INTRODUCTORY. 



& I < &**& J^Wfe& 



No art ever flies 

 direct to its imagined 

 goal. The Italian dream 

 of the ideal garden was 

 heavily weighted by the 

 mass and profusion of 

 the salvage of antiquity. 

 Raphael even was de- 

 flected from his school 

 of painting to the cares 

 and pursuits of a director 

 of excavations. We cannot 

 understand Italian villas 

 and gardens unless we 

 realise that the museum 

 had yet to be disengaged 

 from the lordly pleasure 

 house. Whether architect 3. ITALIAN RENAISSANCE LANDSCAPE OF THE LATE PERIOD, BY TITIAN. 

 or sculptor, the artist 



had perforce one eye and hand on the antique and the other on his own new creation, and 

 this duality of interest is a great condition of the work of the time. Vignola owed 

 his start and development as an architect to investigations undertaken by a learned 

 circle of Vitruvian commentators, for whom he acted as draughtsman. Palladio's 

 measured examples of antiquity amount to a century of plates in one book alone. Pirro 

 Ligorio was great in the special branch of ancient domestic architecture, and his conception 



4. GARDEN PICTURE AT THE VILLA DI PAPA GIULIO. 



