Baroque Garden: French Gardens

A sunken garden surrounded by crypto-porticos as at Anet cannot spread; it can only multiply; but between the flanking avenues and groves of Monceaux-en-Brie we can discern the shadow of gardens to come. Monceaux is the herald of Vaux and Versailles; Anet is a refined echo of the past. In the meantime the Renaissance in Italy had itself undergone that change which based it no longer on Tuscany but on Rome; architecture, sculpture, painting, had become more magnificent; men no longer dallied with the ideas of Greece and Rome, but set up classical standards as authorities quite absolute; it was not enough to have read Pliny's letters : one must have studied Vitruvius. The world of art that came into being after Bramante and Michelangelo created St. Peter's was a public world not a private one; it was theatrical, emphatic, larger than life- size. Italian gardens of the earlier polite Tuscan Renaissance were to be found in France quite frequently; gardens of the later, more typical, Roman kind were rare. There were exceptions. The most notable was that planned by Henri IV at St. Germain-en-Laye, where, under the influence of another Italian queen, Maria dei Medici, the Italian garden designer Francini was employed. Because of the steepness of the site on the banks of the Seine, a fine architect's garden with six terraces arranged along a central axis, with balustracling and steps in Bramante's grand manner, was successfully laid out. But Maria dei Medici's own garden at the Luxembourg, for which she had proposed as a model the Boboli gardens, really failed to be conspicuously Italian because of the flatness of the site, although it did not succeed in being French. Italy was not the only foreign influence at work in France at this time, although it was by far the greatest. From 1622 till 1626 Rubens was decorating the Luxembourg, he had no direct influence on garden design but his presence shows how ready France was to look north as well as south. The baroque gained a greater footing in the Low Countries through Spain than it ever succeeded in doing in France, and although the gardens of the French seventeenth century have been called baroque they are so only in a limited sense. In a more true way the baroque garden was con-fined to Italy, to Spain, and to central Europe, where it reached its most extreme state. But because at the beginning of the seventeenth century France looked to the Netherlands as well as to Italy there was an impetus to the canal-like development of the moat, because the canal was the most conspicuous feature in the lowland landscape.