DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68272#0021
INTRODUCTORY.
No art ever flies
direct to its imagined
goal. The Italian dream
of the ideal garden was
heavily weighted by the
mass and profusion of
the salvage of antiquity.
Raphael even was de-
flected from his school
of painting to the cares
and pursuits of a director
of excavations. We cannot
understand Italian villas
and gardens unless we
realise that the museum
had yet to be disengaged
from the lordly pleasure
house. Whether architect 3.—Italian renaissance landscape of the late period, by Titian.
or sculptor, the artist
had perforce one eye and hand on the antique and the other on his own new creation, and
this duality of interest is a great condition of the work of the time. Vignola owed
his start and development as an architect to investigations undertaken by a learned
circle of Vitruvian commentators, for whom he acted as draughtsman Palladio’s
measured examples of antiquity amount to a century of plates in one book alone. Pirro
Ligorio was great in the special branch of ancient domestic architecture, and his conception
4.—GARDEN PICTURE AT THE VILLA DI PAPA GIULIO.
No art ever flies
direct to its imagined
goal. The Italian dream
of the ideal garden was
heavily weighted by the
mass and profusion of
the salvage of antiquity.
Raphael even was de-
flected from his school
of painting to the cares
and pursuits of a director
of excavations. We cannot
understand Italian villas
and gardens unless we
realise that the museum
had yet to be disengaged
from the lordly pleasure
house. Whether architect 3.—Italian renaissance landscape of the late period, by Titian.
or sculptor, the artist
had perforce one eye and hand on the antique and the other on his own new creation, and
this duality of interest is a great condition of the work of the time. Vignola owed
his start and development as an architect to investigations undertaken by a learned
circle of Vitruvian commentators, for whom he acted as draughtsman Palladio’s
measured examples of antiquity amount to a century of plates in one book alone. Pirro
Ligorio was great in the special branch of ancient domestic architecture, and his conception
4.—GARDEN PICTURE AT THE VILLA DI PAPA GIULIO.