Gardens in Italy: Pliny and the Renaissance Garden

Their gardens were for use by the owner and his friends and not for display.2 Florence was not long the leader of garden fashion. It was the policy of the great Lorenzo to ally Florence closely to Rome. Two future Medici Popes, Leo X and Clement VII, were brought up in his house, so that when he died in 1492 Rome with its potentialities of papal patronage became the new engine-room of the Renaissance. The spirit of Rome and the spirit of Florence were very different, and from this point when gardens in Italy begin to derive from the gardens of Rome they clearly change their nature. The Italian garden from 1503-1573, our second period, is an architect's garden. It was partly so because in the most influential garden at the beginning of the period the compulsion of site forced upon the designer an architectural solution. The special nature of the solution was caused by the conditions prevailing in Rome at the time. Briefly the important facts behind the creation of Bramante's Belvedere garden are these. The death of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI in 1503 brought to a head the conflict between the reforming element in the Roman Church and what for lack of a better label we shall call the worldly-traditional. For a moment with the election of Pius III it seemed that the reformers had won and that the Church was about to turn its back upon the New Learning and the ancient past. The victory was brief, too brief to have any influence on the course of the Renaissance, for Pius lived only a few months after his elevation. His successor Julius II, one of the greatest of Popes, was also, but in a different sense, a reformer. He set about the aggrandisement of Rome, pouring out upon the visible signs of the Church's greatness the wealth which Alexander had used for the establishment of a temporal kingdom for his son, Cesar. Thus the rebuilding of Rome was an occasion for display, an attempt to re-establish the authority of the papacy in the eyes of the world. The palaces and gardens which the cardinals built in and near the city in accordance with his orders reflected that intention. Against the background of this self-conscious reaching for grandeur and display Bramante undertook on the Pope's orders to link the Vatican with the Belvedere. The chief problem was that the Belvedere stands many feet higher than the Vatican; the secondary problem was that the Vatican was a splendid palace and the Belvedere a not very large villa.