DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.16632#0242
The Italian Renaissance and Baroque
213
the conquering army presses into the town. Thus shall you by skill, time, native strength, and careful
nurture, convert the tree into many new forms, even as a thread of wool is woven into divers figures and
colours in a carpet.
If one ignores in all this the exaggerations and meanderings of a humanistic style,
there is nothing at variance with Rucellai's garden: indeed it is quite likely that the poet
had in his mind his garden at the Mergelina.
As compared with such detailed accounts, what we get from literature about the
1.
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FIG. 154. VILLA SALVIATI, FLORENCE
famous villa of the early Renaissance at Careggi (Fig. 153) is very scanty. The talk about
trees and shrubs in a Latin poem from a humanistic source is quite worthless: after the
conventional comparisons with the gardens of Semiramis and Alcinous there is nothing
but the familiar rhetoric and repetitions. Instead, we have the villa preserved, and certain
features of the garden also. The house itself is just as of old, to the roof that was put up
on the battlements after a fire in 1517. It was built by Michelozzo for Cosimo de' Medici,
a little earlier than Quaracchi.
There is very little to be found at Careggi of those Renaissance forms so fully adopted
by Michelozso in the Medicean palace—which was already built—in Florence itself, such
as the delicate "rusticated" joints, graduated according to the relative heights of the
stories, and the outspreading corona, and again the tastefully treated window-frames.
So far as its outside is concerned, Careggi is still under the spell of the castle of the Middle
Ages. The facade on the road widens at its lower story, as though it made a safeguard
213
the conquering army presses into the town. Thus shall you by skill, time, native strength, and careful
nurture, convert the tree into many new forms, even as a thread of wool is woven into divers figures and
colours in a carpet.
If one ignores in all this the exaggerations and meanderings of a humanistic style,
there is nothing at variance with Rucellai's garden: indeed it is quite likely that the poet
had in his mind his garden at the Mergelina.
As compared with such detailed accounts, what we get from literature about the
1.
'4H ' "
1 -iJfe
8
i
1
I 1
4'
FIG. 154. VILLA SALVIATI, FLORENCE
famous villa of the early Renaissance at Careggi (Fig. 153) is very scanty. The talk about
trees and shrubs in a Latin poem from a humanistic source is quite worthless: after the
conventional comparisons with the gardens of Semiramis and Alcinous there is nothing
but the familiar rhetoric and repetitions. Instead, we have the villa preserved, and certain
features of the garden also. The house itself is just as of old, to the roof that was put up
on the battlements after a fire in 1517. It was built by Michelozzo for Cosimo de' Medici,
a little earlier than Quaracchi.
There is very little to be found at Careggi of those Renaissance forms so fully adopted
by Michelozso in the Medicean palace—which was already built—in Florence itself, such
as the delicate "rusticated" joints, graduated according to the relative heights of the
stories, and the outspreading corona, and again the tastefully treated window-frames.
So far as its outside is concerned, Careggi is still under the spell of the castle of the Middle
Ages. The facade on the road widens at its lower story, as though it made a safeguard