Italian garden
Italian garden typically refers to a style of gardens, wherever located, reflecting a number of large Italian Renaissance gardens which have survived in something like their original form. In the history of gardening, during the Renaissance, Italy had the most advanced and admired gardens in Europe, which greatly influenced other countries, especially the French formal garden and Dutch gardens and, mostly through these, gardens in Britain.
The gardens were formally laid out, but probably in a somewhat more relaxed fashion than the later French style, aiming to extend or project the regularity of the architecture of the house into nature. A garden in something of the same style, and using many Mediterranean plants, is often called an "Italian garden" anywhere in the world.
From the late 18th century many grand Italian gardens were remade in a version of the English landscape garden style, and the range of garden types actually found in Italy is considerable, partly depending on different climatic conditions.
History and influence
The Italian garden was influenced by Roman gardens and Italian Renaissance gardens. The principles of the French garden are based on those of the Italian garden, but André le Nôtre ultimately eclipsed it in scale and concept at the gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles during the 17th Century. The formal early English garden was influenced by the fountains and cascades that were elements of the Italian Renaissance garden, and though there are later water features – for example, the 300-year-old cascade at Chatsworth House – Italian influence was superseded in England by seventeenth-century formal Franco-Dutch parterres and avenues. From the early eighteenth century onward, thanks to gardeners like Charles Bridgeman, William Kent, Capability Brown, and Humphry Repton garden design in England took a completely different, romantic and informal turn.Roman influence
Roman gardens were greatly inspired by Greek gardens and were usually in the peristyles. The administrators of the Roman Empire actively exchanged information on agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, hydraulics, and botany. The Gardens of Lucullus on the Pincian Hill at the edge of Rome introduced the Persian garden to Europe, around 60 BC. The garden was a place of peace and tranquillity, a refuge from urban life, and a place filled with religious and symbolic meanings. As Roman culture developed and became increasingly influenced by foreign civilizations through trade, the use of gardens expanded and gardens ultimately thrived in Ancient Rome.The principle styles of the giardino all'italiana emerged from the rediscovery by Renaissance scholars of Roman models. They were inspired by the descriptions of Roman gardens given by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, in the letters of Pliny the Younger, in 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.
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". The purpose of a garden, according to Pliny, was otium, which could be translated as seclusion, serenity, or relaxation. A garden was a place to think, read, write and relax.
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.
Italian Medieval gardens
Italian Medieval gardens were enclosed by walls, and were devoted to growing vegetables, fruits and medicinal herbs, and, in the case of monastic gardens, for silent meditation and prayer. Generally, monastic garden types consisted of kitchen gardens, infirmary gardens, cemetery orchards, cloister garths, and vineyards. Individual monasteries might also have had a "green court", a plot of grass and trees where horses could graze, as well as a cellarer's garden or private gardens for obedientiaries, monks who held specific posts within the monastery.Italian Renaissance gardens
The Italian Renaissance garden emerged in the late fifteenth 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.During the late Renaissance, gardens became larger and even more symmetrical, and were filled with fountains, statues, grottoes, water organs and other features designed to delight their owners and amuse and impress visitors.
While the early Italian Renaissance gardens were designed for contemplation and pleasure with tunnels of greenery, trees for shade, an enclosed giardino segreto 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." The central fountain at Villa di Castello featured a statue of Hercules, symbolizing Cosimo de' Medici, the ruler of Florence, and the fish-tailed goat that was an emblem of the Medici; the garden represented the power, wisdom, order, beauty and glory that the Medici had brought to Florence.
Italian villas with notable gardens
The Medici Villa at Fiesole (1455–1461)
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 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 Leon Battista 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". 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 Medici Villa 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 Agnolo 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".
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. 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. 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.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."
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.