sono senza fine gl’ingeniosi innesti, che con si gran meraviglia al mondo mostrano, quanto sia l’industria d’un accorto giardiniero, che incorporando l’arte con la natura fà, che d’amendue ne riesce una terza natura, la qual causa, che i frutti sieno quivi piu saporiti, che altrove.
(Here are without end the ingenious grafts that show with great wonder to the world the industry of a wise gardener, who by incorporating art with nature brings forth from both a third nature, which causes the fruits to be more flavorful here than elsewhere.)
—BARTOLOMEO TAEGIO
Within two decades and two hundred miles of each other, around the middle of the sixteenth century in northern Italy, Jacopo Bonfadio, in a letter written from Gazano, near Salò on the western shore of Lake Garda, in August of 1541, and Bartolomeo Taegio, on page 66 of La Villa, published in Milan in 1559, penned these strikingly similar characterizations of the interaction between art and nature in horticulture. Bonfadio and Taegio applied the same term, terza natura, to gardens, in the context of statements about human industry and fruits “more flavorful here than elsewhere.”
Both Bonfadio’s letter and Taegio’s dialogue are replete with allusions to ancient literary sources. John Dixon Hunt has pointed out that Bonfadio was imitating the rhetorical style of Pliny the Younger’s letter to Domitius Apollinaris, in which he described his Tuscan villa, and that the intentionality of this conceit is apparent from the fact that the name of Bonfadio’s correspondent was Plinio Tomacelli.222 In addition to this allusion, Bonfadio’s letter contains at least two specific literary references: one to Lucretius’s De rerum natura, where Flora is said to scatter flowers in springtime, in a passage to which Taegio also alluded in La Villa (p. 101), and another to Virgil’s Georgics.223 In the use of the phrase terza natura as well as in the placement of that phrase in context, Taegio’s articulation of an idea about the relationship between art and nature closely resembles Bonfadio’s earlier formulation, and until now its origins have not been elucidated. The most convincing of the possible explanations for the resemblance between the two characterizations is that Bonfadio’s letter was Taegio’s source, and the available facts support this hypothesis.
A careful comparison of the two texts suggests that Taegio had read Bonfadio’s letter to Plinio Tomacelli and derived his statement about “third nature” directly from it. There is another passage in La Villa, besides the one on third nature, that is virtually identical to one in Bonfadio’s letter. On page 63, where Taegio described the villa of Francesco Taverna, he wrote, “Such is the pleasantness of this very pleasant hill, that to those who come here it seems that they come to a place like the one they say our souls inhabit when, having departed from this life as from a tempestuous sea, they arrive where, rested, never again to reach beyond their desires, content, they enjoy an infinite tranquillity.” Bonfadio described the gardens in his region to his correspondent in very nearly the same words:
Voglio perder la vita, se giunto che sarete qua non vi parrà di esser venuto in luoco simile a quello ove dicono abitar gli animi nostri, quando partiti di qua come d’un tenebroso e tempestoso mare, arrivano in certe parti dove fermati, per non sapere che desiderar più oltre, contenti in sempiterna luce si godono una tranquillità infinita.
(I would wager my life that it would seem to you that you have come to a place like the one they say our souls inhabit when, having departed from this life as from a gloomy and tempestuous sea, they arrive where, rested, not knowing what more could be desired, content in eternal light, they enjoy an infinite tranquillity.)224
It is possible that in these comparisons of gardens to “a place like the one they say our souls inhabit” Bonfadio and Taegio were quoting the same source independently of each other. Bonfadio never identified any of the literary works to which he alluded in his letter, and Taegio did not always cite his sources. However, no earlier antecedent for this phrase has yet been found. Furthermore, the contexts, as well as the phrasing, of these passages are so similar that it seems highly unlikely that Taegio could have created virtually the same juxtaposition of words and literary setting as Bonfadio without having seen the letter. Finally, remembering the close similarity with respect to both phrasing and context of the passages on third nature, a double coincidence is even less plausible.
A body of evidence from outside the letter to Plinio Tomacelli bolsters the argument that Taegio relied on Bonfadio, by showing that he had ample opportunity to see the letter. Four of Bonfadio’s letters, including the one addressed to Plinio Tomacelli, were published in Venice by Aldus Manutius five times before the publication of La Villa, first in 1545 and then again in 1547, 1548, 1553, and 1556.225 The modern-day editor of Bonfadio’s letters has brought forward strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that when Bonfadio was in Rome in 1538, in the service of Cardinal Girolamo Ghinucci, he joined a literary society not unlike Bartolomeo Taegio’s Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna, called the the Accademia della Virtù, which had been founded by Claudio Tolomei, a humanist from Siena, in 1530.226 Bonfadio and Tolomei probably knew each other, and they certainly had mutual acquaintances. One of Bonfadio’s letters is addressed to Francesco della Torre, with whom Tolomei also corresponded.227 The addressee of another one of Bonfadio’s letters, Francesco Molza, and the addressor of a letter received by him, Annibal Carro, were members of Tolomei’s Academy of Virtue.228 The collected letters of Bonfadio also reveal that he and Tolomei had at least three acquaintances in common with Taegio. The names of Francesco della Torre and Annibal Carro appear in Taegio’s list of villa owners, and one of the letters received by Bonfadio is signed by Alessandro Piccolomini, whose garden in Siena Taegio praised.229
Claudio Tolomei’s own writings contain a suggestion that he was familiar with Bonfadio’s articulation of the idea of third nature, and this fact opens up the possibility that some of their mutual acquaintances, such as Taegio, might have been familiar with it as well. In a letter to Giambattista Grimaldi, dated July 26, 1543, Tolomei described a grotto in a garden near the Trevi Fountain in Rome, which was fed by the newly restored Acqua Vergine, where, he said, “mescolando l’arte con la natura, non si sa discernere s’elle è opera di questo o di quella; anzi or altrui pare un naturale artifizio ora una artifiziosa natura” (mingling art with nature, one does not know how to discern whether it is a work of the former or the latter; on the contrary, now it seems to be a natural artifice, then an artificial nature.)230 While the phrase terza natura does not appear in Tolomei’s letter, the idea conveyed by this excerpt is unmistakably the same. Tolomei had the opportunity to see Bonfadio’s letter, and he may have been a crucial link between Bonfadio and Taegio.
It is not impossible that both Taegio and Bonfadio derived their statements about third nature independently from earlier sources. However, it is much more likely that Bonfadio’s letter was Taegio’s source for both the phrase terza natura and the idea of third nature. It remains to be seen if Bonfadio’s use of the phrase terza natura was in turn dependent on earlier sources.
The question of whether phrases similar to terza natura, and anticipations of the idea, existed in the literature with which Bonfadio and Taegio were familiar is complicated by the fact that the word natura admits of some ambiguity. Natura comes from natus, the past participle of the Latin verb nascor, nasci, which means “to be born,” and it is the counterpart of the Greek word physis. Like physis, natura has, in Italian as well as in Latin, two different senses, although in ancient Latin texts these two senses are not always distinct. In one sense, natura is used, in Italian and Latin literature, to refer to the innate qualities of people and things. In the other sense, it is used in both languages to signify the order and constitution of the world.
It is in the latter sense that Bonfadio and Taegio employed natura in the phrase terza natura. The usage of the phrase by these authors is marked by three characteristics that are important to delineate for the purpose
