i \TRonrcroRY. 



6. A WASHING PLACE. 



with its four graceful bridges, is truly related to the sculptural group that it supports, to the 

 surrounding parterre and the twin casinos, and the scheme, as a whole, is free from the taint of 

 the theatrical. Lastly, the garden works vanish naturally into the larger field of the wooded 

 hillside ; man's calculated effort ceases at the embrace of an unsophisticated nature that can 

 never be eliminated. It is this transition which marks the true garden architect, who alone 

 knows where to stay his hand. 



The Villa d'Este at Tivoli (Chap. XVII) is another work which must always rank as one 

 of the greatest creations of Italian garden art. It must be understood as a vast conception of 

 the music of water. The great structural organ is, as it were, a mere key to a scheme whose 

 parent idea is that of so spreading the force of a mountain torrent over the descending 

 slopes of the garden as to create a great tone poem of rushing water. The long 

 terrace, with a hundred dripping fountains, conveys the idea of recitative. The foaming 

 cascades are floods of sound that rise and fall with the varying volume of the waters. 

 The aspiring single jet plays a fantasia of its own. In the face of an idea of this kind 

 the excessive rusticity of some of the structural features is of minor importance. The 

 Italian architect and sculptor were apt in the later phases of the Renaissance to be misled 

 by a false analogy of nature. That is not really natural which is most deliberately assimilated 

 to the accidents of nature, as a column is no closer to nature, but really further removed, 

 when it is sculptured as a tree with the bark on. The barocco satyr and fawn are degenerate in 

 outraging of the modesty of nature, which does not fix the play of passion in an unyielding 

 mould. Few more fatal steps were taken in the Renaissance than those which smudged the lines 

 of architectural propriety and lost the sense of a building art. The constructed rustic cliff 



