The Great Period of the Grottoes: French Gardens

They were picturesque and uncomfortable spots. But strange things happened to them. They became more architectural than natural and these romantic caverns evolved into something very like clamp basements. In hot climates such a room, cool, dripping, shady, had charm, and in Imperial times were common. There were famous examples in sixteenth- century Italy, notably the Elephant Grotto at the Villa Madama designed by Raphael and the nymphaeum at the Villa Papa Giulio by Vasari. Although from the outside the seventeenth-century nymphaeum might make no attempt to disguise itself as anything but a normal man-made building, the inside appears always to have had about it something of the strangeness of the grottoes in which the Oreades dwelt. The ancients took the opportunity of introducing tufa, a sponge-like, irregularly shaped volcanic rock, admirably suited to add to the sense of dripping gloom that was required, but unpleasing when used for any other purpose, as it often has been. Grottoes no longer pretended to naturalness but to bizarrerie and that peculiar distortion or misinterpretation of the normal which was called `grotesque'. To the garden designer they became an escape valve through which his maddest fancies could burst out. The great period of the grotto in France was the reign of Louis's grandfather, Henri IV, who had been served by the most famous of grottoists, Bernard Palissy. Palissy was essentially a potter who built a grotto at Ecouen for the Constable de Montmorency. This was so successful that he established himself as the authority on grottoes and reduced the principles of his art to paper in a book, A True Recipe, by which all Frenchmen may learn to add to their Treasures. Palissy's main idea was that gardens should be square and, if the site allowed, should be cut into a slope so that at least one side of the garden had a natural terrace walk above it; where this was not possible by digging down, the same result was achieved by building `up', so that the garden gave the impression of a sunken parterre. Grottoes were then to be constructed in all four corners and in the centre. The centre was marked as the crossing point of paths at the end of which other grottoes should be made. Thus the classic type of Palissy garden was to contain nine grottoes. The eight grottoes in the boundary wall of the garden were to have semicircular amphitheatres about them, giving them, as it were, room to be separate creations.