DOI chapter:
I. Florentine villas
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61216#0044
FLORENTINE VILLAS
fashions imported from England and France; and the
English who have colonized in such numbers the slopes
above the Arno have contributed not a little to the
destruction of the old gardens by introducing into their
horticultural plans two features entirely alien to the
Tuscan climate and soil, namely, lawns and deciduous
shade-trees.
Many indeed are the parterres and terraces which
have disappeared before the Britannic craving for a
lawn, many the olive-orchards and vineyards which
must have given way to the thinly dotted “specimen
trees ” so dear to the English landscape-gardener, who
is still, with rare exceptions, the slave of his famous
eighteenth-century predecessors, Repton and “ Capa-
bility Brown,” as the English architect is still the de-
scendant of Pugin and the Gothic revival. This
Anglicization of the Tuscan garden did not, of course,
come only from direct English influence. The jardin
anglais was fashionable in France when Marie Antoi-
nette laid out the Petit Trianon, and Herr Tuckermann,
in his book on Italian gardens, propounds a theory, for
which he gives no very clear reasons, to the effect that
the naturalistic school of gardening actually originated
in Italy, in the Borghese gardens in Rome, which he
supposes to have been laid out more or less in their
present form by Giovanni Fontana, as early as the first
quarter of the seventeenth century.
It is certain, at any rate, that the Florentines adopted
2 I
fashions imported from England and France; and the
English who have colonized in such numbers the slopes
above the Arno have contributed not a little to the
destruction of the old gardens by introducing into their
horticultural plans two features entirely alien to the
Tuscan climate and soil, namely, lawns and deciduous
shade-trees.
Many indeed are the parterres and terraces which
have disappeared before the Britannic craving for a
lawn, many the olive-orchards and vineyards which
must have given way to the thinly dotted “specimen
trees ” so dear to the English landscape-gardener, who
is still, with rare exceptions, the slave of his famous
eighteenth-century predecessors, Repton and “ Capa-
bility Brown,” as the English architect is still the de-
scendant of Pugin and the Gothic revival. This
Anglicization of the Tuscan garden did not, of course,
come only from direct English influence. The jardin
anglais was fashionable in France when Marie Antoi-
nette laid out the Petit Trianon, and Herr Tuckermann,
in his book on Italian gardens, propounds a theory, for
which he gives no very clear reasons, to the effect that
the naturalistic school of gardening actually originated
in Italy, in the Borghese gardens in Rome, which he
supposes to have been laid out more or less in their
present form by Giovanni Fontana, as early as the first
quarter of the seventeenth century.
It is certain, at any rate, that the Florentines adopted
2 I