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The Art of Garden Design
Rebecca Keary, 01 May 2001 - [ E-mail a Friend ]
When a firm of antiquarian booksellers publishes an anthology of collected writings, we can expect it to be both learned and well-produced, and readers of L'Arte dei Giardini can hardly be disappointed. The bookselling firm of Polifilo in Milan is run by the Vigevani family, and this two-volume anthology of Italian writings on the art of garden design is intended by the firm as a memorial volume dedicated to Alberto Vigevani, a member of the family who had helped Margherita Visentini in her research. The range of texts featured in the anthology stretches from the early Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century, comprising excerpts from contemporary writings on the Italian garden from such illustrious names as Boccaccio, Giovanni Rucellai, Filarete, Colonna, Pietro Bembo, Vasari, Tasso, Scamozzi, Borromeo, Milizia, and Del Rosso. Visentini's focus in bringing these texts together is the unique place garden design occupied in the field of the arts in Renaissance and Baroque Italy.
Visentini begins by considering the special nature of the garden as an art form, especially its transitory aspect and the fragility of its elements. The garden, she says, is an "opera a cielo aperto", the creation of which requires at once knowledge in the diverse fields of geometry, hydraulics, botany, physics, antiquarianism, design and architecture, resulting, as she rightly says, in an union of art and science, nature and artifice.
Following on from this, the subject of the garden becomes unique bibliographically; the very fragility of any state of the garden in a moment in time means that contemporary records become more valuable perhaps than in any other related field. In addition, valuable material on the history of the garden will be found in unexpected places - Boccaccio's Decameron, as Visentini shows, or Bembo's Gli Asolani - as much as in an architectural treatise, especially as there were no serious writings dedicated solely to the Renaissance or Baroque garden in Italy until the end of the eighteenth century. The history of the garden (especially in Italy during the Renaissance) is closely linked to a wide range of other disciplines.
This doesn't mean, though, that garden design was a neglected art at that time, and Visentini gives a more than potted history of garden art and construction in Italy, emphasising its importance as part of the enlightened Italian intellectual's vocabulary, with members of the nobility taking an active part in the design and construction of their own gardens, and with respected architects and stage designers eager to turn their hand to it.
Garden history in Italy divides into two distinct periods of influence, and this is how Visentini chooses to order the anthology. The formal 'Italian-style' garden reigned from the early Renaissance until the advent of the irregular 'English-style' landscape garden, which arrived in Italy c. 1730 and appealed to the emergent bourgeoisie (the French garden in the style of Le Nôtre and Dezallier d'Argenville never really took off with the Italians). The anthology is also interesting for evidence of the flow of ideas and specifically the impact of the idea of the English landscape garden on another country - all in all Visentini's preliminary essays and the sources themselves give a fairly complete, and intriguing, picture of this process.
Sources for the earlier formal gardens tend to be scattered about. Contemporary architectural treatises dealt only with the spatial dimensions of the garden and the relationship between greenery and buildings; agronomical writings (starting with de' Crescenzi's Ruralia Commoda at the beginning of the fourteenth century) concentrated on terrain, water supply and the treatment of plants. The history of the garden is inevitably tied to the dreams of the fantastic, though, and one interesting example of the latter is Pier Antonio Michiel's I cinque libri di pianti with illustrated designs by Domenicho delle Greche of fabulous structures and sculptures built out of greenery. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the study of hydraulics came into its own, with both practical and fantastic designs and treatises on water features, following the fashions in Northern Europe. Statues, both ancient and modern, also became obligatory props and this gave rise to a number of now prized guidebooks and lists of famous collections of antique statuary, as well as books of designs for statues and fountains, sometimes by names usually known for genius in another field, such as Tiepolo.
The sources in the anthology range from the famous (Raphael's letter of 1519 concerning the Villa Madama, or Pirro Ligorio's description of the Villa d'Este), to the bizarre (when Italy caught the garden bug, official reports on visits to noble's residences or foreign courts would turn to a description of the marvellous gardens to be found there, with diplomats waxing lyrical in their reports and letters on the latest water feature in their postings). All the most famous and fashionable intellectuals and dilettantes got involved, while Italian literature also started featuring fantastical imaginary garden landscapes; Visentini throughout the book seeks to illuminate the important relationship between the (landscape) garden and the stage-set, eventually made explicit in the nineteenth century by the landscape architect Jappelli. Some of the documents she features are by their nature factual and reliable, in particular inventories, land registers, and other cartographic surveys carried out, all of which can be highly valuable to the researcher. Others are fanciful or concern projects which were only ever half-completed, such as the Villa Madama.
To put the excerpts in context, Visentini gives a good general outline of the bibliographical history of garden-making in Italy from the fourteenth to late nineteenth centuries, also giving a brief guide to more recent studies and restoration projects. In the now huge proliferation of studies on the Italian garden (the subject has seen something of a resurgence), Visentini's anthology is a fresh contribution, bringing much-needed approachable primary sources into the domain of the researcher, conservator, student, bibliophile, or seriously interested armchair gardener. The texts are Italian-language only - Latin texts such as those by Alberti and Crescendi have been (sadly) excluded, as have writings by foreign visitors to Italy, including Furttenbach and Goethe, on the gardens they saw.
A working knowledge of Italian is all that is needed, though, and after each excerpt Visentini helpfully supplies biographical, bibliographical and other interesting notes on the author and/or the text. The lavish illustrations also attract the reader, although these volumes should not be dismissed as coffee-table books; this is the first time that such sources have been pulled together, and it has been done with great thought and scholarship. Although filling a yawning gap in a specialist area, this anthology will also be interesting to those wishing to expand their knowledge of gardening history in general and it is an excellent introduction to the broad range of primary sources available on the subject.