The Villa Madama was planned on a grand scale, there was supposed to be an open circular court at the center of a symmetrical building; to the south of this building there was to be a large courtyard; to the west, an amphitheater would be carved out of the slope; the east facade would look out upon a fabulous view of Rome; while to the north there would be a hanging garden. Only the northern part of this grand villa was constructed when Giulio de Medici became Pope Clement VII and this was used as a pavilion for entertaining in. The gardens continued to be developed, but the rest of the planned villa was never constructed. During the 1527 sack of Rome, the Villa Madama was severely damaged by the troops of Pompeo Colonna. Clement VII restored the existing part of the villa and dreamed of completing the grand design, but never did. After his death the villa went through centuries of neglect; by the early twentieth century, the northern part of the villa was badly in need of restoration, and of the gardens, only the hanging garden remained. They have been restored, but most garden lovers would say that there isn't much of a garden to visit.
It doesn't really matter that so little of the Villa Madama has survived, it s importance was always as a dream of what an ideal Renaissance Villa should be. The most important lesson that Raphael learned from Bramante was how to use axial lines to both unify a garden and to control the way that visitors experience a garden. Ever since ancient Egypt, the Western tradition of garden design had been closely related to the agricultural practice of growing vegetables in straight rows and having straight irrigation ditches running alongside of the rows of vegetables. Early Renaissance gardens were much more closely related to agriculture than architecture, they were geometric reflections of the orchards and meadows which surrounded them. Bramante and Raphael began a tradition in which plants played a minor role in gardens; until the rise of the English landscape style in the eighteenth century, all important European gardens would be a form of architecture. The foundations had been set for the spectacular gardens of the Late Renaissance.
