Garden Paintings: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

Its chief charm was quiet, privacy, shade and the sound of running water; for ornament there were the statues and the fountains and the painted capitals of the pillared portico. The relative absence of plants, however, was due to necessity not choice. In many cases to make up for their absence and to give an impression of extent where it was lacking the walls of the porticoes, or of the terraces, or of the rooms which opened on to the peristyle, were painted with garden scenes in the manner which today we should call trompe l'oeil. According to Pliny the practice of painting these garden murals was invented by Tatius in the reign of Augustus, but it is far older than that for Solomon had something of the sort in his palace. It is from these paintings rather than from the reconstructed peristyles themselves that we get the clearest picture of what the wealthy Roman of the time considered a garden should be. The most consistent feature is the raised bed. It seems that most planting was done in beds held by retaining walls two and three feet high. The walls were coved at regular intervals to contain statues or basins of water. Beds can be built up for several reasons, to improve drainage, to keep roots clear of flooding, or, in a small way, to keep their edges from spilling over a path. Other advantages are to bring low-growing plants nearer to the eye, to enable one to tend them without stooping, or to give scope for trailing pendant plants over the edge. Probably the Roman practice grew out of the need for importing soil to a rocky site and is likely to have been done only on a limited scale. The advantage of these walls to the painter was considerable, for they provided a natural hard line where the architectural feature actually was and allowed the remainder of the wall painting, the trees and the flowers, to show beyond the wall without the problem of making the floor appear to continue in the horizontal plane on a vertical surface. Sometimes the walls seem to be only ornamental fences with simulated apertures in them which show that the ground-level behind differed not at all from the level in front, though whether we are to suppose ourselves fenced in or fenced out is not clear, for plants are painted on both sides of it.