the mighty oak, the tall ash, the knotty chestnut, the lofty pine, the shady beech, the delicate tamarisk, the incorruptible linden, the oriental palm, the mournful cypress, the very hard cornel, the humble willow, the very pleasant plane tree, and other very beautiful trees” (p. 67). Variety and rarity of plants were part of what made a garden an imitation of nature in Taegio’s day.
The second way in which planting contributed to the mimetic potential of an Italian Renaissance garden was through symbolism. As Lazzaro has said, “the symbolic significance of plants guided the selection of specimens in the garden.”100 While the key to much of this symbolism is now lost, it is clear that it was based on associations with moral as well as physical attributes of human beings. In the passage quoted above the oak is called “mighty,” the tamarisk “delicate,” the linden “incorruptible,” the cypress “mournful,” and the willow “humble.” These specimens not only represented the variety of plant species in the world; they also symbolized the range of human physical and psychological types, establishing a correspondence between the garden itself and the larger world, with the human being as the mediator, through conventions of planting.
The microcosm of the Italian Renaissance garden also imitated the macrocosm by means of various strategies for imposing order on the layout of plant materials. Four conventions of ordering gardens in sixteenth-century Italy are recorded in La Villa. The principal one is the subdivision of the garden into three parts corresponding to three categories of plants. The conventional arrangement of the parts of a villa garden placed beds of simples, herbs, or flowers near the house, an orchard of small fruit trees at an intermediate distance, and a bosco, or grove of larger trees, in the most remote part of the garden.101 The second ordering convention is partitioning the garden into regular units, most commonly squares, called compartimenti (quadri in La Villa). Intersecting linear elements such as paths, pergolas, and hedges were typically used to achieve compartmentalization. The third method is the use of geometric designs, epitomized by the quincunx, in the plan of the whole or parts of the garden. The fourth strategy is to fashion plant material into representations of the owner of the garden.102
The last three of these conventions were explained in Alberti’s treatise on architecture. In book 9 of De re aedificatoria, where he discussed garden design in the context of ornament appropriate for private dwellings, Alberti advised that “walks should be lined with evergreen plants” such as box, myrtle, and laurel. In the same passage he advocated the use of geometric designs, saying, “Circles, semicircles and other geometric shapes that are favored in the plans of buildings can be modeled out of laurel, citrus and juniper when their branches are bent back and intertwined.”103 He went on to express his partiality for the figure that was to become a favorite of sixteenth-century garden theorists: the quincunx.104 Alberti said that “rows of trees should be laid out in the form of the quincunx as the expression is, at equal intervals and at matching angles.” Finally, Alberti wrote approvingly of the ancient Roman practice of fashioning garden plants into representations of villa owners: “How charming was that custom of our ancestors whereby the gardeners would flatter their master by writing his name on the ground with box or fragrant herbs!”105 The systematic application of order and measure to garden design is a hallmark of the Renaissance, and a foreshadowing of it can be seen in Alberti’s architectural theory. Its justification is found in a desire, newly expressed in the fifteenth century, for order in the garden to reproduce not only the order proper to the design of buildings but also the cosmic order.
Four conventions of ordering are represented in La Villa. Taegio’s description of Cesare Simonetta’s villa estate (p. 65) reflects the organization of the garden in three parts. The first part of the “well-ordered” garden is composed of “squares of beautiful appearance, both distinct one from another, and equal … where the flowers and the herbs are obliged to dwell.” This is followed by an orchard, where “green and living lemons, oranges and citrons, which have their fruit hanging fresh, unripe and ripe, together with their flowers,” and finally by “a shady and delightful wood.”
The second method of establishing order in the garden is mentioned in several places in La Villa. Compartimento (compartmentalization) is the word Taegio used to describe the partitioning of the garden of Pietro Paolo Arrigono: “In the marvelous and well-contrived construction of a superb palace, as well as in the comparmentalization, in the order, in the charm, and in the loveliness of this very beautiful garden, he shows clearly the splendor and magnificence of his mind” (p. 101). Pergolas are among the means Taegio specified in La Villa (p. 66) for the compartmentalization of Cesare Simonetta’s garden: “The main walkway, which subdivides the place in a cross, is covered by a pergola of new vines, whose sides are nearly all covered with roses and jasmine, so that their big and pleasing fragrance makes the garden seem in truth like all the spiceries of the orient are there. And the alleys are well shaded from the sun, so that one can at all times go everywhere under fragrant and pleasant shade without being touched by its rays.” Taegio added that squares in the same garden were outlined with clipped hedges. “Beside the paths that wind along the aforementioned squares, the pale salvia grows, the green rosemary, the fragrant lavender, the pretty myrtle, the crinkled box, the tenacious mastic, the prickly juniper, the poetical bay laurel, the lowly strawberry bush, and many other similar shrubs, placed regularly and kept low by the masterful hand of the wise cultivator, enclose all the paths of the successful garden.”
The “masterful hand of the wise cultivator” would have been indispensible as well for the third convention of garden art represented in La Villa: the ordering of the plan of the garden with geometric designs such as the labyrinth and the quincunx. In La Villa (p. 108) Taegio called wonderful a “very dense grove of hazel made in the form of a labyrinth” that he saw in the garden of Pietro Novato. He also praised “the wonderful order, the gracefulness, and the careful distribution of the plants that were disposed in the form of a quincunx” in the proverbial garden of King Cyrus. Taegio was so enamored of the quincunx that he illustrated it in La Villa (p. 50).
Finally, Taegio referred to the fourth way of making a garden as an ordered microcosm: by shaping plants into representations of the owner. Rather than spell the owner’s name, as the ancients did in Alberti’s account, Cesare Simonetta’s gardeners reproduced his insignia on the ground with plants. As Taegio wrote in La Villa (p. 67), “the flowers and herbs not only delight the corporeal eyes of the spectators, but with very sweet food they nourish even those of the mind; for inside frames are seen very beautiful devices with very witty and ingenious mottos; and so those like these are composed in flowers and tiny herbs.”
By representing owners, and by means of geometry, compartmentalization, and tripartite organization, Italian Renaissance gardens in general, and the gardens Taegio described in particular, reflected the cosmic order in which human beings were thought to occupy a privileged place. Various adaptations of these conventions of ordering, in combination with those of planting, resulted in sixteenth-century Milanese gardens that functioned as imitations of nature on multiple levels. Horticultural conventions supported the representational quality of Italian Renaissance gardens. Agricultural theories and practices shaped, both literally and figuratively, the terrain in which Taegio’s villa owners lived.
The Idea of the Villa in Antiquity
The idea of the villa has a history. The word villa originated in the Latin language, and it was introduced into English, by way of Italian, in the seventeenth century.106 The word villa has a great richness of associations for readers of English today, as it did for Taegio and his sixteenth-century Italian readers, both because it was an adaptable term in ancient times and because its meaning developed from a long history of usage beginning in ancient times and continuing through the Renaissance to the present day.107 Latin authors used the term villa to denote either a building or a group of buildings, built on a piece of land that was cultivated to some extent, and that usually, though not always, was located outside, or at least on the outskirts of, the city. In papal documents
