Tradition and transformation: the pleasure garden in Piero de' Crescenzi's

Abstract

Anyone who has taken even the most rudimentary survey course in the history of Western garden art will have been exposed to the medieval treatise on gardens and agriculture written by the landed Italian nobleman Piero de' Crescenzi in the late thirteenth century. Translated from the Latin into French, Italian and German by the fifteenth century, the Liber ruralium commodorum — which can be roughly translated as ‘The Book of Rural Benefits’ — consists of twelve books that encompass everything from soils and sowing to animal husbandry, and, most famously, a book on pleasure gardens.1 Book Eight, whose full title is ‘On making gardens and delightful things skillfully from trees, plants, and their fruits’, contains descriptions of three types of gardens — small herb gardens, gardens for people of moderate means, and gardens for kings and lords. It also has chapters devoted to the elements of which gardens were composed, the field, the grove, the orchard, the vineyard and the herb garden, as well as advice on how to create marvelous graftings and raise plants with unusual properties. Although the early manuscripts of Crescenzi's work were not illustrated, later editions were often adorned with rich illustrations depicting various aspects of rural life and, after the invention of the printing press, with sometimes crude and often comical woodcuts.2 These images, along with the descriptions of pleasure gardens, have formed the basis for the appeal of the work for garden historians, forever in search of representations of lost gardens, be they visual or verbal.