THE ITALIAN FORMAL GARDEN 



By A. D. F. HAMLIN 



AUJUNCT PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

 I. 



A GARDEN is a portion of the earth's surface humanized. 

 Nature is subjected to the designer's will ; trees, grass, 

 flowers and shrubs are made to do his bidding, and 

 an ordered design takes the place of the capricious wildness 

 of the primitive growth. Gardening, as one of the decorative 

 arts, deals with the materials of the earth's surface, and the 

 vegetation and water which dixersify and embellish it. In any 

 style of gardening the results of the designer's labors are, and 

 must be, artificial, whether he seek to counterfeit the appear- 

 ance of the primitive meadow, forest and thicket, or to arrange 

 his combinations of earth, rock, plants and water upon some 

 arbitrary and conventional system. The different schools of 

 the art are distinguished largely by the degree to which they 

 incline towards one or the other of these systems of treatment : — 

 towards naturalistic picturesqueness, or towards monumental 

 and artificial regularity. The Italian villa gardens of the 

 Renaissance are the highest representative of the second 

 system. 



Gardening is an art of peace and luxury, and, as an 

 accompaniment of buildings, follows in the wake of architec- 

 ture. " Without it," says Bacon, writing in Elizabeth's time,- 

 " buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks ; and a man 

 shall ever see that when ages grow to civility and elegancy,) 

 men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely." As( 

 an art of luxury it fared poorly in the Dark and Middle Ages ; 

 but when the Renaissance revived the arts of ancient Rome in 

 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the increasing sta- 

 bility of the social order permitted the indulgence of personal 

 luxury, gardening was revived with the other arts of antiquity, 

 and its practice modelled after the suggestions offered by the 

 ruins of ancient Roman prototypes. What these were we may 



D. H. HJLL UBRARY 



