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Garden Architecture and Function: Pliny and the Renaissance GardenArchitecture in the service of Christianity put on pagan garments and continued to achieve great things such as St. Peter's at Rome or St. Paul's at London; painting and sculpture commenced, even if they did not long continue, their new life under church patronage, but the Church made little use of gardens to promote its splendor. The garden grew up around the individual as a luxurious extension of the individual's private life; it was a purely secular achievement, although the Cardinals and Popes of the late Quattro cento in their capacity as temporal princes had a good deal to do with it. There were three threads that linked the gardens of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the gardens of the ancient world. The first thread was physical, the influence of the actual ruins amidst which men lived. The second was literary, the descriptions of ancient gardens, particularly in the letters of the younger Pliny. The third was traditional, through Byzantium and the Moslem kingdoms of Spain. In a continent of ruins the monastic orders often settled on Roman villa sites so that the traditional physical layout of a monastery was partly developed by force of what they found there. Cloisters, for example, are the Gothic shadows of the Roman epistyles, an enclosed rectangle surrounded by a covered walk or arcade. Fortresses as well as monasteries developed among the ruins. Barbarian magnates settled in the places which had been of sufficient charm and convenience to attract their original owners, and which still, however ruinous, provided shelter much superior to any that Vandal, Frank, or Goth had leisure, or probably ability, to build. Medieval gardens, both monastic and secular, such as they were (and they were not very much), were shaped by the roofless walls of an earlier time. The world in which the peculiar condition we call medievalism was established was deeply and extensively a Roman world, consequently the underlying, unseen influence of Rome was everywhere and no single aspect of Europe was, or indeed is, free from it; certainly gardens were not. The medieval gardens that grew up in these circumstances were functional rather than ornamental. Herbs were grown for healing and the pot, a small orchard provided fruit, flowers had sometimes culinary and medicinal uses, but were chiefly for decorating the table or the Church. |
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