What is a renaissance garden? Garden historians use the terms 'renaissance', 'mannerist' and baroque' freely—and often interchangeably, Tim Richardson argues that such art-historical classifications fail to distinguish between the many traditions of garden making in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—traditions that were often strongly regional, and overlapped in time

Apollo, July, 2005 by Tim Richardson

Garden history is still a relatively young subject--it got into its stride only in the 1960s--and there are many gaps in scholarship and research. But even well-trodden subjects are prone to confusions and contradictions, and nowhere more so than in the case of Italian gardens of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The question is, do the categories used by art historians to classify the visual arts of the period apply to gardens? Can any garden accurately be described as renaissance, mannerist or baroque? In the case of Villa Lante and Villa d'Este--the gardens of this period that have been most celebrated during the past century--the three terms appear to be interchangeable, with the prefixes Early, High or Late regularly added, and individual writers tending to state their categorisations as self-evident fact.

Garden historians have not been much affected by the recent questioning by art historians of the validity of these stylistic labels. Although the labels' usefulness is undeniable, most recent art history has tended to subordinate stylistic classification to discussion of such issues as patronage, function and other aspects of social history. These are topics that have been eagerly embraced by garden historians, but the fundamental question of categorisation cannot be ignored while terms such as 'renaissance garden' are still in common use. This brief survey of the period 1450 to 1600 is intended to tease out some of the major strands in garden design during these years, and on that basis to suggest a surer--and simpler--system of categorisation, based on what I would argue are the seven important strands in garden design in Italy that can be discerned during this period. These strands overlap greatly, both chronologically and geographically.

1 The Tuscan villa gardens of the Medici, c. 1445-62

Michelozzi Michelozzo (1396-1472) was employed by Cosimo de Medici in the 1440s and 1450s to remodel or rebuild several medieval fortified villas or fattorias in the vicinity of Florence. This was achieved in a spirit of villegiatura, or the cultural ideal of rural living, which had become desirable by the fourteenth century, as evinced by Boccaccio's setting of The Decameron in a villa outside the city, (1) and Petrarch's Vita Solitaria, begun in 1346. The fourteen celebrated lunettes of Medici villas painted by Giusto Utens for alcoves in the banqueting hall of the Villa Artimino at Monte Albano--now in the Museo di Firenze Com'era--are dated to 1598/99, which represents a lapse of some 150 years since Michelozzo's work at the villas of Trebbio, Careggi and Cafaggiolo. (2) Nevertheless, it is quite possible that the basic layout of these gardens remained unchanged during this period.

As depicted by Utens, the garden at Cafaggiolo (Fig. 2), where Michelozzo worked in about 1450, is an enclosed space with six grassy compartments bounded by low fences wreathed in what could be flowering shrubs, herbs or roses (all were used at this time). A pair of vine covered pergolas or arbours are contained within this symmetrical design, which is in many ways reminiscent of the medieval hortus conclusus: a small garden of herbs and flowers in hedged compartments, usually next to or near a house in town.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

A rural, productive enclosed garden on this theme was known as an orto in medieval agricultural literature. (3) During the course of the fifteenth century, private spaces such as these evolved into the more formally, ornamentally and geometrically ordered giardino segreto, or secret garden--an intimate space that was often retained in some form in even the grandest or most innovative sixteenth- and seventeenth-century gardens. These medieval gardens of grassy compartments enclosed by trellis can also be seen as the precursors of the parterre gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by which time the pretence of productivity in such a garden had diminished considerably. It is likely that Islamic precedent, absorbed via Sicily and then southern Italy, was more influential on such gardens than has been realised, specifically in terms of the central placement of fountains in garden courts, the introduction of citrus groves, the cross-axis plan and the use of rills and pavilions. (4)

In more agrarian and utilitarian situations where there was no formalised hortus conclusus or giardino segreto, the enclosed productive gardens near the house, which were also laid out in hedged compartments or as grids of orchard trees, fulfilled a dual ornamental productive role. The lesser-known lunettes in the Utens series illustrate the resilience of this older style of garden layout even into the seventeenth century: Villa Collesalvetti (Fig. 4), for example, is modest and agricultural in tone, with three fenced enclosures of diminishing size aligned laterally against the house, each containing fenced grass plats and trees at the corners. (5) The gardens are not associated with the villa in any meaningful way; the difference at Cafaggiolo is that Michelozzo organised the ornamental-productive garden on an axis with the house, and in scale with it. Garden and building are inseparably linked; the distinction between agriculture and ornament is blurred.