La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio
as an apologia for his withdrawal from the urban world of activity, in his villetta at Vaucluse in 1346.144 He was one of the first to view his own day as the beginning of a revival, which he conceived in terms of a return to the study of classical Greek and Latin texts and a reformation of writing in Latin. But it was Boccaccio who answered Petrarch’s call for a return to the classics with a call of his own for a return to nature.145 Boccaccio’s Decameron is set during the Florentine plague of 1348, in a villa in the countryside midway “between sophisticated city life and the pastoral simplicity of the peasant’s world.” That villa is a locus amoenus, conceived as a place to which one can escape from the city without suffering the disorderliness of untamed wilderness.146
The revival of villa literature proper began with the rebirth of the “villa dialogue” in Florence in the century following Boccaccio’s. The earliest such work is the Dialogus ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, written by Lionardo Bruni in 1401. Two other villa dialogues, both from shortly before 1440, are Poggio Bracciolini’s De Nobilitate and Matteo Palmieri’s De Vita Civile. Not only is Palmieri’s dialogue, like Bruni’s and Bracciolini’s, set in a villa, it also focuses on villa life as a subject.147 Palmieri has one of the interlocutors say, “La Villa è tutta buona, fertile, copiosa, dilettevole, onesta, naturale e degna d’ogni uomo da bene e libero” (The villa is a perfect good: fertile, abundant, delightful, honorable, and worthy of every free man of good class.)148 When this statement is compared to comments on country life made in the previous century, the increase in value of the kind of retreat that a villa affords is evident. Paolo Da Certaldo, in his mid-fourteenth century Libro di buoni costumi, had written, ‘“La Villa fa buone bestie e cattivi uomini,’ e pero usala poco: sta a la città e favvi o arte o mercatantia, e capiterai bene” (“The villa makes good animals and bad men”; therefore make very little use of it. Stay in the city and foster your trade or business affairs, and you will prosper.)149
The second phase of the revival of villa literature began with the work of Leon Battista Alberti. Alberti was the first writer since antiquity known to have devoted a piece of writing exclusively to the idea of the villa. That piece is his short monograph, written probably around 1438, entitled simply Villa.150 Alberti also took up the villa as a topic in two other, better known, works: his dialogue on the family, I Libri della Famiglia, written in 1438; and his treatise on the art of building, De re aedificatoria, written after 1450.
The content of Alberti’s Villa is derived from the De agri cultura of Cato and the Works and Days of Hesiod, which also may have served as a model a century later for Taegio. Alberti could have been familiar with one of several manuscripts of Works and Days now in Florence, and Taegio with one now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.151 The moralizing tone of Alberti’s Villa can be traced to Cato and Hesiod. Alberti’s phrase “nulla più iusto a ricchire che la agricultura, e quelle ricchezze quali s’acumulano senza fraude sono uno bene divino” (there is no fairer way to get rich than agriculture, and riches that are acquired without fraud are a divine blessing),152 recalls the opening paragraph of Cato’s treatise, where he says that his ancestors praised farmers more than merchants,153 as well as Hesiod’s exhortation to Perses to do “the work which the gods ordained for men.”154 Alberti did not simply imitate his antique models, however; he built on them and went beyond them, reflecting on the purpose of a villa. The first line of Villa reads, “Compera La Villa per pascere la famiglia tua, non per darne diletto ad altri” (Buy a villa to nourish your family, not to give pleasure to others).155
Similar sentiments about the purpose of a villa can be found in the dialogue on the family Alberti wrote at about the same time as Villa. In I Libri della Famiglia he embellished his conception of the villa as a farm for the production of food and income for the family by adding, in a way that is reminiscent of Martial, that a villa is a refuge from the noise and dangers of city life. For Alberti, the villa not only offered “utile grandissimo, onestissimo e certissimo” (the greatest, the most honest, and the most certain profit); it was also a place “fuggire questi strepiti, questi tumulti, questa tempesta della terra” (to flee these uproars, these tumults, this tempest of the world) that is the city.156 This felt need to withdraw from the city, which in Alberti is mixed with a sense of the private realm as a training ground for public life, recalls Petrarch’s De vita solitaria.157
In De re aedificatoria Alberti made three statements about the design of villas that refer to attributes of the idea of the villa found in ancient sources.158 In the first of these statements, Alberti reaffirmed the purpose of the villa implied by Martial and Pliny the Younger, saying that the kind of private house appropriate for a leading citizen of a republic is “a place to retreat with his household … well away from the common crowd,” and ideally “outside the city altogether.”159 In a second passage, Alberti, like Cato before him, located the villa between the works of man and the works of nature, where it should enjoy the best of both worlds, urban and rural, by being situatied “right in the countryside, at the foot of mountains,” and “at no great distance from the city.”160 Finally, Alberti defined the type of the suburban villa, intimated by Martial, as “that [which] combines the dignity of a city house with the delights of a villa.”161 Alberti called this type by that archaic term for a villa, hortus, which Martial had used. Its distinguishing feature is that it has a view of “meadows full of flowers, sunny lawns, cool and shady groves, limpid streams and pools.”162
With Villa, I Libri della Famiglia, and De re aedificatoria, Alberti made an enormous contribution to the revival of villa literature, by drawing from Hesiod, Cato, Martial, and Pliny the Younger to reconstruct the idea of the villa in a new context. Alberti’s work and the “villa dialogues” by Bruni, Bracciolini, and Palmieri incorporated notions of the essential nature and purpose of a villa, and thereby embodied the idea of the villa in the Renaissance.
The Philosophical Context of La Villa
Bartolomeo Taegio was not a philosopher, but he was well versed in the studia humanitatis of his day, and the list of his published writings indicates the wide scope of interests typical of the homo universalis. Taegio was a humanist and a poet-scholar, and as such he belonged to a class of intellectuals that was in decline in the sixteenth century, even as the influence of humanistic learning in Italy was reaching its zenith.163 The reasons for the decline are numerous and interrelated. After 1500, when printed editions of ancient texts, many accompanied by commentaries, became widespread, the humanists found themselves no longer “personally the possessors and diffusers of ancient culture.”164 Having been for several decades practically indispensable to patrons eager for new knowledge of antiquity, a growing number of classically trained scholars now had to compete for fewer and less profitable posts. At the same time, with the Counter-Reformation gaining momentum, humanists more and more frequently had to defend themselves against charges of atheism and heresy. Suspicions of apostasy had occaisionally interrupted the careers of classical scholars in Italy as early as the middle of the fifteenth century. In general it became increasingly difficult for scholars in Italy to publicly maintain unorthodox views after 1542 when Paul III, the pope who was to summon the Council of Trent three years later, revived the Inquisition by establishing “a new centralized organization, the Holy Office, with its headquarters in Rome, to supervise and coordinate the activities of inquisitorial tribunals elsewhere in Italy.”165
It is commonplace today to characterize the intellectual climate of the Renaissance in terms of a conflict between the two dominant systems of classical thought. A better sense of the kind of intellectual activity that produced La Villa is captured by the phrase some scholars have used to characterize the writings of the Florentine humanists: “an attempt at a syncretistic fusion of” Platonism and Aristotelianism.166 As a writer, Taegio depended on sources aligned with both traditions. Traces in La Villa of the influences of the Platonists Ficino, Pico, and Carolus Bovillus, as well as the Aristotelian Pietro Pomponazzi, are unmistakable.
The main premise of Taegio’s argument for the