in part to the fact that in the fifteenth century the “centralized territorial unit” of the duchy of Milan “realized the powerful concentration of force and [economic] means that was necessary to carry out great public works,” an artificially irrigated and intensively cultivated agricultural landscape extended throughout the plain of the Po River valley in Taegio’s lifetime.86 This landscape was characterized by canals, meadows, and fields planted primarily with either wheat or rice, a recent introduction that had already become an important export of the neighboring region of Piedmont by the sixteenth century.87 The boundaries of the fields in Lombardy were typically marked by embankments and irrigation ditches, along which rows of trees were planted. These plantations consisted of either hardwood species, such as elms, or mulberry trees, which had been introduced into the region with the silk industry in the first half of the sixteenth century. By the second half of the century, with the expansion of meadows and the regular practice of crop rotation based on recently founded modern theory, the old system of fallowing finally came to an end. The arrangement of fields in porche yielded to systematization a prese or a prace, with three or four times greater distance between drainage ditches. The greater length and width of the fields, and the permanent and extensive hydraulic arrangements, distinguished the piantata of Lombardy from the landscape of other parts of Italy. With these improvements the Po valley moved to the forefront of agricultural progress in Italy in the first decades of the sixteenth century.88
By the middle of the century, leadership in agricultural theory and technology had shifted from Tuscany and southern Italy to Milan and other northern cities, such as Padua and Venice, which took the place of Florence as the most important centers of publication of agronomic literature. This shift is apparent from the fact that, while earlier the science of agronomy had been dominated by Florentines such as Tanaglia and Alamanni, after 1550 we find at the forefront a Paduan (Clemente) and two Brescians (Falcone and Gallo).89
Gallo’s Le dieci giornate is especially illuminating in connection with La Villa because it reflects the landscape of the same region and the same time period as Taegio’s. The salient features of this landscape are the network of canals and ditches for irrigation, the systematization of the plain into a checkerboard of fields, and the cultivation of trees in rows along the boundaries of the fields. That Gallo approved of the works of systematization and irrigation is evident from the great pleasure he took
quando egli fa drizzare vie, quadrare campi, scavezzar tor nature, carettare cavedagne, ugualare prati, fare ponti, argini, canali, e chiaviche per adacquare.
(when someone straightens roads, squares fields, digs out ditches, hauls up embankments, levels meadows, builds bridges, banks, canals, and sluiceways for irrigation.)90
He advocated imposing an orthogonal grid on the land: fields
si quadrino di pezzo in pezzo non piu lunghi di quaranta cavezzi l’uno, ne manco di trenta, o di vinti cinque; facendo i fossi attorno, e piantando da ogni lato gli arbori.
(should be well squared one after the other, not more than forty cavecci [240 feet] long, nor less than twenty five or thirty, with ditches all around, and planted on all sides with trees.)91
Gallo took up the subject of the cultivation of mulberry trees in the section of his treatise on gardens, and in the third section he expounded on the planting of trees to support vines, stating his preference for poplars over the elms of which Tanaglia had sung. In La Villa (p. 112) Taegio described the delightful sight of “the leafy vine, when it reacquires the lost shoots and, marrying itself to the elms, clings to their branches.” The technique of “marrying” vines to trees in Lombardy is as ancient as the period of Etruscan colonization, and in the time of the late empire the Romans, who planted maples, poplars, and elms for the purpose, called this method of viniculture, in what was then known as Cisalpine Gaul, arbrustum gallicum.92 The practice of edging the fields with linear plantations dates from at least the last decade of the fifteenth century, when Tanaglia was writing.
The texts by Crescenzi, Tanaglia, Alamanni, and Gallo are vauluable not only as sources of technical information about how land in northern Italy had been cultivated for two centuries before La Villa was published but also as verbal impressions of the changing visual experience of agricultural landscapes in Italy over the same time period. Although he acknowledged Crescenzi, and exposed his familiarity with Tanaglia, Taegio was careful to distinguish his dialogue from the written works of both his predecessors and his contemporaries. La Villa is not an agricultural treatise, as its author made clear at the end of the dialogue where Vitauro decides “to defer the discussion of agriculture to a more convenient occasion.” There is not a single reference in La Villa to the two most important crops produced in the region at the time of its writing: rice and silk. Mulberry trees, the single food source of the silkworm caterpillar, are mentioned only as root stock for grafting oranges, pears, and other fruits. In fact gardening, rather than farming, is the primary focus of Taegio’s treatment of villa landscape.
The Horticultural Context
In the culture of the Italian Renaissance, gardening was understood to be a special case of the imitation of nature in art. A garden could represent, like a painting, the outward appearance of visual effects (and, unlike a painting, the auditory, olfactory, and tangible effects) observable in the world of landscapes both touched and untouched by human hands. In addition, it could represent the hidden cosmic order that was thought to produce those effects. Because the gardener’s palette was the living, growing, changing world of earth, water, and plants, his work could express the interaction of human culture and the natural world in a unique way. In the Italian Renaissance, the garden was considered by many to be the ideal place to reveal the supposed correspondence between the visible and the invisible in a divinely ordered and harmonious universe. This mimetic function distinguished Italian gardens of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from earlier ones. Claudia Lazzaro calls it “the essence of an Italian Renaissance garden.”93 Eugenio Battisti says that the Italian Renaissance garden was, among a great many other things, a “well-ordered model of the universe.”94 Lazzaro in particular has specified how gardens in Italy in the Renaissance were made to be representations of the larger world: microcosm imitated macrocosm through conventions of planting and ordering.95
The selection of plants in a garden enabled it to serve as a medium for preserving and transmitting knowledge of the divine order of the cosmos in two ways. First, a garden was supposed to represent nature in all its variety by containing a diverse collection of botanical species from all over the known world. In fact, actual gardens created in Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century approached this ideal. The first European example of what later became known as the “botanical garden” was founded at Pisa in 1543. The second, the Orto Botanico at Padua, was constructed two years later.96 Taegio mentioned the botanical gardens at both Pisa and Padua in La Villa (p. 105), where he compared the garden of Scipione Simonetta to them. The metaphor of the garden as a catalogue of plants was familiar in fifteenth-century Italy to, among others, Leon Battista Alberti.97 In book 3 of his I Libri della Famiglia, in a discussion modeled after Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Alberti said that the ideal setting in which to raise a family would be a villa where “tutti e’ frutti nobilissimi quali nascono per tutti e’ paesi” (all the finest fruits that come from the country) would be grown.98 Villa gardens in the state of Milan in the sixteenth century embodied this ideal by including a wide variety of specimens, some exotic. In his description of the garden of Scipione Simonetta in La Villa (p. 104), Taegio listed forty-eight “valuable, famous and exotic simples” from places as remote as Egypt and Calcutta.99 Among the exotics Taegio observed in Cesare Simonetta’s garden at Castellazzo were “the sweet-smelling, precious and rare shrubs, brought from parts of India.” The diversity of Cesare Simonetta’s collection of plants is indicated by the passage in which Taegio described a bosco of mixed deciduous
