La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio

      INTRODUCTION

      The idea of the villa has a persistent relevance. La Villa will be of interest to many who have been entrusted with the making of habitable spaces because, in his treatment of the idea of the villa, Bartolomeo Taegio articulated the purpose and meaningfulness that he associated with a particular kind of place. La Villa contains three elements that make it especially relevant for landscape architects. First, it reveals a Renaissance appreciation of land not only for its economic utility but also for its aesthetic value. Second, it is one of only two extant documents that articulate a theoretical formulation of the position of the garden on a hierarchical scale of landscape interventions in terms of the interaction of art and nature: “third nature.” Finally, it offers rare clues to the appearance of sixteenth-century Milanese gardens, and to their symbolic and metaphorical significance for their owners.

      When Taegio took up the idea of the villa as the topic for his dialogue, he brought into focus an idea that had been the subject of reflection by others before him, both in the Renaissance and in antiquity. La Villa appeared toward the end of a long tradition of villa literature in Italy, a verbal tradition that suffered a protracted and nearly complete interruption during the Middle Ages. This tradition originated in ancient Rome in the time of the Republic, and continued until the dissolution of the empire. Its recovery, which has been called a revival of villa literature, began in Florence in the fifteenth century and spread northward through the sixteenth century, with significant echoes well into the eighteenth century within and outside Italy.¹ The common theme of this body of literature, to which La Villa belongs, is the idea of the villa.

      Taegio’s subject is the idea of the villa, not the villa as a type. Typology is an analytical tool, useful for defining categories of objects and spaces, but not very helpful for understanding the richness of symbolic and metaphorical associations that works of architecture and landscape architecture can have for the people who use them. Typology relates to form-making more than it does to place making. Taegio never described or even mentioned an actual building in La Villa. Instead, he alluded to villas by rendering their gardens in language so poetical as to frustrate any attempt to reconstruct them. By virtually ignoring the typology of villas, Taegio’s treatise invites the reader to consider what is simultaneously both immaterial and essential about them.

      The form of the argument in La Villa, as in many “villa books” written before and after it, is dialogical. But unlike most sixteenth-century dialogues written in the Italian language it is not the kind scholars today call “documentary,” nor is it based on a Ciceronian model. Taegio’s dialogue does not include a scene-setting introduction, an essential feature of documentary dialogues; therefore it demonstrates what Cicero considered a “lack of decorum.” La Villa is properly called a “semifictional dialogue” because it is relatively “transparent”; that is, because readers can look through the dramatic conflict to the contest of ideas behind it, without having to interpret the text in light of their familiarity with the interlocutors’ respective points of view in life.² Sixteenth-century readers of La Villa might have known the true identities of the interlocutors and their real opinions, if they were personally acquainted with the author