Lakes in the Garden: French Gardens

An obscure plan which was never carried out can hardly be answerable for the later delight of the French in large sheets of water, but the example of Leonardo's patron, Francis I, at Fontainebleau was certainly infectious. Fontainebleau for some important years was the model for all France. The earliest influences from Italy arrived in two waves: the first commenced in 1495 and centered upon Amboise and Blois, the second some thirty years later, when Francis I imported a fresh group of Italian artists who concentrated on rebuilding and decorating Fontainebleau. The school of Amboise familiarized the French with Renaissance ornament; the school of Fontainebleau taught France the essential nature of Renaissance design. Although a vast amount of work was done at Fontainebleau, it did not result in a fully integrated Renaissance chateau and garden appearing there. Yet what it did was very influential. Here, as at many medieval water-defended castles, the immediate neighbourhood was a swampy marsh which Francois without difficulty turned into a large decorative lake. The royal garden set a fashion and other great lakes appeared in similar situations. This marsh at Fontainebleau is the ancestor at some remove of such quite different ornamental water as the Serpentine in Hyde Park and the lake at Blenheim. The difference between French and Italian gardens is due to the structure of the land as well as to, the political history of the two societies. If the restrictions of the Hundred Years' War imposed on the French a walled and moated life from which they at last expansively reacted, though still retaining vestigial shackles, it was the fact that France became a unified monarchy with its centre of gravity in the northern plain which made them react in the direction they did. The centre and north of France is flatter, colder and wetter than the vicinity of Rome, of Florence, or of Milan. Wealthy people in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as in Pliny's time, lived in the country only in the summer months. The summers being hot, villas were sited on the lower slopes of hills, where cool breezes and the sound of running water gave relief. We have seen how such situations were linked with distant views and terrace construction, and how Italian genius unified the garden by the architectural interrelation of terraces; but in France the king and his nobles lived at their chateaux the year round, changing perhaps from one to the other for the sake of variety, but rarely returning to a town house as the aristocracy of Rome or Florence would naturally do.