La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio
in numerous printed editions in the early sixteenth century, appears to be another possible source.
As Hunt has shown, terza natura resembles, and builds upon, the phrase alteram naturam (second nature), in Marcus Tullius Cicero’s dialogue De natura deorum, where the Stoic philosopher had one of the interlocutors, Quintus Lucilius Balbus, make the following statement.
Nos campis, nos montibus fruimur, nostri sunt amnes, nostri lacus, nos fruges serimus, nos arbores, nos aquarum inductionibus terris fecunditatem damus, nos flumina arcemus, derigimus, avertimus, nostris denique manibus in rerum natura quasi alteram naturam efficere conamur.
(We delight in the fields and the mountains. Ours are the rivers, the lakes. We bring forth the fruits of the earth and the trees. We give fecundity to the land by bringing in water. We dam, direct, and divert the rivers. In short, with our hands we undertake to produce as it were a second nature within the natural world.)236
Cicero’s “second nature” is what Hunt calls “cultural landscape: agriculture, urban developments, roads, bridges, ports and other infrastructures.” By postulating the existence of second nature Cicero implied that rerum natura (“the nature of things,” or “the natural world”) preexisted as an unmediated realm, or “first nature,” which in the Renaissance was associated with what today commonly goes by the name of “wilderness.” By calling gardens a third nature, Bonfadio put them at the top of a triad of conceptual zones in the landscape, ordered hierarchically according to the degree to which each represents natura, in the sense of the constitution of the world, controlled or changed by human intervention.237
Phrases similar to terza natura, then, have been found in the De rerum natura of Lucretius, Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia, and Cicero’s De natura deorum. Anticipations of the idea that art and nature can work in partnership with each other can also be found in the writings of these authors, although not where they deal in general with the idea of natura. It is in the sections of Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia in which they discuss propagation techniques, and, somewhat surprisingly, in Cicero’s De oratore, where he treats the art of public speaking, that depictions of natura can be found that make the partnership, or cooperative interaction, between nature and art conceivable.
Cicero developed the attributes of natura in the second book of De natura deorum. Cicero’s natura is divine (and female), nurturing and rational. She is “quae contineat mundum omnem eumque tueatur, et ea quidem non sine sensu atque ratione” (that which holds the whole universe together and guards it, and indeed she is not without sense and reason.)238 Cicero equated natura with both mundus (the universe) and deus (God), as the following excerpt makes clear.
Quocira sapientem esse mundum necesse est, naturamque eam, quae res omnes complexa teneat, perfectione rationis excellere, eoque deum esse mundum, omnemque vim mundi natura divina contineri.
(So the universe must be wise, and the Nature that embraces all things must be distinguished by perfection of reason. And so God must be the universe, and all the life of the universe must be contained within Divine Nature.)239
In both of the passages quoted above, Cicero described natura as nurturing and rational. He went on to explain the wisdom of natura in terms of sollertia (skillfulness). Cicero said that no human operation, such as the navigation of fleets or the deployment of troops, “tantam naturae sollertiam significat, quantam ipse mundus” (shows the skillfulness of nature so much as the universe itself).240 Cicero’s characterization of natura as divine, nurturing, and rational was not uniquely his own. Rather, the view of nature that Cicero articulated in the second book of De natura deorum has its essential elements in common with what Mary Beagon has called a “mainstream tradition,” which was “derived from the cosmological theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.”241 More than a century after Cicero, the most eloquent spokesman for that tradition was Pliny the Elder.
The salient features of Pliny the Elder’s cosmology, like Cicero’s, are the divinity of natural mundus, her providence, and her skillfulness. Pliny the Elder’s very first statement about natura in Naturalis historia is that “numen esse credi par est” (she is rightly believed to be divine).242 Like the divinity of natura, the idea of her providence toward humankind, which Pliny the Elder expressed in terms of providentia (providence), naturae benignitas (the benevolence of nature) and naturae maiestas (nature’s majesty), is a recurring theme in the treatise.243 Pliny the Elder used the phrase ars naturae (the skill of nature) to refer to what we call symbiosis.244
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