Renaissance and Humanist Concepts as Employed in Italian Renaissance Gardens

Julián Huertas

27 February 2015

Professor Musgrave

Garden Art in European History

Blog Post Three:

Explain, with examples, the ways in which the Renaissance spirit of a rediscovery of the classics and the new Humanist ways of thinking were expressed in the design and content of the Italian Renaissance garden.

            The Renaissance spirit of rediscovery of the classics and new Humanist ways of thinking expressed itself in garden design, form, and content of Italian Renaissance gardens can be expressed with two primary examples.  These are the gardens of the Villa Medici in Fiesole, Italy and of Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy.  The Humanist ways of thinking led to the view of humans as rational and sentient beings. Individuals had the ability to decide and think for the self instead of God having absolute control. Religion was still a very important part of life, but the concepts and philosophy were on the values and importance of human matters. The additional interest in the classics led to a focus on mathematical precision. This demonstrated the ability of man to use the natural order of nature and improve upon it.

            The  gardens at Villa Medici are constructed using ratios and proportions for the design and form of the garden. The west front of the garden is open, which provides an open view of the Arno Valley and city of Florence. The lower garden is cut into the hillside so that it does detract from this view. These types of concepts echoed those of Leon Battista Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria. He said a villa should be a place to be looked at and looked from. The villa should be set above the garden, gazing down into its own gardens and overlooking its countryside. This created relationship between the garden and architecture took the garden outside of the building. This is quite unlike the Mediæval cloisters, in which the garden was secluded within the Abbey grounds. Thus, using classical ratios and proportions and Alberti’s theories, humans were able to tame and manipulate nature to create new forms of garden design.

            The gardens at Villa d’Este are similar to those of Villa Medici in that they reference classical ratios and proportions.  The axial alignment of the garden creates symmetry and the terraces create open spaces through which to circulate and navigate through the garden. There are ornate water channels, fountains, plants, and sculpture. Water, plants, and stone are all raw materials of nature, and, thus, these decorations reference the human ability to improving upon nature to create a complex, organized garden design.

            These Renaissance spirit and Humanist ways of thinking questions how garden spaces are contemporarily designed and manipulated to this day. A theme popular in modern design is that of “vertical gardens” or “living gardens.” These types of gardens are mounted on walls in varying sizes. Hoses generally run behind the plants and easily allow for watering without being seen. This concept illustrates to an extreme the ability of humans to alter nature’s raw materials and improve upon garden design.

Here is a link for how vertical gardens work, their benefits and are incorporate into small, compact spaces.

Picture of Villa Medici’s gardens. Note the proportions and the view of the garden below and view of the valley and city.

Picture of Villa d’Este's garden. Note the ornate water channels, fountains, plants, and sculpture.

 

Picture of a massive “vertical garden.” This is an extreme, impressive example of altering raw natural materials and placing them in an urban setting.

The Role of the Garden in Celebrating Religion in Roman, Mediæval, and Muslim Cultures

Julián Huertas

19 February 2015

Professor Musgrave

Garden Art in European History

Blog Post Two:

In the three cultures we have so far studied – Roman, Mediæval and Muslim – how did/does the garden play a role in their respective religions?

            In Roman, Mediæval, and Muslim cultures, the garden has played a role in representing and celebrating the respective religions in similar and different ways. In this blog post, I will explore those similarities and differences.

            The garden in Roman culture served as a form of religious expression and incorporating of deities into human activities. Within Roman peristyle gardens, many of the fountains and statuary are of deities. Specific deities found in Roman gods would be Pomona and Venus. There were additionally various nymphaea, which were shrines to nymphs of the gardens.  Fresco paintings on the side-walls of gardens additionally showed deities relaxing in or performing activities in the gardens themselves.

            Mediæval gardens that served religion were primarily monastic, as plebian gardens were utilitarian and royal/noble gardens were primarily orchards, parks, and/or herbers. Many of the mediæval gardens were cloisters, which heavily symbolized the purity of the Garden of Eden.  Many of the plants within these gardens symbolized aspects of the Virgin Mary. The white lily represented the virgin’s purity and the red rose symbolized the virgin’s birth of Christ. A smaller garden separate from the cloisters but within the abbey grounds was the hortus conclusus (“enclosed garden”). This was heavily sacred and usually locked. It was a quiet, private spot that was heavily ornamented.  These pure, sacred aspects of the garden appealed to the idea of the cloisters as the Garden of Eden.

            Muslim gardens represented religion as they directly referenced Islam as a faith. In its text, Qur’an gives a blueprint of the design of a garden. Specifically, there are over one-hundred and twenty references in the Qur’an to the jannah al-firdaws (“gardens of paradise”). In this sense, the garden should be like the “paradise” like that of the afterlife.  Specifically in regard to design, there should be a fourfold design (chahar bagh), water channels, a qanat irrigation system, central pool, and plane trees (chenar).  The four rills, small narrow water courses, represented the four rivers of life. It stimulated an individual’s own spiritual reflection in relation to self and to god. In this way, the Islamic garden should be an earthly and spiritual paradise.

All three religions similarly have gardens as central components to each respective faith. The differences, however, are that the Roman garden was less symbolic and referenced the many deities, whereas the mediæval gardens were heavily symbolic. Islamic gardens differed in that the sacred text of the Qur’an gave a blueprint for the design yet was similar in that it represented a spiritual paradise.

Here is a for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blog. Specifically, this link talks about the plant symbolism within Mediæval horti conclusi.

Roman garden fresco of a deity within a garden

A hortus conclusus in the Little Sparta garden in Dunsyre, Scotland

The charah bagh garden designed from the text of the Qur’an in an Islamic garden

The Garden as A Form of Representing Socioeconomic Status

Julian Huertas

5 February 2015

Professor Musgrave

Garden Art in European History

Blog Post One:

Why Do You Think Gardens Have Always Been an Intrinsic Part of European Culture?

            There are several reasons why gardens may have always been an intrinsic part of European culture. These reasons may range from the garden being a form of romantic escape, pleasure, consolation, morality, or hunting grounds.  Other reasons may be the garden as acting as a way of boasting of socioeconomic status or as way of practically growing fruits and cultivating grapes for wine. For this blog post, however, I believe that gardens have always been an intrinsic part of European culture primarily because it is a way of representing socioeconomic status.

            One of the most famous examples of this type of garden is that of Louis XIV at the Palace of Versaille, created at the end of the 17^th century. Heavily manicured with trees, shrubs, fountains, and a central canal, the garden is one of the most heavily ornamented in the world. It is symmetrical due to its central axis, which is more than a mile-long. The garden corresponds to the heavily ornamented Palace of Versailles and is a clear statement of wealth and opulence for France.

            A secondary example of the garden as a manifestation of wealthy socioeconomic status is that of the peristyle garden in Roman villas. Wealthy Roman families would have this garden in the interior courtyard of the house. Peristyle gardens were formal, another term for symmetrical, and typically had frescoes on the walls, herms, topiaries, fountains, and sculpture within the garden. They were used for relaxing or hosting social events.  Many lower and middle-class Roman families did not have peristyle gardens.  Naturally, the larger the peristyle for upper-class families revealed the more wealth a family had. The House of the Vettii in Pompeii exemplifies a wealthy family with a peristyle garden. This garden had topiary, flowers, fountains, shrubs, sculpture, frescoes, and a walkway for the family in the mid-First century BCE.  

            In modern society, gardens can demonstrate the socioeconomic status of a family but not entirely in the same way as in the past. In the United States wealthier suburban communities have more room for lawns and yards in which gardens can be cultivated and designed. Communal gardens are becoming increasingly popular in both suburbs and cities. These gardens are not so much to represent socioeconomic status, but are contemporarily being used as teaching tools.  These gardens educate about the health benefits of plants, develop the idea of cultivating and caring for one’s own garden, and keep urban children from participating in more dangerous activities.  I have pasted a link below with a list of urban garden projects in New York City. As the modern trend of people increasingly moving into cities continues, the idea of the garden as a form of socioeconomic status representation may or may not remain. This leads to the question: could the concept of a garden as largely a representation of socioeconomic shift to the concept of a garden largely being used to educate?

Here is a link with several urban garden projects in New York City: http://ecowatch.com/2013/11/08/urban-farming-projects-new-york-city/

The Gardens of Versailles

Peristyle garden at a house in Pompeii

A group of children working together on an urban garden