La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio
of villa owners: “How charming was that custom of our ancestors whereby the gardeners would flatter their master by writing his name on the ground with box or fragrant herbs!”105 The systematic application of order and measure to garden design is a hallmark of the Renaissance, and a foreshadowing of it can be seen in Alberti’s architectural theory. Its justification is found in a desire, newly expressed in the fifteenth century, for order in the garden to reproduce not only the order proper to the design of buildings but also the cosmic order.
Four conventions of ordering are represented in La Villa. Taegio’s description of Cesare Simonetta’s villa estate (p. 65) reflects the organization of the garden in three parts. The first part of the “well-ordered” garden is composed of “squares of beautiful appearance, both distinct one from another, and equal … where the flowers and the herbs are obliged to dwell.” This is followed by an orchard, where “green and living lemons, oranges and citrons, which have their fruit hanging fresh, unripe and ripe, together with their flowers,” and finally by “a shady and delightful wood.”
The second method of establishing order in the garden is mentioned in several places in La Villa. Compartimento (compartmentalization) is the word Taegio used to describe the partitioning of the garden of Pietro Paolo Arrigono: “In the marvelous and well-contrived construction of a superb palace, as well as in the comparmentalization, in the order, in the charm, and in the loveliness of this very beautiful garden, he shows clearly the splendor and magnificence of his mind” (p. 101). Pergolas are among the means Taegio specified in La Villa (p. 66) for the compartmentalization of Cesare Simonetta’s garden: “The main walkway, which subdivides the place in a cross, is covered by a pergola of new vines, whose sides are nearly all covered with roses and jasmine, so that their big and pleasing fragrance makes the garden seem in truth like all the spiceries of the orient are there. And the alleys are well shaded from the sun, so that one can at all times go everywhere under fragrant and pleasant shade without being touched by its rays.” Taegio added that squares in the same garden were outlined with clipped hedges. “Beside the paths that wind along the aforementioned squares, the pale salvia grows, the green rosemary, the fragrant lavender, the pretty myrtle, the crinkled box, the tenacious mastic, the prickly juniper, the poetical bay laurel, the lowly strawberry bush, and many other similar shrubs, placed regularly and kept low by the masterful hand of the wise cultivator, enclose all the paths of the successful garden.”
The “masterful hand of the wise cultivator” would have been indispensible as well for the third convention of garden art represented in La Villa: the ordering of the plan of the garden with geometric designs such as the labyrinth and the quincunx. In La Villa (p. 108) Taegio called wonderful a “very dense grove of hazel made in the form of a labyrinth” that he saw in the garden of Pietro Novato. He also praised “the wonderful order, the gracefulness, and the careful distribution of the plants that were disposed in the form of a quincunx” in the proverbial garden of King Cyrus. Taegio was so enamored of the quincunx that he illustrated it in La Villa (p. 50).
Finally, Taegio referred to the fourth way of making a garden as an ordered microcosm: by shaping plants into representations of the owner. Rather than spell the owner’s name, as the ancients did in Alberti’s account, Cesare Simonetta’s gardeners reproduced his insignia on the ground with plants. As Taegio wrote in La Villa (p. 67), “the flowers and herbs not only delight the corporeal eyes of the spectators, but with very sweet food they nourish even those of the mind; for inside frames are seen very beautiful devices with very witty and ingenious mottos; and so those like these are composed in flowers and tiny herbs.”
By representing owners, and by means of geometry, compartmentalization, and tripartite organization, Italian Renaissance gardens in general, and the gardens Taegio described in particular, reflected the cosmic order in which human beings were thought to occupy a privileged place. Various adaptations of these conventions of ordering, in combination with those of planting, resulted in sixteenth-century Milanese gardens that functioned as imitations of nature on multiple levels. Horticultural conventions supported the representational quality of Italian Renaissance gardens. Agricultural theories and practices shaped, both literally and figuratively, the terrain in which Taegio’s villa owners lived.
The Idea of the Villa in Antiquity
The idea of the villa has a history. The word villa originated in the Latin language, and it was introduced into English, by way of Italian, in the seventeenth century.106 The word villa has a great richness of associations for readers of English today, as it did for Taegio and his sixteenth-century Italian readers, both because it was an adaptable term in ancient times and because its meaning developed from a long history of usage beginning in ancient times and continuing through the Renaissance to the present day.107 Latin authors used the term villa to denote either a building or a group of buildings, built on a piece of land that was cultivated to some extent, and that usually, though not always, was located outside, or at least on the outskirts of, the city. In papal documents of the sixteenth century, villa was used to refer to the whole ensemble of buildings and their landscape setting, while the house itself was called a palazzo.108 The word villa brings to mind variously a working farm, a simple homestead, an architecturally refined country seat, a refuge from the irritations and dangers of the city, a retreat for study and inspiration, a luxurious vacation house, a locus amoenus (place of pleasure), and a paradise on earth. As this list suggests, these overlapping associations can be thought of as occupying a scale from simple and necessary to elaborate and idealized.
The origin of the word villa is by no means clear, nor is its meaning fixed very securely by its early usage. Pliny the Elder said that in the Twelve Tables, the traditional founding documents of Roman law written in the middle of the fifth century B.C., the word villa never occurs, but that the word hortus is “always used in that sense.”109 In the later codes of law, villa signified a building in the country that, together with its ager (land), formed a fundus (estate).110 A Latin word closely related to villa is vilicus, which is both an adjective meaning “pertaining to an estate” and a noun meaning “steward,” or “overseer of an estate.” Varro’s Rerum rusticarum contains an etymology of the noun, vilicus.
Vilicus agri colendi causa constitutus atque appellatus a villa, quod ab eo in eam convehuntur fructus et evehuntur, cum veneunt. A quo rustici etiam nunc quoque viam veham appellant propter vecturuas et vellam, non villam, quo vehunt et unde vehunt.
(The vilicus is appointed for the purpose of tilling the ground, and the name is derived from villa, the place into which the crops are hauled [vehuntur], and out of which they are hauled by him when they are sold. For this reason the peasants even now call a road veha, because of the hauling; and they call the place to which and from which they haul vella and not villa.)111
Of the ancient Roman authors invoked by Taegio in La Villa to support his argument for the superiority of country life over city life, six prove to be important sources for the origin and early usage of villa: Marcus Porcius Cato, who wrote the earliest extant piece of continuous Latin prose, De agri cultura, in 165 B.C.; Marcus Tullius Cicero, who wrote De senectute in 40 B.C.; Marcus Terentius Varro, who wrote Rerum rusticarum in 37 B.C.; Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella, who wrote the most systematic extant Roman agricultural manual, De re rustica, in 65 A.D.; Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), who wrote Naturalis historia in A.D. 70; and his nephew Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus), whose Epistulae were first published around A.D. 100. Another important ancient source for the meaning of villa, a source Taegio used extensively, is the Greek author Xenophon, who wrote Oeconomicus around 360 B.C.
The term villa may have been relatively new at the time Cato was writing. The villa-residence he described was a working farmhouse, complete with horse stalls and quarters for servants.112 Scholars today commonly refer to this type of building, for which archaeological evidence has been found at Boscoreale and elsewhere, as villa rustica, although Cato never used that term. His word for such a farmhouse is simply villa. Varro, whose description of a villa is more detailed