Italian Gardens

Italian Gardens

Georgina Masson

Contents Foreword

6

Introduction

10

Roman Gardens

26

Medieval and Early Humanist Gardens

60

III

Tuscan Gardens

84

IV

Roman Renaissance Gardens

154

Gardens of the Marche and Veneto

232

The Gardens of Northern Italy

276

Postscript

322

Flowers Grown in Italian Gardens

330

Bibliography

343

Plans

346

Index of Places

355

Index of People

355

Photographic Credits

360

I II

V VI

Roman Gardens

I

iii hadrian’s villa

t was no mere chance that a crystal spring chattering in the shade of an oak tree provided the inspiration for what is probably the best-known and loved lyric in the Latin 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 a favourite poetical theme, but also the necessary adjuncts of pleasure – especially of pleasure gardens, which since their earliest origins have in Italy always been associated with poetry and the arts.

When Horace wrote his poem this conception of a garden as a place of inspiration and repose was still quite new to the Roman world. Gardens in the practical sense of a hortus or enclosure 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 or goddess or surrounding a tomb, but the stern world of the early Republic with its cult of the ancient Roman virtues of austerity and frugality was little calculated to produce anything so ephemeral and non-utilitarian as pleasure gardens, and these only made their appearance towards the end of the second century B.C. when the influence of the Hellenistic 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 gardens attached to them. Most famous of these was the park dedicated to Artemis at Scillus, which Xenophon had laid out after his return from the Persian expedition; his military exploits had 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, filled with 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 the regions of the earth – and used partly as pleasure gardens and partly for hunting. No doubt the memory of these Oriental parks inspired Xenophon’s design for that of Artemis at Scillus, with its wooded game preserve and fruit trees symmetrically planted round the temple.

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

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

27

Tuscan Gardens

O

f the early renaissance gardens of Tuscany, and even those of later periods, few have 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 landscape even 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 taken by meandering paths and ugly irregular beds that bear no relation to the scale, character or site. 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.

v villa garzoni 36 il trebbio A lunette in the Museo Topografico in Florence, probably painted by Utens at the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century, showing the house and garden of the Medici villa of Il Trebbio, near Cafaggiolo. This hunting lodge was restored by Michelozzo for Cosimo de' Medici probably about the year 1451. It is one of the very rare examples of an Early Renaissance villa which has survived more or less untouched since the fifteenth century. It now belongs to Signor Scaretti. Photo Alinari.

85

Tuscan Gardens

xxvii, xxviii villa torrigiani

142

Tuscan Gardens

143

Roman Renaissance Gardens

218

Roman Renaissance Gardens

121 villa aldobrandini The ‘room of the winds’ in Villa Aldobrandini described by Evelyn, print by Falda from Le Fontane di Roma, part 2, edited by G. de Rossi, 1675. By kind permission of the American Academy.

122 villa mondragone The ‘theatre’ of the fountains in the Borghese Villa of Mondragone, at Frascati, with the water game as described by Evelyn. Engraved

by Falda, in Le Fontane di Roma, 1675.

The villa is now a Jesuit college. By kind permission of the American Academy.

conception of man and his creations’ place in the natural scheme of things. There are also terraces and walks on the hillside, but, unlike a Renaissance garden, these are simply grassy alleys 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 be described as a gradual blurring of the outlines or – as Lugi Dami did – a softening of the edges. The basic principles are still the same and near the house man’s order still reigns, but as the garden recedes from it the architectural features gradually disappear, giving way to less violent contrasts of light and shade as the clipped alleys merge into the natural growth of the woods and the surrounding landscape. It is the logical development of the process that began at 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 of the decay that was later to submerge many villas had already changed the aspect of these Roman gardens, increasing precisely this picturesque aspect that appealed so strongly to the French taste and artists of the time Hubert Robert had stayed at Villa Aldobrandini with the French Ambassador the Duc de Choiseul, as well as at the Villa d’Este. Pierre de Nolhac, in his book on the French painters in Italy, quotes a passage that not only sums up the fascination which these gardens exercised upon his compatriots of the period, 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 the Roman gardens is that venerable impression of the hand of time. Created during the centuries of opulence, with a disposition according to the regular forms of art, the change 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 intermingling of their effects produces the most picturesque scenes. This negligence, this antiquity, and this impetuous vegetation compose the most wonderful pictures’ and, it might be added, 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’s interval from each other, reflect not only the differences in taste of their day but also the changes which have since come over the gardens. To the English seventeenth-century diarist the Aldobrandini garden was ‘full of elegance, groves, ascents and prospects surpassing in my

219

Gardens of the Marche and Veneto

T

he remote adriatic province of the Marche had contributed two of its greatest names to Renaissance Rome – Bramante and Raphael, both of whom were born within 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 far from Urbino, which had been one of the greatest cultural and artistic centres of the fifteenth century in the glorious days of Federico di Montefeltro, they must have seen this garden in their youth and perhaps some memory of it lingered when they were designing the Cortile del Belvedere and Villa Madama.

By the beginning of the sixteenth century the Montefeltro dynasty had become extinct in the male line, and through marriage the duchy had passed to Pope Julius II’s greatnephew Francesco Maria Della Rovere who, in keeping with the family tradition, was to revive 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 Mantua were famous – and together they created two remarkable gardens. One of these, near Fossombrone, was still a tourist sight for foreign travellers in the seventeenth century but has since disappeared; the other at Villa Imperiale near Pesaro happily still exists.

Villa Imperiale - Pesaro

xl

villa cuzzano

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

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

233

The Gardens of Northern Italy

lii, liii isola bella

300

The Gardens of Northern Italy

301

The Gardens of Northern Italy

liv, lv villa san remigio

310

ISBN: 978-1-870673-57-0

9

781870 673570

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