplied mutually confirming histories, gene- alogies, and interpretations for the thesis that Janus was identical with the Biblical Noah and thus a worshiper of the true God. He made Janus/Noah the founder-teacher-priest of a theocratic golden age after the Flood, in the region of the Etruscan tetrapolis. To escape the apparent contradiction of a pagan divinity who worshiped the true God, Nanni explained that the pagan gods were the heroes of early peoples, aggrandized in memory and worshiped in the corrupted cults of later ages. His geneal- ogies identify all the pagan gods with other early leaders and rulers, descendants of Noah/ Janus like all of humanity after the Flood. Janus thus became, in Nanni's reconstruction, the predecessor and father of the whole classi- cal pantheon. Saturn, who presided over the familiar Golden Age of Latium celebrated in Roman literature, was one of his descendants. That Nanni's native Viterbo, one of the Etruscan sacred cities, could thus be seen as surpassing Rome in dignity and antiquity was no doubt one of the intended by-products of his histori- cal fabrication.

The texts "discovered" by Nanni were ac- cepted as genuine by all but a few sceptics for more than a century. They were reissued a dozen times, both with and without his commentaries, by printers in Italy and beyond the Alps.18 Vicino Orsini's friend Francesco Sansovino translated them into Italian and published them with his own commentaries, heavily dependent on Nanni's though considerably shorter. 19 Vicino must surely have known the Antiquities, a book that would have suited his taste for the remote and extravagant and that, furthermore, glorified his own region as the seat of a true golden age.

The many reflections of Etruscan art in the

Fig. 11 Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, the Theatre and the Leaning House.

sculpture and architecture of the bosco at Bomarzo have been noted by a number of scholars.20 J. P. Oleson a few years ago identi- fied the fallen pedimented edicula as an echo of Etruscan funerary reliefs and of an edicula in the Etruscan necropolis at Sovana, near another Orsini castle.2' In fact, most if not all of the images in the garden can be matched by Etruscan examples; some of them are uniquely Etruscan. Important Etruscan remains were still visible in the ancient sites at Bomarzo and its vicinity even after the sixteenth century, and important Etruscan artifacts were being redis- covered at the time of the garden's creation.22

Whether or not the Etruscan Golden Age is the only or even the principal theme at Bomarzo, it is one to which the varied representations of time contained in the garden would be highly appropriate. In one of his commentaries, Nanni

presents Janus as a master of astronomy around whom the superstitious populace wove the legend of a divinity who "moves and turns the heavens and the elements and all things that turn." This is the Janus introduced in Ovid's Fasti; Nanni makes him identical with Vertum- nus, also a Tuscan deity, whose name refers to the turning of things and to whom, according to Propertius, the fruits of the turning year are sacred. Thus, says Nanni, the Janus quadri- frons represents the four seasons. He explains the myth in which Vertumnus is first disguised as an old woman and then reveals a young and beautiful face as symbolizing the passage from winter to spring and to fruitfulness. In addition to controlling the cycles of the seasons, which also represent the transition from death to fertile life, Janus is the god of change in general: "the forms of all things are his cloth-

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Fig. 12 Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, Janus Head.

Fig. 13 Parco dei Mostri, Bomarzo, Janus Quadrifrons.

ing." But Janus is not associated merely with cosmic time and change. In identifying Janus with Noah, Nanni places him and the Etruscan Golden Age at a hinge of history. Noah is at the beginning of the world after the Flood as the universal ancestor, "the most ancient father of gods and men," and at the same time he is a giant surviving from the age of giants before the Flood.23

The two kinds of time of which Janus/Noah is master, according to Nanni, may be directly relevant to the heads of Janus bifrons and quadrifrons, the former relating him to past and future, the latter to the seasons and the ages of man. A parallel distinction can be made between two sorts of inscriptions in the bosco: those in which Vicino exhorts visitors to compare his garden with recorded wonders of the ancient world and the two flanking the fountain at the end of the fountain terrace, in which the guardians of the fountain twice repeat the formula "notte et giorno," night and day.24 Less directly, both successive human activities and cosmic cycles-both human his- tory and nature-are implied in the processes some of the garden's forms evoke. Nature in these representations is that which turns and overturns human artifacts.

The poetic conceit of time represented in the interaction of human activity with nature is implied at Bomarzo in the very process of molding the earth and shaping the living rock, the stages of which are revealed. It appears also in a number of images in earth and rock in which various kinds of changes over time are represented. The garden contains heads of Janus and a great number of direct reflections of Etruscan art. All these suggest a connection of the bosco of Vicino Orsini with Nanni da Viterbo's myth of an Etruscan Golden Age. The classical topos of the Golden Age was frequently invoked in Renaissance villas and villa gardens in Central Italy,25 but Nanni's was a peculiarly time-conscious version of the topos. The pre- occupation with time and its turnings, revealed in many ways in the bosco, links Bomarzo with Nanni's vision of a Golden Age presided over by Janus/Vertumnus/Noah, the deities of time and the seasons conflated with the hero of a decisive turning point in human history.

Notes The foregoing essay is part of a longer study on Bomarzo, itself part of an investigation of the theme of time in the European garden tradition. I am grateful to the Society for the Humanities of Cornell University, whose fellowship grant for the academic year 1980-81 made possible the re- search reflected here.

1 Claudia Lazzaro, "The Villa Lante at Bagnaia: An Allegory of Art and Nature," The Art Bulle- tin, LIX, 1977, p. 553. Cf. also essays in David Coffin, ed., The Italian Garden, Washington, Dumbarton Oaks, 1972, especially Elizabeth MacDougall, "Ars Hortulorum" and Eugenio Battisti, "Natura Artificiosa to Natura Artifi- cialis"; and David R. Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 358 - 59 andpassim.

2 Josef Furttenbach, Architectura Civilis, Ulm, 1628 (Facsimile edition, Hildesheim, Georg Olms Verlag, 1971), pp. 31-35 and plate 13. Several very similar designs appear in his Architectura Recreationis (1640), especially

plates 9-12. 3 Quoted in full and translated in part by Eliza-

beth MacDougall in her Introduction and the Appendix to the Introduction to Fons Sapientie: Renaissance Garden Fountains, Washington, Dumbarton Oaks, 1977, pp. 6, 12.

4 Lazzaro, "The Villa Lante at Bagnaia," pp. 555-56; Liliane Chatelet-Lange, "The Grotto of the Unicorn and the Garden of the Villa di Castello," The Art Bulletin, L, 1968, 51-58; Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, p. 358.

5 Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, p. 21.

6 There are some evidences for more precise dating of at least major parts of the bosco's sculpture and architecture. But the earliest positive date, in one of the inscriptions of the garden, is 1552, and the letters to Giovanni Drouet show Vicino still tinkering with the sculpture of the bosco as late as 1578. There is no reason to assume he did not continue to do so until his death. Cf. the references to these letters in note 9.

7 Of the inscription incised around the lip of the hell-mouth, only the middle section is still legible: OGNI PENSIERO VOI. The present owner prefers to read OGNI PENSIERO VOLA and has reinforced that reading with red pigment; but the stone surface is badly damaged where the horizontal base of the L and the A are supplied, and there is no indication of the required grooves. A mid-seventeenth-century drawing of a slightly different grotesque mask framing a doorway (Ernst Gulden, "Das Monster-Portal am Palaz- zo Zuccari in Rom," Zeitschrift fur Kunst- geschichte, XXXII, 1969, p. 253) is inscribed: LASCIATE OGNI PENSIERO 0 VOI CHE IN- TRATE. The spacing of the legible words at Bomarzo is consistent with a similar reading. The reference to Dante's account of the in- scription over the entrance to Hell-LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA VOI CH'ENTRATE-is obvious and appropriate to a hell-mouth.

8 TANTE MERAVIGLIE (such marvels) on the base of one of the sphinxes (cf. also below, note 16); CEDAN MEMPHIS ET OGNI ALTRA MERAVIGLIA / CH'EBBE GIA IL MONDO AL PREGIO AL SACRO BOSCO / CHE SOL SE STESSO ET NULL'ALTRO SOMIGLIA (Memphis and all other marvels prized before by the world yield to the sacred grove that resembles only itself and nothing else) on the wall of the small stairwell that descends from the tempietto; TROVARETE MOSTR[I] (you will find monsters) in a fragment legible on a small stone plinth; . . . LE PIU STRANE BELVE (the strangest beasts) on a vase on the fountain terrace; VOI CHE PEL MONDO GITE ERRANDO VAGHI / DI VEDER MERAVIGLIE ALTE E STUPENDE / VENITE QUA DOVE SON FACCIE HORRENDE / ELEFANTI, LEONI, ORSI, ORCHE ET DRAGHI (You who go wandering and rambling through the world, to see high and astonishing marvels, come here where are horrid faces, elephants, lions, bears, orcs, and dragons) on the back wall

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of a bench framed within an arch, near the hell- mouth, the dragon, and the war elephant.

9 Cf. the laudatory poem to Vicino Orsini in Giuseppe Betussi, II Raverta, Venice, 1544, and the characterization in Francesco Sanso- vino, De gli huomini illustri di Casa Orsina libri quattro, Venice, 1565, II, 26; Annibal Caro, Lettere familiare, Padua, 1742, letters of 20 October and 12 December 1564; and the letters from Vicino Orsini to Giovanni Drouet discovered by Amaldo Bruschi (Archivio de Stato di Roma, Deposito Santa Croce, Busta Y 592), extensively quoted in his "Nuovi Dati Documentari sulle Opere Orsiniane di Bomar- zo," Quaderni dell'Istituto di Storia dell'Ar- chitettura, LV-LX, 1963, pp. 13-58, espe- cially the letters of 26 November 1578, 7 January 1578, 4 December 1578, and 13 De- cember 1578 from which excerpts are quoted onp. 18.

10 Annibal Caro, Lettere familiare, letter of 6 June 1563, first cited in this connection by Josephine von Henneberg, "Bomarzo: The Ex- travagant Garden of Pier Francesco Orsini," Italian Quarterly, XLII, 1967, 6.

11 That no sculpture is preserved that can be associated with the formally organized section of the garden may be accidental. The gentle slope under whose surface aerial photographs show a regular axial scheme was adaptable to agricultural use once the gardens had fallen into disuse and disrepair, so that no surface traces of the formal garden remain, and any sculptures that may have occupied it would naturally have been removed. The shallow soil, scattered boulders and outcroppings, steep slopes, and trees of the bosco presumably contributed to its remaining relatively undis- turbed until the twentieth century. It is the bosco, however, that Annibal Caro mentions with admiration and that Vicino Orsini's sur- viving letters refer to as his preoccupation and pastime. The aerial photograph and a schematic plan showing the position of the axial scheme in relation to the bosco are published in Amaldo Bruschi, "L'abitato di Bomarzo e la Villa Orsini," Quaderni dell'Istituto di Storia dellArchitettura, VII - IX, 1955, pp. 4-5.

12 Furio Fasolo ("Analisi Stilistica del Sacro Bosco," Quaderni dell'Istituto di Storia dell'Architettura, VII-IX, 1955, p. 44 and fig. 40) provides a photograph of this mass, taken from above. His caption identifies it as "un masso scolpito e intenzionalmente non finito."

13 Cf. note 9, the inscription in the stairwell descending from the tempietto.

14Jacqueline Theurillat, Les Myrs de Bomarzo et desjardins ymboliques de la Renaissance, Geneva, Aux Trois Anneaux, 1973. The letter from Vicino Orsini to Cardinal Famese, now in the Farnese archives at Parma, is reproduced between pages 32 and 33, and quoted in translation on p. 45. The relevant passage is as follows: "ma guingendo al boschetto trovai la loggia delle mie fontane che va a terra, di

modo che Vignola e savio piui che non credevo poi che ha voluto le chiave di ferro alla loggia [della] casa." The word "casa" is written in after "loggia," above the line. It is not clear whether Vicino meant the expanded reading, "loggia della casa," or a substitution of "casa" for "loggia." The point does not affect the reading proposed here.

15 Furio Fasolo, "Analisi Stilistica," p. 47 and fig. 51.

16 The inscription is on the base of one of the two sphinxes, just inside the present entrance, which were apparently designed to flank an entrance but not originally in that position: TU CH'ENTRAI QUA CON MENTE PARTE A PARTE E DIMMI POI SE TANTI MARAVIGLIE SIAN FATTE PER INGANNO 0 PUR PER ARTE (You who enter here, compare in your mind and tell me then if such marvels are done by deceit or by art).

17 Joannes Annius Viterbensis, Opera Diversorum Auctorum de Antiquitatibus Loquentium, Rome, Eucharius Silber alias Franck, 1498. Various Antiquities is a frequent title for later editions (i.e. Antiquitatum variarum vol- umnia... ) and Francesco Sansovino entitles his Italian translationLeantci (see note 19).

18 Venice, 1498; Paris, 1509, 1510, 1512, 1515; Strassburg, 1511; Basel, 1530; Antwerp, 1545, 1552; Venice, 1550; Lyons, 1552, 1554, 1560; Heidelberg, 1598-99; Wittenberg, 1612. The only translation I have been able to locate is Francesco Sansovino's into Italian, for which see note 19.

19 La antichiti di Beroso Caldeo sacerdote, et d'altri scrittori, cosi Hebrei, come Greci et Latini, che trattano delle stesse materie. Tradotte, dichiarate, et con... annotationi, illustrate, da M. Francesco Sansovino. In Vinegia, Presso Altobello Salicato, 1583. This is the same Francesco Sansovino whose appre- ciation of Vicino Orsini is cited above, note 9.

20 E.g., E. Bacino, Italia, oro e cenere, Florence, 1953, "La valle dei mostri," pp. 91- 97; Furio Fasolo, "Analisi Stilistica," p. 35; Eugenio Bat- tisti, L'Antirnasdmento, Milan, 1962, pp. 126, 129; A. Pieyre de Mandiargues, Les Monstres de Bomarzo, Paris, 1957; Salvatore Settis, "Contributo a Bomarzo," Bolletino d'Arte, LI, 1966, pp. 17, 19.

21 J. P. Oleson, "A Reproduction of an Etruscan Tomb in the Parco die Mostri at Bomarzo," The Art Bulletin, LVII, 1975, pp. 410-17. Oleson calls attention to the interest in Etruscan antiquities sparked by Nanni's publication.

22 Cf. Eugenio Battisti, LAntmnacimento, p. 126, for the remains recorded in the seventeenth century at Polimarzio (i.e. Bomarzo). The bronze Chimaera now in the Museo Archeologico in Florence was discovered in 1553 in the course of excavations for the Medicean walls of Arezzo.

23 Joannes Annius, Opera Dirsorum Auctorum, Rome, Silber, 1498, fol. Oiv verso, Ovi verso to Pi recto, in his commentary on a forged text, the Histories of Berosus the Chaldean; and fol.

Fi recto to Fii recto, in notes to a genuine antique text, from Book II of Propertius's Elegies.

24 Most of the inscriptions on the vases of the fountain terrace are so weathered as to be illegible. Several fragmentary inscriptions sur- vive on the two vases nearest the large basin of the fountain at the southeast end of the ter- race. One reads: NOTTE ET GIORNO NOI SIAM VIGILI ET PRONTI A GUARDAR DOGNI INGIURIA QUESTA FONTE (Night and day we are watchful and ready to guard this fountain from all damage). The corresponding in- scription on the other vase is legible only so far as NOTTE ET GIORNO ....

25 Cf. above, note 5. Nanni's Etruscan Golden Age meets the Roman Golden Age in Latium under Saturn in the frescoes originally in the Villa Lante on the Janiculum in Rome, built for Baldassare Turini, datary to Pope Leo X. These may reflect a complimentary reference to Leo's Tuscan origins included in the Car- nival of 1513 which celebrated his election to the papacy. In the pageants on this occasion both Saturn and Janus appeared. The frescoes from the Villa Lante in Rome, now in the Biblioteca Hertziana, show, among other scenes of the beginnings of Rome, aMeeting ofJanus and Saturn. The symbols and representations of time that appear at Bomarzo are not present, so far as I can determine, in these frescoes, except insofar as Janus is identified by his two opposed faces. See David Coffin, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, pp. 262-65 for the decorative program of Turini's villa.

Esther Gordon Dotson is Associate Professor of the History of Art at Cornell. Her most recent publication is 'An Augustinian Interpretation of Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling," The Art Bulletin, LXI, 1979.

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