Writing the garden in the age of humanism: Petrarch and Boccaccio

Abstract

In an effort to trace the ongms of the Italian Renaissance garden, scholars have often given considerable attention to humanistic literature. Petrarch, in particular, is considered to be the first lover of the art of gardens, mainly because of the sensitivity towards the seduction of landscape that emerges from his writings. This view has been so quickly accepted by subsequent studies that Petrarch' s uneasy and ambivalent relationship to the beauty of nature has rarely been acknowledged. Also, the urge to find an absolute origin for the art of Renaissance gardens, and the belief that this origin has been found in Petrarch, has led scholars to overlook an important distinction: the one between gardens and natural landscape, that is, between gardens and — to use a less anachronistic phrase — the locus amoenus. In fact, if every garden is a locus amoenus, in the sense of a pleasing place, not every locus amoenus is a garden. Also, garden historians' interest in Petrarch derives from the fact that he was a gardener hirr1self, and they believe that the poet' s activity anticipates later developments in the Italian Renaissance. However, scholars tend to overlook the difference between gardens and orchards, a distinction that had already been made by Petrarch' s contemporaries.