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Gardens of the Late Renaissance

© Kirk Johnson

Early Renaissance gardens were settings for philosophical discussions, and for the enjoyment of simple "rustic" pleasures. High Renaissance gardens introduced architectural ideas, such as axial planning, into gardens; along with a strong emphasis on architectural elements, such as staircases, carved balustrades, and niches to display statues in.

Even before the 1527 sack of Rome, many artists were moving away from the calm harmony of High Renaissance compositions towards more a complex and eccentric style (or collection of styles) which art historians call Mannerist. While many Late Renaissance gardens featured Mannerist sculpture, there are very few gardens that I would really call Mannerist. Many Late Renaissance gardens have an elegant playfulness which is more typical of Mannerismthan it is of High Renaissance art, but this was the period when most of the great Renaissance gardens were created. It was during the High Renaissance that garden design became a great art, equal to architecture, and created by the greatest architects of the period.

During the Early Renaissance, Florence was the cultural center, while the High Renaissance was centered in Rome. After 1527, no one city was the center of Renaissance culture; the culture of the High Renaissance spread over all of Italy and beyond the Alps to the rest of Europe.

In 1537, at the age of 18, Cosimo de Medici became duke of Florence and began to renovate the villa which he had inherited at Castello, near Florence. The present garden was begun about 1538 by Niccolo Tribolo. The design of the garden is surprisingly conservative, but was also very innovative.

Giorgio Vasari described this garden as the "most rich, magnificent and ornamental garden in Europe", but most modern visitors to this garden are probably there to visit the grotto, the rest of the garden isn't very interesting. This is because the basic design is rather monotonous, and most of the statues and water features which once enlivened it were removed in the late eighteenth century.

Water was always the glory of this garden and this was the first Renaissance garden to use water on a lavish scale. The garden featured many fountains as well as large fishponds and giochi d'aqua (water games). This was also the first Renaissance garden in which all of the statues were part of an allegorical theme. It was these two innovations which would have a strong impact on the gardens which followed it.

Because Renaissance gardens were quite formal, people often don't realize that many of these gardens were created for avid plant collectors. It was usual for each kind of plant to be given its own bed; this encouraged the practice of creating formal gardens in which the pattern was composed out of many small beds. Padua's Orto Botanico, which was designed by Giovanni Moroni in 1545, still displays its plants in this manner.

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