Gardens of the Northern Renaissance
Italians didn't begin to use the word "parterre" to describe the sort of geometric designs which Cerceau shows in his engraving at Bury until the seventeenth century, when Italians began to be influenced by French gardens. Italians called the individual squares compartimenti, the French adopted this term, calling them compartiments, but by the mid-sixteenth century they were beginning to refer to such flat, geometric gardens as parterres. The first geometric designs for compartimenti to be published were in Sebastiano Serlio's treatise Tutti l'opera architecttura, which was printed in five books between 1537 and 1547. These designs had a huge effect on the design of Northern Renaissance gardens.
Many Italian Renaissance gardens were created on hillsides and featured gravity-fed fountains. Much of northern France is flat with a high water table. Northern France already had a strong tradition of moated castles and when they began to adopt ideas from Italian gardens, it was natural that rectangular canals became the main water features, rather than fountains; it was also quite common to surround a garden with a moat.
Another difference between French and Italian gardens is that, while many Italian gardens featured pergolas, they weren't as important as they became in French gardens. Italians liked to contrast the sunny compartimenti with the dense shade of adjoining boscos (ornamental woodlands). The contrast between sunny parterres and shady bosquets was to become very important in the grand gardens of seventeenth century France, but the typical gardens of sixteenth century French Chateaux featured compartiments surrounded by pergolas or roofed galleries.
The enclosed gardens of Renaissance France retained much of the atmosphere of Medieval gardens. The late Medieval love of heraldic designs also manifested itself in the designs for the compartiments. The Hyperotomachia Poliphilli, an Italian romance attributed to the Dominican friar Francesco Colonna (1433-1527), describes compartimenti decorated with figurative designs, but there is very little to indicate that such designs were ever common in Italian gardens. England's Henry VIII embellished his gardens with numerous painted statues of heraldic animals holding coats of arms, the effect must have seemed amazingly childish to Italian visitors. The written evidence indicates that figurative designs, such as coats of arms, were very popular in the compartments of French and English gardens, the use of complex geometric designs appears to be a later development. Knot gardens were especially popular in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
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