LA VILLA
PENN STUDIES IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
John Dixon Hunt, Series Editor
This series is dedicated to the study and promotion of a wide variety of approaches to landscape architecture, with special emphasis on connections between theory and practice. It includes monographs on key topics in history and theory, descriptions of projects by both established and rising designers, translations of major foreign-language texts, anthologies of theoretical and historical writings on classic issues, and critical writing by members of the profession of landscape architecture.
The series was the recipient of the Award of Honor in Communications from the American Society of Landscape Architects, 2006.
LA VILLA
BARTOLOMEO TAEGIO
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY
THOMAS E. BECK
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taegio, Bartolomeo, fl. 1550.
[Villa. English & Italian]
La villa / Bartolomeo Taegio ; edited and translated by Thomas E. Beck. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (Penn studies in landscape architecture)
Italian text and English translation.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4317-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Landscape architecture—Italy—Early works to 1800.
2. Agriculture—Italy—Early works to 1800.
3. Country life—Italy—Early works to 1800.
4. Gardens—Italy—Design—Early works to 1800.
5. Country homes—Italy—Early works to 1800.
I. Beck, Thomas E. (Thomas Edward) II. Title.
III. Series: Penn studies in landscape architecture.
SB471.T34 2011
712.0945—dc22
2011002041
For Elizabeth
CONTENTS
Note on This Edition and Translation
NOTE ON THIS EDITION AND TRANSLATION
This English translation of La Villa is the first to be published. The text that follows is presented side by side with my transcription of Taegio’s original Italian text published in Milan by Francesco Moscheni in 1559, and is augmented with notes, referred to by Arabic numerals inserted into the translation. The plates that illustrated Moscheni’s edition appear here in the same sequence and relationship to the text as they did originally. Each page of the Italian text bears its original page number, and wherever there was an error or omission in the original numbering of pages, the correct number appears in brackets. References to specific pages of La Villa in the notes to the translation, and in the Introduction, are to the correct page numbers.
INTRODUCTION
The idea of the villa has a persistent relevance. La Villa will be of interest to many who have been entrusted with the making of habitable spaces because, in his treatment of the idea of the villa, Bartolomeo Taegio articulated the purpose and meaningfulness that he associated with a particular kind of place. La Villa contains three elements that make it especially relevant for landscape architects. First, it reveals a Renaissance appreciation of land not only for its economic utility but also for its aesthetic value. Second, it is one of only two extant documents that articulate a theoretical formulation of the position of the garden on a hierarchical scale of landscape interventions in terms of the interaction of art and nature: “third nature.” Finally, it offers rare clues to the appearance of sixteenth-century Milanese gardens, and to their symbolic and metaphorical significance for their owners.
When Taegio took up the idea of the villa as the topic for his dialogue, he brought into focus an idea that had been the subject of reflection by others before him, both in the Renaissance and in antiquity. La Villa appeared toward the end of a long tradition of villa literature in Italy, a verbal tradition that suffered a protracted and nearly complete interruption during the Middle Ages. This tradition originated in ancient Rome in the time of the Republic, and continued until the dissolution of the empire. Its recovery, which has been called a revival of villa literature, began in Florence in the fifteenth century and spread northward through the sixteenth century, with significant echoes well into the eighteenth century within and outside Italy.1 The common theme of this body of literature, to which La Villa belongs, is the idea of the villa.
Taegio’s subject is the idea of the villa, not the villa as a type. Typology is an analytical tool, useful for defining categories of objects and spaces, but not very helpful for understanding the richness of symbolic and metaphorical associations that works of architecture and landscape architecture can have for the people who use them. Typology relates to form-making more than it does to place making. Taegio never described or even mentioned an actual building in La Villa. Instead, he alluded to villas by rendering their gardens in language so poetical as to frustrate
