Garden - An Integral Part: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

Once the eye was encouraged to look outward rather than inward the basic square was broken up and those paths which led to views tended to lengthen and those which were only internal grew shorter. Yet the essential character of the Renaissance garden does not lie in any particular physical feature, but rather in the attitude to life of its creators. No longer was the garden an afterthought `fitted in' beside the building in any space that happened to be convenient; it was conceived as an integral part of the building and shared in creating the mood which the aware man required for his home . . . it was the outcome of reflection and calculation. So pure and personal and civilized an approach was not general and the period during which we can look for it is brief. Cosimo and his grandson, Lorenzo dei Medici, enjoyed their gardens in the company of their friends, men of learning and taste. In this sense, however the physical ingredients might differ, their gardens were not unlike the gardens of Cicero. But so urbane an attitude was brief and the exuberant vitality of the Renaissance burst through the discipline of good manners and sent the garden off in a very different direction. Alberti in his De Re Aedif catoria described what a garden should be and took for his model the gardens of the younger Pliny. It is not surprising that the urbanity of the cultivated Roman should have fascinated the newly awakened mind. Admiration for balanced cultivation was the hall-mark of the circle of Cosimo dei Medici. What Alberti wrote of the villa building applied equally to the garden: `The architect ought to keep his main lines in strict proportion and regularity in case the pleasing harmony of the whole be lost in the attraction of individual parts.' One should aim at well-mannered proportion. The atmosphere the builder of a house should seek to create around his building was something parallel to the personality of an ideal host, there should be an aura of good-humoured welcome. The house ought to be set on a slight eminence so that fine views are obtained from it, yet the approach should be easy by gently inclined planes so that there is no effort in the climb. Anything of a somber note is to be avoided; there is to be no self-conscious poetic melancholy such as we find later in the seventeenth century; dark shadows are to be used only as a background for light and not for the sake of their own gloom. So much for the main principles. The details fill in the picture according to taste. There are to be porticoes and pergolas and grottoes of tufa .l Decorative pots may be used for growing flowers and the owner's name should be written in box. Box or rosemary is also to be used for the edging of beds.