DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.68272#0022
THE GARDENS OF ITALY.
of the Italian villa is heavily charged with the desire to re-create the past greatness of
Rome. The energy of creation was still, however, in its first momentum, and the antique was
a stimulus rather than a clog. To live as the Romans, to re-create the gardens of Lucullus,
Cicero and Hadrian was an ideal that produced works which live for themselves and not as mere
lesson books of a vanished past. Perhaps it was fortunate that the ancient writings and
descriptions of the Greek and Roman villas and gardens were, as they still remain even now, so
obscure that the restorations on paper of various learned authorities are all wildly divergent.
Cicero’s and Pliny’s villas, for instance, as usually put forward in schemes of restoration, seem
outside the bounds of probability and practical building politics. This absence of direct
examples gave free play to a skilful adaptation of ideals to actual requirements and sites. The
Villa Madama at the Gate of Rome, an incompleted fragment of a great idea, was a forerunner
of much that was afterwards attempted and in part achieved.
The Villa Lante at Bagnaia (Chap. XIX), while a masterpiece of artistic gardening, is a
most modest and practicable creation for its special situation and purpose. It is difficult to
think of a more pleasant place in which to spend a glorious Italian afternoon. The water
rushing down the quaint troughs is checked by the scrolls of the masonry as in the
watercourses of nature. It is an artistic treatment of a naturally observed fact. The
music of the waters beneath the shade serves as a Lethe passage that blots out the glaring
memories of the dusty highway without. The balance of the broad and massive twin casinos
is the outcome of a fine masonic sense. They are veritable everlasting cubes of stone,
relieved by a fretted surface of pilaster treatment that has none of the worrying obligations of
an Order. The central fountain presents a modest appreciation of human form, true in scale
and vigorous in an attitude that stops short of the affectation of a studied pose. The island
•d'G
5.—AN ITALIAN FARMYARD.
of the Italian villa is heavily charged with the desire to re-create the past greatness of
Rome. The energy of creation was still, however, in its first momentum, and the antique was
a stimulus rather than a clog. To live as the Romans, to re-create the gardens of Lucullus,
Cicero and Hadrian was an ideal that produced works which live for themselves and not as mere
lesson books of a vanished past. Perhaps it was fortunate that the ancient writings and
descriptions of the Greek and Roman villas and gardens were, as they still remain even now, so
obscure that the restorations on paper of various learned authorities are all wildly divergent.
Cicero’s and Pliny’s villas, for instance, as usually put forward in schemes of restoration, seem
outside the bounds of probability and practical building politics. This absence of direct
examples gave free play to a skilful adaptation of ideals to actual requirements and sites. The
Villa Madama at the Gate of Rome, an incompleted fragment of a great idea, was a forerunner
of much that was afterwards attempted and in part achieved.
The Villa Lante at Bagnaia (Chap. XIX), while a masterpiece of artistic gardening, is a
most modest and practicable creation for its special situation and purpose. It is difficult to
think of a more pleasant place in which to spend a glorious Italian afternoon. The water
rushing down the quaint troughs is checked by the scrolls of the masonry as in the
watercourses of nature. It is an artistic treatment of a naturally observed fact. The
music of the waters beneath the shade serves as a Lethe passage that blots out the glaring
memories of the dusty highway without. The balance of the broad and massive twin casinos
is the outcome of a fine masonic sense. They are veritable everlasting cubes of stone,
relieved by a fretted surface of pilaster treatment that has none of the worrying obligations of
an Order. The central fountain presents a modest appreciation of human form, true in scale
and vigorous in an attitude that stops short of the affectation of a studied pose. The island
•d'G
5.—AN ITALIAN FARMYARD.