La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio
of the land and agricultural production. Roman treatises on the management of villas reflect practical concerns identical to those treated by Xenophon in Oeconomicus. Cato may have used Xenophon’s Oeconomicus as a source for his own treatise, De agri cultura. In Cicero’s De senectute, Cato, the chief interlocutor in the dialogue, was represented as familiar with Xenophon’s writings in general, which he called “multas ad res perutiles” (very instructive on many subjects), and with the Oeconomicus in particular.131 It is Cicero’s, not Cato’s, regard for Xenophon that is evident in this passage. Cicero had produced a Latin paraphrase of the Oeconomicus in 85 B.C., and it was Cicero’s version, rather than the Greek, that Varro, Columella, and Pliny the Elder later quoted. Cicero himself was the real speaker in all of his dialogues. He even warned his readers, in the introductory section of De senectute, not to expect to find in his representation the historical Cato, who “eruditius videbitur disputare quam consuevit ipse in suis libris” (will seem to argue more learnedly than he was in the habit of doing in his own books).132
The idea of the villa, especially as found in Cato and Varro, differs in several repects from the idea of the oikos found in Xenophon. By contrast to the Greek oikos, the Roman villa was always situated in a “countryside,” whether found or contrived. Cicero used the term villa to distinguish a house in the country from one in the city. While most ancient Roman villas had the agricultural capability to be self-sufficient, not all villas were associated with farming.133 The villas of the rich, especially those of the emperors, were not always literally located in the countryside. The most obvious example is the Domus Aurea of Nero, who built his villa where the Colosseum now stands. Though it was located in the heart of Rome, because it was provided with a parklike setting, an imitation of rural landscape, such a residence could still be called a villa. The first-century A.D. Latin historian Tacitus described Nero’s villa as a palace the marvels of which “were not so much customary and commonplace luxuries like gold and jewels, but lawns and lakes and faked rusticity—woods here, open spaces and views there.”134 Because the idea of the villa carries with it a notion of life in the country, a landscape setting that evokes or represents the countryside is essential to the Roman villa, while it is not essential to the Greek oichos.
A villa is distinguished from an oikos not only by its actual or represented situation but also by its purpose. The Roman villa was associated with the owner’s enjoyment and relaxation in a way that the Greek oikos was not. Evidence for the idea that the enjoyment of country life constituted a purpose for the villa is found in the works of Cato, Varro, and Pliny the Younger. The first indication in ancient literature that life in villa was associated with delight in the vita rustica appears as early as the first half of the second century B.C., in Cato’s De agri cultura. To Cato the villa represented primarily a sound investment, and only secondarily a source of pleasure because it served as a retreat. Varro’s view was more balanced. He said that “agricolae ad duas metas dirigere debent, ad utilitatem et voluptatem” (farmers ought to aim at two goals, profit and pleasure).135 For Pliny the Younger, the main purpose of the villa was pleasure, particularly the pleasure that comes from “dulce otium honestumque” (sweet and honorable leisure) devoted to literary studies.136 He called the retreat at Laurentum his “verum secretumque mouseion (true and private haunt of the muses), indicating that for him an important function of its setting was to inspire him to write.137 Pliny the Younger counted himself among the “scholasticis porro dominis” (scholars-turned-landlords) of his day, who not only enjoyed villa life but also found it necessary for cultivating a life of scholarship, just as Taegio would, nearly fifteen hundred years later.138
While life in villa was, from Cato’s day on, associated with enjoyment of the countryside, the “pleasure factor” became more remarkable at the height of the empire. The rustic farmhouses of Cato’s and Cicero’s days were overshadowed in later generations by the luxurious suburban villas described by Martial. This shift in the idea of the villa may have resulted in part from the increasing influence of Epicurean philosophy, which contrasted with the Stoicism of Cato. As the Roman Empire expanded, villas were increasingly devoted more to the owner’s pleasure than to farming. This development probably was stimulated by economic changes associated with the rise of slave-run estates known as latifundia. When Pliny the Elder wrote that “latifundia perdidere Italiam, iam vero et provincias” (large estates have been the ruin of Italy, and are now proving the ruin of the provinces too), he was not only putting latifundia at the center of debate about the aggregation of rural properties too large to farm according to the labor-intensive methods described by Cato and Varro, he was also signaling a change in the meaning and purpose of the villa, a new emphasis on its role as a locus amoenus, a place of sensual and intellectual pleasure.139
The Idea of the Villa in the Renaissance
As the Roman Empire disintegrated, the ideological as well as the practical need for villas waned. As urban populations shrank, much of the countryside of Italy was taken out of cultivation, and became economically and politically isolated from cities. Villas ceased to be centers of economic and administrative life, and many of their structures were either neglected or adapted for other uses. While people may have continued to live on country estates throughout the former empire, the construction of new villas and the production of writing on the idea of the villa both eventually stopped. The “process of disaggregation of the agricultural landscape and the separation of the city from the countryside” reached its peak between the eighth and eleventh centuries.140 By the thirteenth century, following an increase in population, the elaboration of the agricultural landscape began to develop again under new conditions. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Crescenzi wrote his Liber ruralium commodorum using Cato, Varro, and Columella as sources.141 Crescenzi’s agricultural treatise does not deal with the idea of the villa. Rather, “it gives a complete picture by a cultured observer, of the medieval garden at its most expansive, before the onset of the Renaissance.”142 The buildings Crescenzi described in his text are essentially fortified castles, which were built all over Italy before the fifteenth century.
Villas, as distinct from castles, farmhouses, and urban palazzi, began to be built again in Italy in the fifteenth century. The resurgence of Italian cities, which had begun in the thirteenth century, stimulated a demand for the agricultural produce that villas collected and distributed, and a related increase in the safety of the countryside led to positive reassessments of the value of country life relative to that of city life. Investment in agricultural real estate was a way for wealthy businessmen to buffer themselves financially from the shocks of fluctuating market economies in Florence in the middle of the fifteenth century, when banking and trading were more profitable than farming, as surely as it was in the Veneto in the late sixteenth century, in the context of the reformation of uncultivated land in the Terraferma, and in the state of Milan in Taegio’s day.
A change in attitude toward the contemplative life stimulated new interest in the idea of the villa, which in turn prompted a revival of villa literature and a renewal of villa construction, beginning in Florence in the fifteenth century. This revival progressed in two phases: the rebirth of the ancient tradition of the “villa dialogue,” in the first half of the century; and, after 1450, the appearance of the first treatises to include the idea of the villa as a topic. Renewed interest in the idea of the villa as a site of otium was preceeded by writing on the contemplative life. Belief in the superiority of the contemplative life over the active life is expressed in the writings of fifteenth-century humanists, such as Cristoforo Landino, who wrote Disputationes Camaldulenses in 1475, and Pico, who wrote Oratio de hominis dignitate in 1486; but its roots are found in the previous century, in the writings of Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio.
Petrarch based his argument for the superiority of the contemplative life over the active life, in De vita solitaria, on the authority of a variety of ancient writers, mostly Stoics, including Cicero, Scipio, and Seneca. The literary setting for Petrarch’s life of solitude was a locus amoenus in the countryside, “inter purpureos florum toros, autumno caducarum inter frondium … procul a malis, procul ab exemplis scelerum” (amid purple beds of flowers