A Literary and Visual Stroll Through the Renaissance Garden

Simon Felice, Secondo prospetto per fianco del palazzo con diversa veduta del giardino del Bel respiro...Pamphilio, from I Giardini di Roma. Con le loro Piante Alzate e Vedute in Prospettiva.... Roma, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi, [ca. 1680].

The garden had a significant role to play in Renaissance Italy. With the development of the grand villas of the sixteenth century, formal garden art became a way for the wealthy to demonstrate their power through expansive arrays of plants, waterworks, statuary, grottoes and terraces. At the heart of this development was an increasingly animated dialogue between nature, culture, and cultivation. While its medieval predecessors were used for growing fruits and vegetables and medicinal herbs (or silent meditation and prayer), during the Renaissance the garden becomes a complex site of mediation between art and nature—a ‘third nature’, according to John Dixon Hunt, after the first nature of wilderness and the second nature of agriculture. Indeed, the garden becomes a special space for a type of tamed freedom, important for cultivating the self and to show that cultivation to others but also to let one’s imagination roam in harmony with a nature somehow outside the bounds of contemporary society, to both control nature and explore its immensity.

Michael Leslie makes the important point that the development of the printed text and the formal garden go hand in hand (M. Leslie, “Verbal Representations,” A Cultural History of Gardens, p. 139). As in other areas, the gardens of antiquity were of especial interest to Renaissance men and women, and the movable type provided a way for them to gain greater knowledge of their arrangement and meanings. At the same time, the reading public becomes ‘fertile ground’ for the circulation and expansion of ideas concerning both the aesthetics and significance of the garden space, as well as a way for the development of knowledge about plants and cultivation to develop along more scientific or classificatory lines. The exploration of new worlds and discovery of their flora and fauna all became accessible to the reader, as to the gardener, which often overlapped.

The garden space was important for literary ‘insiders’ to exchange ideas, too. For example, the publisher Francesco Marcolini (ca. 1508-1568) had a garden in Giudecca, Venice, that fostered a particularly comfortable environment for intellectual and literary exchange. His garden provided the setting for Pietro Aretino’s Ragionamenti delle corti of 1538, in which it is described by one of the interlocutors in the text, none other than Lodovico Dolce: “We could call this little garden of Marcolino the fan of the summer, such that the breath of its wind, the shade of its greenery, the softness of its flowers, and the song of its Petrarchan birds refresh cover, please, ad encourage sleep.” (Translation by J. Cranston, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice, p. 21). As a locus amoenus, Marcolini’s garden provided a sense of freedom outside the church walls; he was in fact the friend and publisher of the suspected and later forbidden Aretino, as well as many other eccentric and transgressive writers and poets. At the same time, Marcolini’s garden becomes the subject of literary construction and ekphrasis. As Jodi Cranston observes, “Marcolini’s garden existed, but in Aretino’s text it became a place made for, and generated by, language and sustained by its inhabitants, which, in this case, were the lively publishing and editorial community in cinquecento Venice.” (J. Cranston, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice, p. 31)

Marcolini, Francesco (ca. 1500-1559). Le Sorti. Intitolate Giardino dei Pensieri. Venezia, Marcolino 1540.

See the full description of this copy here.

Marcolini offered a reflection on this literary freedom and its constructive potential in his Le Sorti. Intitolate Giardino dei Pensieri (Venice, Marcolini, 1540), a copy of which is presented here. Subtitled “The Garden of Thoughts,” this fortune-telling game-book presents a similarly autonomous realm structured through a complex, poetry-mediated system of choice and chance and accessed by men and women alike. As the author explained in his introduction, “even though they ask the same question, the lines of poetry come out varied” (p. 4) and hidden meanings abound. The subtitle also alludes to the tradition of referring to poetry anthologies as gardens (florilegia), while its complex layout alludes to the highly geometric organization of the Renaissance garden, influenced as it was by proportion and symmetry. A fine example of this is the garden at the Palazzo Pontificio sul Quirinale, included in Giovan Battista Falda’s I Giardini di Roma. Con le loro Piante Alzate e Vedute in Prospettiva.... Roma, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi, [ca. 1680].

Falda, Giovan Battista (1643-1678), Prospettiva del Giardino Pontificio sul Quirinale, from I Giardini di Roma. Con le loro Piante Alzate e Vedute in Prospettiva.... Roma, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi, [ca. 1680].

I will return to Falda’s magnificent album momentarily. Before leaving Venice, though, it is worth stopping to take a look at the saucier side of the garden as seen in that most famous illustrated book of the Renaissance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Translated as “Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream,” this curious work relays the protagonist Poliphilo’s circuitous and disorienting journey through various garden settings to find his love Polia. The work is wonderfully illustrated and involves a mix of languages (Latin and Greek) and states (dream and reality), making Poliphilo’s engagement with the overlap between art and nature all the more rousing and evocative.

First printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499, the second edition presented here may owe something to the rising interest in formal garden art. Certainly, the fact that it was printed again in 1545 suggests a renewed interest in the work, in Italy as well as abroad, for within a year a French translation also appeared, followed by an English translation in 1592. The second edition is mostly a page-for-page reprint by Manutius’s heirs. There is a significant difference, however, in the lack of printed capitals in the second edition: instead of the printed initials included in the 1499 edition, only guide letters with blank spaces appear in the second edition thus allowing for illuminators to enrich individual copies. This suggests the edition was intended for particularly affluent bibliophiles, as with those interested in, and having the means of, cultivating their own gardens.

Indeed, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is long thought to have had a great influence on garden design, ranging from the incorporation of Classical elements like obelisks and pergolas to water features and mazes, even in specific gardens like the Giardino di Boboli and those at the Villa di Pratolino and the Villa di Castello.

Colonna, Francesco (ca. 1433-1527). La Hypnerotomachia di Poliphilo, cioe pugna d’amore in sogno. Dou’egli mostra, che tutte le cose humane non sono altro che Sogno: & doue narra molt’altre cose degne di cognitione. Venice, Sons of Aldo Manuzio, 1545.

See the full description here.

As form and content suggest, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili also points to the garden as a setting for the exploration of sexuality and desire, a trope found again in another contemporary Venetian publication, the famous Celestina. As Leslie observes, “the energy of both books is desire for physical consummation and the garden is both the setting and the metaphor for its triumph.” (p. 157) The connection of course rests on associations between reproductive organs of plants and humans and the multiple valences of ‘recreation’. On the other hand, death also figures into the scenario. Here the cycle of life is obvious but the paragone of verbal and garden art is also evident, as Leslie further points out: “literary gardens are often places of seduction through intoxicating delights; the frequent imaging of the language arts in garden terms itself suggest association with pleasure, power, danger, and abuse.” (p. 143)

Falda, Giovan Battista (1643-1678). Gli Esperidi I Romani (The Garden of the Hesperides), from I Giardini di Roma. Con le loro Piante Alzate e Vedute in Prospettiva.... Roma, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi, [ca. 1680].

Of course, the plastic arts also had a great role to play in the development of garden aesthetics, particularly in the coming together of past and present. Ancient statuary was central here. In Rome, for example, Pope Julius II displayed his tremendously important collection of ancient Roman statuary in the gardens at the Papal Belvedere Villa. The effect of ‘modernizing’ in this way is played out int the frontispiece for Falda’s I Giardini di Roma, pointedly titled Gli Esperidi I Romani (The Garden of the Hesperides) on a ruin in the bottom left. Here the union of statuary, ancient Rome, art and nature is made clear, with an animated Hercules gesturing in the foreground while Atlas as fountain statuary bears a water-working world behind him. Three putti carry the coat of arms of Innocent XI and others pour water from urns, perhaps an allusion to giochi d’acqua—such ‘water games’, which had been incorporated into gardens since the mid-sixteenth century, were concealed fountains that would shower unsuspecting visitors as they passed by. Nymphaea (grottos dedicated to nymphs) were also popular among Renaissance gardens, but here the nymphs come alive to bring garlands to the Roman wolf. Falda’s album was dedicated to contemporary gardens and several of those included in the volume are also emblematized here: at right, for example, is an aviary pavilion like that at the Farnese Gardens or Horti Farnesiani while the flower beds are those of the Barberini garden on the Quirinal. Atlas, meanwhile, derives from the Water Theater at the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati, while the hedges of citrus trees as well as the flat-roofed casino come from the Villa Pamphilj.

Falda’s views—renowned for their beauty and accuracy—also demonstrate the significance of the rediscovery of perspective, not just for effective views but also for the planning of the garden itself. “A result of this visual shift was an emphasis in spatial progression in urban and landscape design. The Renaissance garden in Italy provided visitors with opportunities for diverse visual, spatial, and sensory experiences while gently directing them through space by using a succession of focal features: fountains, grottoes, statues, and fishponds.” (M. Gharipour, "The Gardens of Safavid Isfahan and Renaissance Italy," p. 120) Often these shifts and delimitation of views controlled navigation and thus contributed to a narrative program, as at the the Villa Mattei, where visitors were required to follow a fixed itinerary. They could also ably be used to suggest continuity and connection, as in the wall surrounding the same.

Falda, Giovan Battista (1643-1678), Prospettiva del Giardino dell'Eccellentis: mo Signor Duca Mattei alla Nàvicella su'l Monte Celio, from I Giardini di Roma. Con le loro Piante Alzate e Vedute in Prospettiva.... Roma, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi, [ca. 1680].

Part of what makes Falda’s work so fascinating is the contemporaneity of the images which allow the viewer-reader to imagine roaming through these grand creations and cultivations at such an important moment in history. In total, the album illustrates the layout and embellishment of nine of the finest gardens of Rome dating from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. It includes bird's-eye views and plans of the Vatican Gardens, those on Quirinal Hill, and, among others, the Villas Mattei, Pamphili, Borghese, Ludovisi, and Montalto. The gardens were designed by Alessandro Algardi, Carlo Maderno, Ottavio Mascarini, Annibali Lippi, Cavalier Rainaldi, Domenico Fontana, Flaminio Pontico, and Giacomo Del Duca. Many of these are now lost or changed, making Falda’s album a testament not only to the vastly important cultural significance of the garden and its power on the imagination, but also to the transience of this extraordinary artform.

Falda, Giovan Battista (1643-1678), Veduta del Giardino di Belvedere del Palazzo Pontificio in Vaticano, from I Giardini di Roma. Con le loro Piante Alzate e Vedute in Prospettiva.... Roma, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi, [ca. 1680].

References

J. D. Hunt, Greater Perfections. The Practice of Garden Theory, Philadelphia 2000; H. Brunot, “Du Songe de Poliphile à la Grande Grotte de Boboli: la dualité dramatique du paysage,” Polia: Revue de l’art des jardins 2, (2004), pp. 7-26; N. Nonaka, “The Aviaries of the Farnese Gardens on the Palatine,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 59/60, (2014/1015), pp. 361-398; E. Hyde (ed), A Cultural History of Gardens in the Renaissance, New York 2015, pp. 1-16, 139-160; M. Gharipour, "The Gardens of Safavid Isfahan and Renaissance Italy: A New Urban Landscape?” M. Gharipour (ed) Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires, University Park, PA 2017, p. 120; J. . Cranston, Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice, University Park, PA 2019, p. 21-31.

How to cite this information

Julia Stimac, “A Literary and Visual Stroll Through the Renaissance Garden,” PRPH Books, 3 March 2021, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/gardens. Accessed [date].

This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.