Villa Garden Research Articles

Standing on a garden wall or assembling in a ‘rustic cabinet’: seasonal statuary at the Villa Gamberaia

Attention to the seasons is common to villas and villa gardens from ancient Roman times to the present day — from the seasonal dining rooms recommended by Vitruvius1 to our own use of water and dense vegetation to create cool spaces for sunnner repose. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the iconography of Central Italian villa decoration, stucchi, and garden statuary often reflected its setting with respect to these seasonal features. In nuny cases, representations of the seasons themselves attested to the relationship of the villa and garden to nature's changes. At the Villa Gamberaia, Settignano, full-figure seasonal allegories are placed along the ‘great wall’ (figure 1) and seasonal busts populate the gabinetto rustico behind this wall (figure 2). The purposes of this paper are to review the current placem.ent of the statues in relation to the available historical documentation and to show how these seasonal representations relate to their local environn1. ents and contribute to the larger iconographic programme. In the process of this discussion, I shall examine traditional uses and meanings of seasonal in1agery in Central Italian villas and gardens.2

Preliminary Excavations in the Gardens of Hadrian's Villa: The Canopus Area and the Piazza d'Oro

Preliminary excavations in 1987–1988 in the Canopus area and in the Piazza d'Oro indicate that Hadrian's Villa contains much important evidence for our knowledge of ancient Roman gardens. On the west bank of the Canopus evidence was found of elaborate terraced gardens still covered with undisturbed soil and on the east bank a row of discarded amphoras was discovered. The amphoras had been cut in half and used as planting pots, giving significant information about the planting pattern.In the Piazza d'Oro a sloping tufa terrain with an insufficient soil covering for plants made it necessary for Hadrian to cut planting holes into the tufa; these were then filled with fertile soil. Large planting pits were found in 1987–1988 that appear to continue around the edge of the garden. In the bed on the west side of the euripus an intricate network of trenches cut to provide drainage for the planting beds was found, as well as smaller planting holes. Subsequent excavations made it possible to explain the unique irrigation system of this garden.

Review: Ancient Roman Villa Gardens by Elisabeth Blair MacDougall

Review: Ancient Roman Villa Gardens by Elisabeth Blair MacDougall

Faulkner Farm: an Italian garden in Massachusetts

Abstract Brookline, Massachusetts, adjacent to Boston, was a pace-setting town in American garden design during the second half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it was the climate: the intellectual climate. Many lively and intelligent people in all fields of endeavour lived in Brookline. Andrew Jackson Downing, in his popular, oft-reprinted Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841), cited two Brookline estates—Thomas Lee's and Colonel T. H. Perkins'—as exemplars of his ideal combination of the ‘Beautiful’ and the ‘Picturesque’. By the 1880s, John Lowell Gardner and his wife, Isabella Stewart Gardner, the flamboyant art collector, had adorned their elaborate Brookline garden ‘Green Hill’ with Italian artifacts. Frederick Law Olmsted, already famous as a landscape designer, established his home and office in Brookline in 1883. At the same time, Charles Sprague Sargent, director of Harvard's new Arnold Arboretum, was expanding and developing his family estate ‘Holm Lea’ into 150 acres of idealized natural landscape. And then, in the last three years of the century, the Honorable and Mrs Charles F. Sprague began transforming their Brookline estate ‘Faulkner Farm’ into something entirely new in America. Their garden, in situation and in plan, was patterned directly after the Renaissance villa gardens of Italy.

A View of Poggioreale by Viviano Codazzi and Domenico Gargiulo

This study attempts to establish the extent to which a painting by Viviano Codazzi and Domenico Gargiulo of the villa Poggioreale as an architectural capriccio can be used as a record of the appearance of the villa in the mid-17th century. By correlating the painting with the plan of the villa in the Carafa map and the Baratta view, a new reconstruction of the layout of the villa garden is proposed.

Shapes of Earth and Time in European Gardens

All gardens are earth art. Gardeners and gardeners, and landscape architects alike —detach er an area of ground from its natural surroundings and give it a new order of boundaries, interior divisions, and plantings. Often they create sculptured earth forms: the flat shelf with retaining bank, drainage channels, and mounded beds of an efficient kitchen garden; the elaborate step-terracing of the hill-slope villa gardens of the Italian Renaissance; the subtly manipulated planes designed to reduce and regularize variations in slope and level in Le Notre's formal gardens; or the calculated contrasts of rolling landscape with flat water plane in the characteristic English “natural” garden of the eighteenth century.