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Palazzo Celsa
"The Garden in History"
Part Two:  – Renaissance Italy –
"The Garden Reborn -or- Back to the Future"
By William R. Hoppé

     The earliest stirrings of the Renaissance period were recorded by Boccacio in 1348 in his "Third Day of the Decameron";  with his vivid description of the garden at the Villa Palmieri which he reports as having featured arbors, pergolas, formal parterres with geometrically designed flower beds and a central fountain made of white marble.   Not long after Boccacio, Pietro de Crescenzi in a work entitled "Ruralia commoda", writes about the design of gardens and advises that small orchards of fruit trees and small herb and vegetable plots have square  borders planted with scented herbs, that all paths should be of grass, that the gardens be surrounded by hedges and walls, that they should contain vined pergolas and have, at their centers, a "lawn" and, if possible, a fountain as well.  Parenthetically, it should be noted that the Renaissance took its own sweet time being born.  It certainly did not spring upon the scene full blown and without a long gestation period.  In fact, that gestation period took more than 100 years from its first stirrings on or about 1340 AD.

     It was not until the end of the 14th century that the Renaissance (The Rebirth) first took hold firmly in Italy.  Fueled, this time, not by conquest and plunder but by rising international commerce and exploration, and influenced, in no mean part, by the vivid accounts of Marco Polo and the crusaders, the arts and the sciences, luxuriating in a new climate of intellectual freedom, flourished as they had not since the fall of Rome.  Roman antiquities, in particular Roman and Greek statues and sculptures, which had lain buried under the debris of a crumbled civilization for almost a thousand years (sic!), were disinterred, lovingly restored, and made, once again, a part of daily life.  In a very real sense, it can be said that the Renaissance period rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the Roman Empire!

     Along with literature, music, and the visual arts such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, the art of garden making rose to theretofore unseen heights of elegance and splendor. 

      Italian gardens of the 15th and 16th centuries  became marvels of civil engineering and grew to  encompass entrance halls, corridors, living rooms,  dining rooms, bedrooms, and bath rooms.  The  painters of the period, notably Benozzo, Botticello,  Botticini, Ghirlandajo (Michelangelo's first mentor  and teacher), and Gozzoli, regularly depicted those,  invariably, walled gardens (like the ones at Palazzo Celsa above)  with their rectangular beds, hedges, orchards, loggias, pavilions, balustrades, colonnades, and fountains, adorned by the resurrected Roman and Greek statues and sculptures as well as by the works of contemporary artists of which Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael were but three among a host of others!

     Such writers of the period as Leon Battista Alberti (in "De Re Aedificatoria" and an architect himself), Francesco Colonna (a Dominican monk who wrote a book, illustrated with many woodcuts by an unknown artist, entitled "Hypnerptomachia" or "The Dream of Poliphilus", which was based on real characters yet allegorical in nature, dealt with the intellectual underpinnings of the early Renaissance, and played an important role in the later development ofItalian Renaissance gardens), and Sebastiano Serlio (in "Architettura") discussed the layout and the design of gardens as well as their architectural structures and embellishments, and offered illustrations of arbors, vined treillage, belvederes, pergolas, garden benches, fountains and water works, and rustic grottoes decorated with pebbles and sea shells, along with detailed instructions as to their use, placement and construction.

     Where the Romans had simply copied Greek gardens and had borrowed so many diverse elements so freely from so many other civilizations as well, they had never succeeded in fully assimilating and integrating them all (if, indeed, they ever tried to) such that their gardens always had a certain hodgepodge-like, out of context, and disorganized quality about them .  It were the Renaissance Italians who finally solved the problem of how to "tame" all of those, often disparate, parts and learned how to incorporate them, along with the house, into a single, totally integrated and coherent composition!  Similarly, where the Romans had simply and, in many ways, brutally and arrogantly, imposed their gardens on the countryside and, like the world conquerors that they were, had made no bones about their desire and intent to control and dominate their surroundings and, indeed, nature herself, the Renaissance Italians proved able to sublimate their human impulse to dominate nature by entering into a partnership with her, which resulted in gardens wherein man and nature were reconciled with one another such that they became places filled with a sense of peace and tranquility.  Thus, where the gardens of the Romans were the gardens of the conquerors, the gardens of the Renaissance Italians were the gardens of the artists, the sculptors, and the architects.

     Never before, or -for that matter- after, were the arts that closely allied in the creation of gardens!   Throughout the 16th century and with Rome and Firenze (Florence) vying for primacy as the cultural epicenter of the movement, the spine of Italy, once again, became dotted with princely villas designed by the greatest artists of the time.

Villa Madama designed around 1515 by Raphael and San Gallo for Cardinal Giulio de Medici is an earlier example notable as much for its design, which became a subject of heated discussion throughout Italy and a design benchmark, as for the fact that it was never completely finished.   Here is the entrance garden to the villa.

      Garden making in Italy reached its zenith with the gardens surrounding Villa d'Este near Tivoli.  Designed in 1550 by Pirro Ligorio for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este (who had been named a Bishop at age 2, an Archbishop at 10, and a Cardinal at 30, and who was the son of Lucrezia Borgia and the grandson of Pope Alexander VI), the gardens were built over a twenty year period during which about one quarter of a nearby village and an old Franciscan convent had to be demolished to make room for them.  Laid out on a steep slope and following a ravine carved out by an ancient, but still robust and powerful mountain stream, the garden descends via paths and staircases (decorated with a multitude of hand carved images), and from one terrace to another, to a large garden below.  Along the way, the stream powers hundreds of fountains which are the garden's chief attraction.  
At the bottom of the "hill" is another series of fantastic fountains        which, at one time, included a small fountain which featured "singing birds" who, powered by a water engine, "sang" until they were "frightened" by an owl.  Among the most important fountains at Villa d'Este are the Rometta, a hand carved, architectural "model" of ancient Rome associated with a network of small fountains that culminate in a large body of water featuring a small island hewn in the form of a galley, the Viale delle Cento Fontane, a three-tiered, stepped fountain that acts as the centerpiece of the garden, the Oval Fountain, and the Neptune Fountain.  Overlooking ALL of this is the Baroque Organ Fountain, which once housed a functioning water organ.  Considered the most beautiful garden ever designed and built in the western world to date, Villa d'Este continues to attract thousands upon thousands of visitors every year, a testament to its enduring quality and its continued ability to speak to the hearts and the minds of people across the ages and the cultural divides which is the true hallmark of a great work of art!

     In his 1961 book entitled "Landscape Architecture" (McGraw-Hill), John Ormsbee Simonds wrote (see p72) that "(in) Villa d'Este the highest inherent qualities of the natural elements of the site -plants, topography, water- were fully appreciated by the planner and given design expression.  Seldom , for instance, has water as a landscape element been treated with more imaginative control than at Villa d'Este, where a mountain torrent was diverted to spill down the steep slopes through the garden, rushing, pouring, gushing , spurting, spewing, surging, gurgling, dripping, trickling, riffling, and finally shining deep and still in the stone reflecting basins.  Here at Villa d'Este, water, slopes, and plant materials were handled architecturally to enhance both the structure and the site and superbly unite the two ."

     Sylvia Crowe, a great (British) garden maker in her own right and a prolific writer, wrote that Villa d'Este has "a lyric quality and romance that unfolds itself gradually, in space, to be read like a poem as one walks through it.   Here water forms the connecting link in the garden.  It is not a garden to be seen as a whole, like a picture, but one through which to progress as if through the playing of a sonata, passing through the successive movements and variations of a theme.  Unlike most Italian gardens, the interest of the individual terraces is even greater than that of the central vista, so that one is compelled to follow the moods of the water through all of its movements, the repetitive theme of a hundred jets, the playful mood of the plopping fountains, the intersecting patterns of the jets, and the gentle music of the rill until the crashing chord of the great cascade is reached beyond which there can be nothing but the quiet sostenuto of the placid tanks on the lowest parterre where the water, like the emotions, comes to rest and takes a breath" (Garden Design, 1958).

Come this way for an extended tour of two more famous gardens designed by Pirro Ligorio,

                             Villa Lante                                             Villa Bomarzo