Italian Style Gardens : Garden Design Style

The first stage in this process, after the hesitant admission by Repton that geometry was sometimes permissible, was the appearance of straight lines in the vicinity of the house. But by the eighteen-thirties the old architectural style was sufficiently re-habilitated for the gardens at Wilton (where de Caus's early-seventeenth-century garden had yielded first to an enlargement in the Wise manner and then to landscaping) to be remade in what was allegedly the Italian fashion, using what little was left of the old statuary and architectural features. The author of this new Italian garden at Wilton was none other than that `ingenious Mr. Westmacott', now Sir Richard, whose statue of the Duke of Bedford ornamented Repton's garden in Russell Square. Architectural gardening returned in the Italian rather than in the Dutch or French form owing to the current influence of the Renaissance upon the minds of men of learning. Whereas the eighteenth century referred for authority to Vitruvius and to Palladio, the nineteenth century was dazzled by the reputation of the Medici. Painters, sculptors, and architects, long seated at the feet of the later Italians, were freed now from the magic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and looked back beyond Rome and Venice to Florence and the days before Raphaelitism. The romantic vision went overboard with the Poussins and Salvator Rosa and the bandits and the over-grown baroque gardens; in any event it did not answer to the needs of those whose citadel was threatened. Now that society had become a jungle, the `ideal world' of the garden needed again the easily recognizable discipline of man, it needed to speak of safety in every line. The Italian garden advocated by Price was the picturesque ruined garden of a painter; the Italian garden brought in by Westmacott was the new-pie orderly rectangularity of the earlier Renaissance.