three statements about the design of villas that refer to attributes of the idea of the villa found in ancient sources.158 In the first of these statements, Alberti reaffirmed the purpose of the villa implied by Martial and Pliny the Younger, saying that the kind of private house appropriate for a leading citizen of a republic is “a place to retreat with his household … well away from the common crowd,” and ideally “outside the city altogether.”159 In a second passage, Alberti, like Cato before him, located the villa between the works of man and the works of nature, where it should enjoy the best of both worlds, urban and rural, by being situatied “right in the countryside, at the foot of mountains,” and “at no great distance from the city.”160 Finally, Alberti defined the type of the suburban villa, intimated by Martial, as “that [which] combines the dignity of a city house with the delights of a villa.”161 Alberti called this type by that archaic term for a villa, hortus, which Martial had used. Its distinguishing feature is that it has a view of “meadows full of flowers, sunny lawns, cool and shady groves, limpid streams and pools.”162
With Villa, I Libri della Famiglia, and De re aedificatoria, Alberti made an enormous contribution to the revival of villa literature, by drawing from Hesiod, Cato, Martial, and Pliny the Younger to reconstruct the idea of the villa in a new context. Alberti’s work and the “villa dialogues” by Bruni, Bracciolini, and Palmieri incorporated notions of the essential nature and purpose of a villa, and thereby embodied the idea of the villa in the Renaissance.
The Philosophical Context of La Villa
Bartolomeo Taegio was not a philosopher, but he was well versed in the studia humanitatis of his day, and the list of his published writings indicates the wide scope of interests typical of the homo universalis. Taegio was a humanist and a poet-scholar, and as such he belonged to a class of intellectuals that was in decline in the sixteenth century, even as the influence of humanistic learning in Italy was reaching its zenith.163 The reasons for the decline are numerous and interrelated. After 1500, when printed editions of ancient texts, many accompanied by commentaries, became widespread, the humanists found themselves no longer “personally the possessors and diffusers of ancient culture.”164 Having been for several decades practically indispensable to patrons eager for new knowledge of antiquity, a growing number of classically trained scholars now had to compete for fewer and less profitable posts. At the same time, with the Counter-Reformation gaining momentum, humanists more and more frequently had to defend themselves against charges of atheism and heresy. Suspicions of apostasy had occaisionally interrupted the careers of classical scholars in Italy as early as the middle of the fifteenth century. In general it became increasingly difficult for scholars in Italy to publicly maintain unorthodox views after 1542 when Paul III, the pope who was to summon the Council of Trent three years later, revived the Inquisition by establishing “a new centralized organization, the Holy Office, with its headquarters in Rome, to supervise and coordinate the activities of inquisitorial tribunals elsewhere in Italy.”165
It is commonplace today to characterize the intellectual climate of the Renaissance in terms of a conflict between the two dominant systems of classical thought. A better sense of the kind of intellectual activity that produced La Villa is captured by the phrase some scholars have used to characterize the writings of the Florentine humanists: “an attempt at a syncretistic fusion of” Platonism and Aristotelianism.166 As a writer, Taegio depended on sources aligned with both traditions. Traces in La Villa of the influences of the Platonists Ficino, Pico, and Carolus Bovillus, as well as the Aristotelian Pietro Pomponazzi, are unmistakable.
The main premise of Taegio’s argument for the superiority of villa life is that the villa is the ideal setting for contemplation, which should be valued because its purpose is the pursuit of knowledge, or, in Taegio’s words, “il fin dell’anima” (the spirit’s goal). Taegio’s emphasis on the value of contemplation recalls the philosophical thinking of Marsilio Ficino, the leader of the Platonic Academy in Florence and “the most influential exponent of Platonism in Italy during the fifteenth century.”167 In his Theologica Platonica (1474) Ficino called contemplation the highest goal of human existence, and he argued that, because contemplation is never perfectly attained in this life, the human being must have an immortal soul.168 The human soul occupied the central position in Ficino’s hierarchy of possible modes of existence, an unbroken scale of mediation between the sensible and the intelligible—that is, in Platonic terms, between appearances (phenomena) and ideas (noumena).169 The theory of a graduated cosmos has its roots in the philosophy of that pseudonymous early sixth-century Neoplatonist author known to scholars in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as Dionysius the Areopagite, whose De divinis nominibus and De mystica theologica Ficino translated in 1492.170
Taegio referred to Marsilio Ficino only once in La Villa, and then it was to identify him as the owner of a villa that is called by the original form of Taegio’s family name, Montevecchio. In fact, Ficino is the first villa owner mentioned in La Villa. The second is Ficino’s pupil Pico della Mirandola, the basic outline of whose teaching was undoubtedly familiar to Taegio, as the following passage from La Villa (p. 4) clearly indicates. In response to a question from Partenio about what the object of the contemplation fostered by the solitude of the villa should be, Vitauro replies, “You ought to know that the elements have only being, the plants have being in common with the elements and life as well, the beasts have being in common with the elements, life in common with the plants, and sense as well. And men have being in common with the elements, life in common with the plants, sense in common with the beasts, and intellect in common with the angels. Thus the immortality of our souls is proven.”
Taegio’s articulation of the concept of a graduated cosmos represents his synthesis of the speculative scheme of Bovillus and the philosophy of Pico. In his De sapiente (1509) Bovillus postulated a universe consisting of four different existential levels: being, living, sensing, and reasoning. The lowest of these levels is shared by everything that is, including minerals, plants, beasts, and humankind. The highest level is reserved for human beings. The passage in which this system is postulated can be found at the beginning of first chapter of De sapiente:
Homini omni insunt a natura Substantia, Vita, Sensus et Ratio. Est etenim, vivit, sentit et intelligit omnis homo. Ast alii hominum duntaxat ut simplicis substantie, alii ut Substantie et Vite, ali ut Substantie, Vite et Sensus, alii denique Substantie, Vite, Sensus et Rationis actu atque operatione funguntur.
(All men by nature consist of Substance, Life, Sense and Reason. For indeed every man exists, lives, senses and understands. Some men in their actions and works function with substance only; others not only with substance but also with life; others not only with substance and life but also with sense; and still others not only with substance, life and sense but also with reason.)171
Bovillus’s system is ethical as well as metaphysical; it describes not only the gradations of existence, which are supposed to reveal the hidden order of the microcosm and the macrocosm, but also the path along which a human being can pass from acedia (spiritual inertia) to self-knowledge and knowledge of the cosmos, which Bovillus associated with virtus (virtue). Bovillus acknowledged only the influences of Ramon Lull and Nicholas of Cusa on the development of these ideas, but his intellectual debt to Pico, though unacknowledged, is amply evident.172
In Oratio de dignitate hominis, which was written probably in 1487 and published only after his death, Pico based his argument for the surpassing excellence of human nature on the human being’s God-given power to choose his place on the scale of created beings. Pico’s scale consists of four levels, like Bovillus’s, but it is marked by two important differences: it encompasses “ways of life” rather than modes of existence per se, omitting Bovillus’s first level; and it makes a distinction between two kinds of knowing. Pico’s levels are vegetative, sensual, rational and intellectual. The highest of these, which Pico associated with the contemplative
