DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.16632#0263
234
History of Garden Art
The impression we get of the place as a whole from these miscellaneous plans is quite
overwhelming. Now we can interpret the enthusiastic tales about the villas of these days
with their "amenissimi giardini." We now see realised, by the help of old writers, both
the fancies of antiquity and the works that have perished, all that Alberti and men of his
kind desired to see. A painter, the greatest of them all, was the first who conceived this
beauty as a whole, and throughout we feel we have an artist's work. What is not yet here
is the seclusion of later Italian gardens, and also the close relationship with the house.
Gardens are composed of at least three
terraces, and these are connected just as
the slope of the mountain requires them to
be. For the architect is still far from
imagining that he can actually alter the lie
of the land; even the terraces with steps
between them are not throughout orientated
by one main axis. The nymphseum, for
instance, is on one side in a little valley by
itself. It is the same with the treatment of
water, which has to be in separate places
for the different garden groups, and how-
ever attractive in special parts, does not
present the beauty and grandeur of one
imposing whole.
Unhappily most of the country houses
of this golden age shared the fortunes of
the Villa Madama, and with gardens it
went worse than with buildings. Nothing
finished, everything destroyed or altered—
that is the story of all the gardens of the
first half of the sixteenth century. It needs
a very careful scrutiny to make a picture,
from our scanty material, of those years
when so many great artists created numbers
of fine and characteristic works in the way
fig. 168. the palazzo del te, mantua—ground-plan °f garden architecture. As a fact, Rome
itself after the death of Leo X. was so
factious, restless, and actually unsafe, that men's minds began to turn to the peaceful
life at a country house. Then the great artists turned their backs on the city for a while,
or perhaps for ever, and were received with open arms by other princes in other towns.
Raphael's best pupil, Giulio Romano, who after his master's death became the architect
of Villa Madama, found plenty of work and also a permanent home in Mantua, the
town of the intellectual and artistic family of Gonzaga. Frederick, son of that noble
lady, Isabella Gonzaga, received the artist with much show of favour, and one of his
first commissions was the erection of a pleasure-house south of the town, the Palazzo
del Te (Fig. 168).
Giulio Romano had a very different task here from the one his master left him at
History of Garden Art
The impression we get of the place as a whole from these miscellaneous plans is quite
overwhelming. Now we can interpret the enthusiastic tales about the villas of these days
with their "amenissimi giardini." We now see realised, by the help of old writers, both
the fancies of antiquity and the works that have perished, all that Alberti and men of his
kind desired to see. A painter, the greatest of them all, was the first who conceived this
beauty as a whole, and throughout we feel we have an artist's work. What is not yet here
is the seclusion of later Italian gardens, and also the close relationship with the house.
Gardens are composed of at least three
terraces, and these are connected just as
the slope of the mountain requires them to
be. For the architect is still far from
imagining that he can actually alter the lie
of the land; even the terraces with steps
between them are not throughout orientated
by one main axis. The nymphseum, for
instance, is on one side in a little valley by
itself. It is the same with the treatment of
water, which has to be in separate places
for the different garden groups, and how-
ever attractive in special parts, does not
present the beauty and grandeur of one
imposing whole.
Unhappily most of the country houses
of this golden age shared the fortunes of
the Villa Madama, and with gardens it
went worse than with buildings. Nothing
finished, everything destroyed or altered—
that is the story of all the gardens of the
first half of the sixteenth century. It needs
a very careful scrutiny to make a picture,
from our scanty material, of those years
when so many great artists created numbers
of fine and characteristic works in the way
fig. 168. the palazzo del te, mantua—ground-plan °f garden architecture. As a fact, Rome
itself after the death of Leo X. was so
factious, restless, and actually unsafe, that men's minds began to turn to the peaceful
life at a country house. Then the great artists turned their backs on the city for a while,
or perhaps for ever, and were received with open arms by other princes in other towns.
Raphael's best pupil, Giulio Romano, who after his master's death became the architect
of Villa Madama, found plenty of work and also a permanent home in Mantua, the
town of the intellectual and artistic family of Gonzaga. Frederick, son of that noble
lady, Isabella Gonzaga, received the artist with much show of favour, and one of his
first commissions was the erection of a pleasure-house south of the town, the Palazzo
del Te (Fig. 168).
Giulio Romano had a very different task here from the one his master left him at