Love and allegory

Abstract

In an image from the 1495 illustrated Venetian edition of the Liber ruralium commodorum, the pleasure garden is shown as a garden of love (see figure 7). This small garden is enclosed by a low wall and culminates in an elaborate fountain placed in the niche of a pergola constructed of living trees. At the center of the garden, on a grassy turf, stands a noblewoman holding a flower. A young man seated on a wall and playing a lute is serenading her. On either side of the garden space are small beds planted in orderly rows and bounded by low fences. A rabbit, which is a symbol of fertility, is shown rooting around in the soil. Although the fifteenth-century artist saw no problem in depicting Crescenzi's pleasure garden as a garden oflove, scholars have rarely made connections between Crescenzi's gardens and the existing poetic and literary discourse. For although Crescenzi refers to the pleasure garden as a locus amoenus, he neither directly invokes the literary and iconological tradition of the pleasure garden, nor avails himself of overtly poetic language. He does refer to the poetry of Virgil and even makes references to the Carmina Burana and Ovid's Metamorphoses, but he mines these sources for their practical value not their poetry.71 Given the interconnectedness of function and meaning in the garden, however, the relationship between Crescenzi's description and the use of gardens in medieval literature warrants re-examination. A careful reading of Crescenzi's descriptions of pleasure gardens reveals a deep connection to the existing literary tropes and conventions. The practical emphasis of Crescenzi's treatise, however, forces him to modify the ideal terms of literary and pictorial representations of gardens. In this way, comparing Crescenzi's practically oriented text to poetical and literary evocations opens up the possibility of exploring the interaction between the ideal and the real, the topos and the locus, the dreamable and the realizable. It is probably somewhere in the space between these two modalities that the truth of gardens resides, since the realisability of dreams and ideals is tangibly restricted by the actuality of climate, soils, water supply, pests, the passage of time and financial restrictions.