Antichità in giardino, giardini nell’antichità: studi sulla collezione Giusti a Verona e sulla tradizione delle raccolte di antichità in giardino

Abstract

The time span indicated by the subtitle of Kathleen Wren Christian’s fundamental Empire without End: Antiquities collections in Renaissance Rome, c.1350–1527 (2010), eloquently demonstrated the early origins of a phenomenon that she and many others have continued to document for Roman collections of antiquities. Pomponio Leto, probably the most avid of these early collectors of inscriptions, also collected statues, to be judiciously placed in his garden on the Quirinal. Members of the wealthy elite who not only had sumptuous urban residences but also owned property on the outskirts of the city were able to organize excavations on their own estates, and the discovery there of figural nudes and mythological subjects, in particular, helped to bring about a shift in taste in the 1470s and 1480s. From then on, until the Sack of Rome in 1527, popes and princely members of the Curia began to lay out pleasure gardens populated by figural sculptures. By the time of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s involuntary stay in Rome in the mid-century, he was able to compile a list of the antiquities displayed in some eighty private collections, as well in the papal gardens and some public spaces and churches.