The Italian Renaissance garden was a new style of garden which emerged in the late 15th century at villas in Rome and Florence, inspired by classical ideals of order and beauty, and intended for the pleasure of the view of the garden and the landscape beyond, for contemplation, and for the enjoyment of the sights, sounds and smells of the garden itself.
In the late Italian Renaissance, the gardens became larger, grander and more symmetrical, and were filled with fountains, statues, grottoes, water organs and other features designed to delight their owners and amuse and impress visitors. The style was imitated throughout Europe, influencing the gardens of the French Renaissance, the English knot garden, and the French formal garden style developed in the 17th century.
Background
Prior to the Italian Renaissance, Italian medieval gardens were enclosed by walls, and were mostly devoted to growing vegetables, fruits and medicinal herbs, as well as, in the case of monastic gardens, for silent meditation and prayer. The Italian Renaissance garden broke down the wall between the garden, the house, and the landscape outside.Prevot, Philippe. Histoire des Jardins, Editions Sud-Ouest, Bordeaux, 2002
Beginning in the early modern period translations of Classical works began to circulate among European society, and by the mid-16th century showed influences of Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Sebastiano Serlio, being regarded more like works of art themselves.Samson, Alexander. Locus Amoenus: Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance, 2012 :4
The Italian Renaissance garden, like Renaissance art and architecture, emerged from the rediscovery by Renaissance scholars of classical Roman models. They were inspired by the descriptions of ancient Roman gardens given by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, by the letters of Pliny the Younger, by Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, and in Rerum Rusticanum by Varro, all of which gave detailed and lyrical description of the gardens of Roman villas.Attlee, Helen. Italian Gardens – A Cultural History, 2006: 10.
Pliny the Younger described his life at his villa at Laurentum: "a good life and a genuine one, which is happy and honourable, more rewarding than any 'business' can be. You should take the first opportunity to leave the din, the futile bustle and useless occupations of the city and devote yourself to literature or to leisure."Cited in Attlee, 2006: 13. The purpose of a garden, according to Pliny, was otium, which could be translated as seclusion, serenity, or relaxation, which was the opposite of the idea of negotium that often classified busy urban life. A garden was a place to think, relax, and escape.
Pliny described shaded paths bordered with hedges, ornamental parterres, fountains, and trees and bushes trimmed to geometric or fantastic shapes, all features which would become part of the future Renaissance garden.Allain and Christiany, L'Art des jardins en Europe, Paris, 2006: 132.
Alberti and the principles of the Renaissance garden
The first Renaissance text to include garden design was De re aedificatoria (The Ten Books of Architecture), by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472). He drew upon the architectural principles of Vitruvius,Prevot, 2005 and used quotations from Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger to describe what a garden should look like and how it should be used. He argued that a villa should both be looked at and a place to look from; that the house should be placed above the garden, where it could be seen and the owner could look down into the garden.
Alberti wrote: "The construction will give pleasure to the visitor if, when they leave the city, they see the villa in all its charm, as if to seduce and welcome the new arrivals. Toward this end, I would place it on a slightly elevated place. I would also have the road climb so gently that it fools those who take it to the point that they do not realize how high they have climbed until they discover the countryside below."Alberti, Leon Battista. Édifices destinés aux catégories particulières de citoyens, in L'art d'édifier, translated from the Latin by Pierre Caye and Françoise Choay, Book I, Paris, 2004: 429.
Within the garden, Alberti wrote: "...You should place porticos for giving shade, planters where vines can climb, placed on marble columns; vases and amusing statues, provided they are not obscene. You should also have rare plants.... Trees should be aligned and arranged evenly, each tree aligned with its neighbours."
The literary influence on the Italian Renaissance garden A popular romance, The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, (Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream), published in 1499 in Venice by the monk Francesco Colonna, also had an important influence on the gardens of the Renaissance. It described the voyage and adventures of a traveller, Poliphile, through fantastic landscapes, looking for his love, Polia. The scenes described in the book and the accompanying woodcut illustrations influenced many Renaissance gardens; they included a lake-island (as at the Boboli Gardens), giants emerging from the earth (as at Villa di Pratolino), the maze and the fountain of Venus (as at Villa di Castello), where Poliphile and Polia were reconciled.See Prevot, 2005; Allain and Christiany, 2006
Power and magnificence – the political symbolism of the Renaissance garden
While the early Italian Renaissance gardens were designed for contemplation and pleasure with tunnels of greenery, trees for shade, an enclosed giardino segreto (secret garden) and fields for games and amusements, the Medici, the ruling dynasty of Florence, used gardens to demonstrate their own power and magnificence. "During the first half of the sixteenth century, magnificence came to be perceived as a princely virtue, and all over the Italian peninsula architects, sculptors, painters, poets, historians and humanist scholars were commissioned to concoct a magnificent image for their powerful patrons."Attlee, 2006: 28 The central fountain at Villa di Castello featured a statue of Hercules defeating Antaeus, alluding to the triumph of the garden's builder, Cosimo de' Medici, over a faction of Florentine nobles who had tried to overthrow him.Isabella Ballerini, The Medici Villas: The Complete Guide, p. 33 The garden was a form of political theater, presenting the power, wisdom, order, beauty and glory that the Medici had brought to Florence.
Glossary of the Italian Renaissance garden Bosco sacro: Sacred wood. A grove of trees inspired by the groves where pagans would worship. In Renaissance and especially mannerist gardens, this section was filled with allegorical statues of animals, giants and legendary creatures. Fontaniere: The fountain-maker, a hydraulic engineer who designed the water system and fountains. Giardino segreto: The Secret Garden. An enclosed private garden, or garden room, within the garden, possibly inspired by the cloisters of medieval monasteries. A place for reading, writing or quiet conversations. Giochi d'acqua: Water tricks. Concealed fountains which drenched unsuspecting visitors. Semplici: "Simples" or medicinal plants and herbs.
Gardens of the Early Italian Renaissance The Medici Villa at Fiesole (1455-1790)
The oldest existing Italian Renaissance garden is at the Villa Medici in Fiesole, north of Florence. It was created sometime between 1455 and 1461 by Giovanni de' Medici (1421–1463) the son of Cosimo de' Medici, the founder of the Medici dynasty. Unlike other Medici family villas that were located on flat farmland, this villa was located on a rocky hillside with a view over Florence.
The Villa Medici followed Alberti's precepts that a villa should have a view 'that overlooks the city, the owner's land, the sea or a great plain, and familiar hills and mountains,' and that the foreground have 'the delicacy of gardens.'Cited in Attlee, 2006: 14 The garden has two large terraces, one at the ground floor level and the other at the level of the first floor. From the reception rooms on the first floor, guests could go out to the loggia and from there to the garden so the loggia was a transition space connecting the interior with the exterior. Unlike later gardens, the Villa Medici did not have a grand staircase or other feature to link the two levels.
The garden was inherited by his nephew, Lorenzo de' Medici, who made it a meeting place for poets, artists, writers and philosophers. In 1479, the poet Angelo Poliziano, tutor to the Medici children, described the garden in a letter: "..Seated between the sloping sides of the mountains we have here water in abundance and being constantly refreshed with moderate winds find little inconvenience from the glare of the sun. As you approach the house it seems embosomed in the wood, but when you reach it you find it commands a full prospect of the city."Cited in Attlee, 2006: 18
The Palazzo Piccolomini at Pienza, Tuscany (1459)
The Palazzo Piccolomini at Pienza, was built by Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who was Pope from 1458 to 1464, under the name of Pius II. He was a scholar of Latin and wrote extensively on education, astronomy and social culture.Allain and Christiany, 2006: 138 In 1459, he constructed a palace for himself and his cardinals and court in his small native town of Pienza. Like the Villa Medici, a major feature of the house was the commanding view to be had from the loggia over the valley, the Val d'Orcia, to the slopes of Monte Amiata. Closer to the house, there were terraces with geometric flowerbeds surrounding fountains and ornamented with bushes trimmed into cones and spheres similar to the garden of Pliny described in Alberti's De re aedificatoria.Allain and Christiany, 2006: 140. The garden was designed to open to the town, the palace and the view.
The Cortile del Belvedere in the Vatican Palace, Rome (1504–1513)
In 1504 Pope Julius II commissioned the architect Donato Bramante to recreate a classical Roman pleasure garden in the space between the old papal Vatican palace in Rome and the nearby Villa Belvedere. His model was the ancient Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Palestrina or ancient Praeneste, and he used the classical ideals of proportion, symmetry and perspective in his design. He created a central axis to link the two buildings, and a series of terraces connected by double ramps, modelled after those at Palestrina. The terraces were divided into squares and rectangles by paths and flowerbeds, and served as an outdoor setting for Pope Julius's extraordinary collection of classical sculpture, which included the famous Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere. The heart of the garden was a courtyard surrounded by a three-tiered loggia, which served as a theater for entertainments. A central exedra formed the dramatic conclusion of the long perspective up the courtyard, ramps and terraces.Attlee, 2006: 21
The Venetian Ambassador described the Cortile del Belvedere in 1523: "One enters a very beautiful garden, of which half is filled with growing grass and bays and mulberries and cypresses, while the other half is paved with squares of bricks laid upright, and in every square a beautiful orange tree grows out of the pavement, of which there are a great many, arranged in perfect order....On one side of the garden is a most beautiful loggia, at one end of which is a lovely fountain that irrigates the orange trees and the rest of the garden by a little canal in the center of the loggia."Cited in Attlee, 2006: 21.
Unfortunately, the construction of the Vatican Library in the late sixteenth century across the centre of the cortile means that Bramante's design is now obscured but his ideas of proportion, symmetry and dramatic perspectives were used in many of the great gardens of the Italian Renaissance.Attlee, 2006: 22
The Villa Madama, Rome (1516)