La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio
advocated imposing an orthogonal grid on the land: fields
si quadrino di pezzo in pezzo non piu lunghi di quaranta cavezzi l’uno, ne manco di trenta, o di vinti cinque; facendo i fossi attorno, e piantando da ogni lato gli arbori.
(should be well squared one after the other, not more than forty cavecci [240 feet] long, nor less than twenty five or thirty, with ditches all around, and planted on all sides with trees.)91
Gallo took up the subject of the cultivation of mulberry trees in the section of his treatise on gardens, and in the third section he expounded on the planting of trees to support vines, stating his preference for poplars over the elms of which Tanaglia had sung. In La Villa (p. 112) Taegio described the delightful sight of “the leafy vine, when it reacquires the lost shoots and, marrying itself to the elms, clings to their branches.” The technique of “marrying” vines to trees in Lombardy is as ancient as the period of Etruscan colonization, and in the time of the late empire the Romans, who planted maples, poplars, and elms for the purpose, called this method of viniculture, in what was then known as Cisalpine Gaul, arbrustum gallicum.92 The practice of edging the fields with linear plantations dates from at least the last decade of the fifteenth century, when Tanaglia was writing.
The texts by Crescenzi, Tanaglia, Alamanni, and Gallo are vauluable not only as sources of technical information about how land in northern Italy had been cultivated for two centuries before La Villa was published but also as verbal impressions of the changing visual experience of agricultural landscapes in Italy over the same time period. Although he acknowledged Crescenzi, and exposed his familiarity with Tanaglia, Taegio was careful to distinguish his dialogue from the written works of both his predecessors and his contemporaries. La Villa is not an agricultural treatise, as its author made clear at the end of the dialogue where Vitauro decides “to defer the discussion of agriculture to a more convenient occasion.” There is not a single reference in La Villa to the two most important crops produced in the region at the time of its writing: rice and silk. Mulberry trees, the single food source of the silkworm caterpillar, are mentioned only as root stock for grafting oranges, pears, and other fruits. In fact gardening, rather than farming, is the primary focus of Taegio’s treatment of villa landscape.
The Horticultural Context
In the culture of the Italian Renaissance, gardening was understood to be a special case of the imitation of nature in art. A garden could represent, like a painting, the outward appearance of visual effects (and, unlike a painting, the auditory, olfactory, and tangible effects) observable in the world of landscapes both touched and untouched by human hands. In addition, it could represent the hidden cosmic order that was thought to produce those effects. Because the gardener’s palette was the living, growing, changing world of earth, water, and plants, his work could express the interaction of human culture and the natural world in a unique way. In the Italian Renaissance, the garden was considered by many to be the ideal place to reveal the supposed correspondence between the visible and the invisible in a divinely ordered and harmonious universe. This mimetic function distinguished Italian gardens of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from earlier ones. Claudia Lazzaro calls it “the essence of an Italian Renaissance garden.”93 Eugenio Battisti says that the Italian Renaissance garden was, among a great many other things, a “well-ordered model of the universe.”94 Lazzaro in particular has specified how gardens in Italy in the Renaissance were made to be representations of the larger world: microcosm imitated macrocosm through conventions of planting and ordering.95
The selection of plants in a garden enabled it to serve as a medium for preserving and transmitting knowledge of the divine order of the cosmos in two ways. First, a garden was supposed to represent nature in all its variety by containing a diverse collection of botanical species from all over the known world. In fact, actual gardens created in Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century approached this ideal. The first European example of what later became known as the “botanical garden” was founded at Pisa in 1543. The second, the Orto Botanico at Padua, was constructed two years later.96 Taegio mentioned the botanical gardens at both Pisa and Padua in La Villa (p. 105), where he compared the garden of Scipione Simonetta to them. The metaphor of the garden as a catalogue of plants was familiar in fifteenth-century Italy to, among others, Leon Battista Alberti.97 In book 3 of his I Libri della Famiglia, in a discussion modeled after Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Alberti said that the ideal setting in which to raise a family would be a villa where “tutti e’ frutti nobilissimi quali nascono per tutti e’ paesi” (all the finest fruits that come from the country) would be grown.98 Villa gardens in the state of Milan in the sixteenth century embodied this ideal by including a wide variety of specimens, some exotic. In his description of the garden of Scipione Simonetta in La Villa (p. 104), Taegio listed forty-eight “valuable, famous and exotic simples” from places as remote as Egypt and Calcutta.99 Among the exotics Taegio observed in Cesare Simonetta’s garden at Castellazzo were “the sweet-smelling, precious and rare shrubs, brought from parts of India.” The diversity of Cesare Simonetta’s collection of plants is indicated by the passage in which Taegio described a bosco of mixed deciduous and coniferous shade trees, “a shady and delightful wood, where one sees growing the very straight fir tree, the mighty oak, the tall ash, the knotty chestnut, the lofty pine, the shady beech, the delicate tamarisk, the incorruptible linden, the oriental palm, the mournful cypress, the very hard cornel, the humble willow, the very pleasant plane tree, and other very beautiful trees” (p. 67). Variety and rarity of plants were part of what made a garden an imitation of nature in Taegio’s day.
The second way in which planting contributed to the mimetic potential of an Italian Renaissance garden was through symbolism. As Lazzaro has said, “the symbolic significance of plants guided the selection of specimens in the garden.”100 While the key to much of this symbolism is now lost, it is clear that it was based on associations with moral as well as physical attributes of human beings. In the passage quoted above the oak is called “mighty,” the tamarisk “delicate,” the linden “incorruptible,” the cypress “mournful,” and the willow “humble.” These specimens not only represented the variety of plant species in the world; they also symbolized the range of human physical and psychological types, establishing a correspondence between the garden itself and the larger world, with the human being as the mediator, through conventions of planting.
The microcosm of the Italian Renaissance garden also imitated the macrocosm by means of various strategies for imposing order on the layout of plant materials. Four conventions of ordering gardens in sixteenth-century Italy are recorded in La Villa. The principal one is the subdivision of the garden into three parts corresponding to three categories of plants. The conventional arrangement of the parts of a villa garden placed beds of simples, herbs, or flowers near the house, an orchard of small fruit trees at an intermediate distance, and a bosco, or grove of larger trees, in the most remote part of the garden.101 The second ordering convention is partitioning the garden into regular units, most commonly squares, called compartimenti (quadri in La Villa). Intersecting linear elements such as paths, pergolas, and hedges were typically used to achieve compartmentalization. The third method is the use of geometric designs, epitomized by the quincunx, in the plan of the whole or parts of the garden. The fourth strategy is to fashion plant material into representations of the owner of the garden.102
The last three of these conventions were explained in Alberti’s treatise on architecture. In book 9 of De re aedificatoria, where he discussed garden design in the context of ornament appropriate for private dwellings, Alberti advised that “walks should be lined with evergreen plants” such as box, myrtle, and laurel. In the same passage he advocated the use of geometric designs, saying, “Circles, semicircles and other geometric shapes that are favored in the plans of buildings can be modeled out of laurel, citrus and juniper when their branches are bent back and intertwined.”103 He went on to express his partiality for the figure that was to become a favorite of sixteenth-century garden theorists: the quincunx.104 Alberti said that “rows of trees should be laid out in the form of the quincunx as the expression is, at equal intervals and at matching angles.” Finally, Alberti wrote approvingly