40 LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



tural decorations preserved from classical antiquity could actually be 

 incorporated in the Renaissance designs. The great artists of the time 

 were architects, sculptors, painters, landscape designers, as the occasion 

 served. The villa was one design, including buildings and gardens, 

 and so the evolution of style of the whole rise and flowering of the Italian 

 Renaissance is reflected in its gardens just as it is in its architecture 

 and painting. There were villas of importance and beauty at least 

 as early as the time of Boccaccio * ; of those which have come down to 

 our time, sufficiently intact to give us any idea of their original state, 

 part of the Villa Palmieri, the Villa Poggio a Cajano, Villa Castello, 

 and Villa Petraia, in the vicinity of Florence, are among the earliest. 

 In all these cases, there is a certain simplicity and solidity in the mass of 

 the buildings, still close to their prototype of the fortress castle, or 

 indeed often containing portions of these older buildings or being 

 altered from them by the cutting of windows and doors in the old fortress 

 walls. The building dominates a main terrace, simple in form and 

 simply divided, and such other terraces and decorative units as there 

 may have been were apparently related to the building in some direct 

 and obvious mass relation motived by the ground rather than in any 

 elaborate axial arrangement of the general scheme. The water appears 

 in simple and quiet pools or in fountains notable for the excellence of 

 their sculpture rather than for the play of fancy in handling the water. 

 In the Villa Madama at Rome, also of an early date, we see evidences 

 of transition to a general scheme in which the separate parts were sub- 

 ordinate to the unity of the whole. 



The later villas, of the sixteenth century, of which some of the finest 

 examples are the Villa Lante at Bagnaia (see Plate 29 and also 19), 

 the Villa d' Este at Tivoli, the upper terrace at the Villa Farnese at 

 Caprarola, and the Villa Medici at Rome, are more evidently the con- 

 scious application of architectural design to the outdoor setting of the 

 palace. The various terraces and areas into which the scheme is divided 

 are definitely related to each other as parts of a formal design, and im- 

 portant points in the design — terminations of axes and vistas or centers 

 of symmetry — are recognized architecturally with statues or fountains 



* The Introduction to the Third Day of the Decameron describes the garden identi- 

 fied as that of the present Villa Palmieri near Florence. 



