La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio
the signs of the heavens, as he demonstrates the delightfulness and the usefulness of the kind of knowledge peasants possess. This beautiful and practical knowledge includes horticulture, which Vitauro discusses, and agriculture, which he declines to treat. In its final section, which is based on a conversation between Socrates and Ischomachus on the training of a villa steward in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, La Villa, having succeeded only partially as an imitation of a live conversation, becomes little more than an imitation of one of the literary dialogues that served as its models.
Taegio interpreted portions of the Oeconomicus, as well as Horace’s Epodes and Satires, to serve the purposes of his argument. In several instances Taegio used the word “villa” in his paraphrases where terms that cannot be translated literally as “villa” appeared in the classical texts he was citing. For example, where Vitauro paraphrases Horace’s Epodes 2.1–38, the Latin phrase “paterna rura” (ancestral farm) is interpreted as “villa.” Similarly, Vitauro uses the expression “topo del la villa” (mouse of the villa) in place of “rusticus mus” (country mouse) in his paraphrase of the tale of the country mouse and the city mouse from Horace’s Satires 2.6.78–117. Where he paraphrases Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Vitauro calls the “work of supervision” the “cose della villa” (affairs of the villa), and he uses “villa” in place of both “kepos” (farm) and “ktema” (piece of property). Taegio also exercised freedom of interpretation where he paraphrased the description of agriculture in Oeconomicus 19.17. The practice that Xenophon called “philanthropos” (humane) becomes, in Vitauro’s words, a “scienza magnanima e generosa” (magnanimous and generous science); in effect, Taegio elevated what is essentially a humble activity to fit his argument that farming is a suitable occupation for an aristocrat.
The Origins of “Third Nature”
E i frutti sono tutti qui più saporiti che altrove, e tutte le cose che nascono dalla terra migliori. Per li giardini che qui sono e quei delle Esperide e quelli d’Alcinoo e d’Adoni, la industria de’ paesani ha fatto tanto, che la natura incorporata con l’arte è fatta artifice, e connaturale de l’arte, e d’amendue è fatta una terza natura, a cui non sarei dar nome.
(And the fruits are more flavorful here than elsewhere, and all things born of the earth are better. As for the gardens that are in this region, and those of the Hesperides and those of Alcinoüs and Adonis, the industry of the peasants has been such that nature incorporated with art is made an artificer, and the connatural of art; and from both of them is made a third nature, which I would not know how to name.)
—JACOPO BONFADIO221
Quivi sono senza fine gl’ingeniosi innesti, che con si gran meraviglia al mondo mostrano, quanto sia l’industria d’un accorto giardiniero, che incorporando l’arte con la natura fà, che d’amendue ne riesce una terza natura, la qual causa, che i frutti sieno quivi piu saporiti, che altrove.
(Here are without end the ingenious grafts that show with great wonder to the world the industry of a wise gardener, who by incorporating art with nature brings forth from both a third nature, which causes the fruits to be more flavorful here than elsewhere.)
—BARTOLOMEO TAEGIO
Within two decades and two hundred miles of each other, around the middle of the sixteenth century in northern Italy, Jacopo Bonfadio, in a letter written from Gazano, near Salò on the western shore of Lake Garda, in August of 1541, and Bartolomeo Taegio, on page 66 of La Villa, published in Milan in 1559, penned these strikingly similar characterizations of the interaction between art and nature in horticulture. Bonfadio and Taegio applied the same term, terza natura, to gardens, in the context of statements about human industry and fruits “more flavorful here than elsewhere.”
Both Bonfadio’s letter and Taegio’s dialogue are replete with allusions to ancient literary sources. John Dixon Hunt has pointed out that Bonfadio was imitating the rhetorical style of Pliny the Younger’s letter to Domitius Apollinaris, in which he described his Tuscan villa, and that the intentionality of this conceit is apparent from the fact that the name of Bonfadio’s correspondent was Plinio Tomacelli.222 In addition to this allusion, Bonfadio’s letter contains at least two specific literary references: one to Lucretius’s De rerum natura, where Flora is said to scatter flowers in springtime, in a passage to which Taegio also alluded in La Villa (p. 101), and another to Virgil’s Georgics.223 In the use of the phrase terza natura as well as in the placement of that phrase in context, Taegio’s articulation of an idea about the relationship between art and nature closely resembles Bonfadio’s earlier formulation, and until now its origins have not been elucidated. The most convincing of the possible explanations for the resemblance between the two characterizations is that Bonfadio’s letter was Taegio’s source, and the available facts support this hypothesis.
A careful comparison of the two texts suggests that Taegio had read Bonfadio’s letter to Plinio Tomacelli and derived his statement about “third nature” directly from it. There is another passage in La Villa, besides the one on third nature, that is virtually identical to one in Bonfadio’s letter. On page 63, where Taegio described the villa of Francesco Taverna, he wrote, “Such is the pleasantness of this very pleasant hill, that to those who come here it seems that they come to a place like the one they say our souls inhabit when, having departed from this life as from a tempestuous sea, they arrive where, rested, never again to reach beyond their desires, content, they enjoy an infinite tranquillity.” Bonfadio described the gardens in his region to his correspondent in very nearly the same words:
Voglio perder la vita, se giunto che sarete qua non vi parrà di esser venuto in luoco simile a quello ove dicono abitar gli animi nostri, quando partiti di qua come d’un tenebroso e tempestoso mare, arrivano in certe parti dove fermati, per non sapere che desiderar più oltre, contenti in sempiterna luce si godono una tranquillità infinita.
(I would wager my life that it would seem to you that you have come to a place like the one they say our souls inhabit when, having departed from this life as from a gloomy and tempestuous sea, they arrive where, rested, not knowing what more could be desired, content in eternal light, they enjoy an infinite tranquillity.)224
It is possible that in these comparisons of gardens to “a place like the one they say our souls inhabit” Bonfadio and Taegio were quoting the same source independently of each other. Bonfadio never identified any of the literary works to which he alluded in his letter, and Taegio did not always cite his sources. However, no earlier antecedent for this phrase has yet been found. Furthermore, the contexts, as well as the phrasing, of these passages are so similar that it seems highly unlikely that Taegio could have created virtually the same juxtaposition of words and literary setting as Bonfadio without having seen the letter. Finally, remembering the close similarity with respect to both phrasing and context of the passages on third nature, a double coincidence is even less plausible.
A body of evidence from outside the letter to Plinio Tomacelli bolsters the argument that Taegio relied on Bonfadio, by showing that he had ample opportunity to see the letter. Four of Bonfadio’s letters, including the one addressed to Plinio Tomacelli, were published in Venice by Aldus Manutius five times before the publication of La Villa, first in 1545 and then again in 1547, 1548, 1553, and 1556.225 The modern-day editor of Bonfadio’s letters has brought forward strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that when Bonfadio was in Rome in 1538, in the service of Cardinal Girolamo Ghinucci, he joined a literary society not unlike Bartolomeo Taegio’s Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna, called the the Accademia della Virtù, which had been founded by Claudio Tolomei, a humanist from Siena, in 1530.226 Bonfadio and Tolomei probably knew each other, and they certainly had mutual acquaintances. One of Bonfadio’s letters is addressed to Francesco della Torre, with whom Tolomei also corresponded.227 The addressee of another one of Bonfadio’s letters, Francesco Molza, and the addressor of a letter received by him, Annibal Carro, were members of Tolomei’s Academy of Virtue.228 The collected letters of Bonfadio also reveal that he and Tolomei had at least three acquaintances in common with Taegio. The names of Francesco della Torre and Annibal Carro appear in Taegio’s list of