DOI article:
Azzi Visentini, Margherita: Around the historiography of Italian gardens: Georgina Masson's contribution; [Rezension]
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14576#0032
26
M \R(,III RI I Л Л//.1 \ [SIN I INI
1. The Canopus at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli
of travellers, from the classic works of Michel de Montaigne, John Evelyn and Charles De Brosses (Masson
constantly refers to thèse invaluable works) to later systematic ones by authors such as the Americans Charles
Platt and Edith Wharton, and the Englishmen Inigo Triggs and Geoffrey Jellicoe. At the same time, however,
it is also the work of an extraordinary insider, given that our author lived in Italy uninterruptedly for 16 years
and her great familiarity with the sites she describes here reveals aspects usually overlooked by the occa-
sional or hasty visitor.
The interest of international historiography in Italian gardens, and particularly those of the late Renais-
sance and Baroque villas of Lazio and Tuscany, whose gardens constitute an essential and inévitable element
(it has long been said that a villa without a garden is not a villa), goes back to the early 19th century. This
interest was dictated by the intention to reintroduce a logical bond between buildings and gardens that the
landscape garden had broken, although some complexes - from Rome's Villa Madama to the Villa d'Esté in
Tivoli - continued to garner attention due to the fact that, over the years, they were always described in
guidebooks and reproduced in collections of views, just like the monuments of antiquity, and were thus vis-
ited and appreciated.
For example, in their high-flown publication in folio, Choix des plus célèbres maisons de campagne de
Rome et de ses environs (first printed in Paris in 1809 and reissued in a revised and expanded version in
1824), Napoleon's architects Charles Percier and Pierre-François Léonard Fontaine presented the surveys of
an array of aristocratie résidences around Rome. With respect the villas' actual condition, however, the authors
corrected and completed the illustrations for reasons that are unclear. In this work, they explained that "the
large gardens of Italy présent the variety and picturesqueness of modem gardens, but without any of their
childish simplicity. They are arranged regularly around the résidence and extend from it in an artistically
devised progression, so that they blend into their rural surroundings"1. The inspiration came from Ippolito
"[L]es jardins d'Italie présentent la variété et le pittoresque des jardins modernes, sans avoir rien de leur puérile simplicité.
Ils sont plantes régulièrement autour de l'habitation, et c'est toujours par une progression artistement ménagée qu'en s'éloignant
M \R(,III RI I Л Л//.1 \ [SIN I INI
1. The Canopus at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli
of travellers, from the classic works of Michel de Montaigne, John Evelyn and Charles De Brosses (Masson
constantly refers to thèse invaluable works) to later systematic ones by authors such as the Americans Charles
Platt and Edith Wharton, and the Englishmen Inigo Triggs and Geoffrey Jellicoe. At the same time, however,
it is also the work of an extraordinary insider, given that our author lived in Italy uninterruptedly for 16 years
and her great familiarity with the sites she describes here reveals aspects usually overlooked by the occa-
sional or hasty visitor.
The interest of international historiography in Italian gardens, and particularly those of the late Renais-
sance and Baroque villas of Lazio and Tuscany, whose gardens constitute an essential and inévitable element
(it has long been said that a villa without a garden is not a villa), goes back to the early 19th century. This
interest was dictated by the intention to reintroduce a logical bond between buildings and gardens that the
landscape garden had broken, although some complexes - from Rome's Villa Madama to the Villa d'Esté in
Tivoli - continued to garner attention due to the fact that, over the years, they were always described in
guidebooks and reproduced in collections of views, just like the monuments of antiquity, and were thus vis-
ited and appreciated.
For example, in their high-flown publication in folio, Choix des plus célèbres maisons de campagne de
Rome et de ses environs (first printed in Paris in 1809 and reissued in a revised and expanded version in
1824), Napoleon's architects Charles Percier and Pierre-François Léonard Fontaine presented the surveys of
an array of aristocratie résidences around Rome. With respect the villas' actual condition, however, the authors
corrected and completed the illustrations for reasons that are unclear. In this work, they explained that "the
large gardens of Italy présent the variety and picturesqueness of modem gardens, but without any of their
childish simplicity. They are arranged regularly around the résidence and extend from it in an artistically
devised progression, so that they blend into their rural surroundings"1. The inspiration came from Ippolito
"[L]es jardins d'Italie présentent la variété et le pittoresque des jardins modernes, sans avoir rien de leur puérile simplicité.
Ils sont plantes régulièrement autour de l'habitation, et c'est toujours par une progression artistement ménagée qu'en s'éloignant