THE GARDKXS Ol< ITALY. 19 



CHAPTER II. 

 ROMAN VILLAS AND GARDENS: PREFATORY NOTE. 



All roads led artists to koni" 

 Tin- Heart of Italy 



THE Rome of the Renaissance must never be submerged in the interest aroused by the 

 vast remains of antiquity. It is, perhaps, as great a marvel as any, that the architects of 

 that epoch, though caught in the first freshness and novelty of the discovery and resurrec- 

 tion of the ancient art, were yet able to express their own age in a way which is quite 

 distinct to us. To Rome came all the bright spirits of the age ; Florentines abounded, so that a 

 Pope laughingly remarked that they were the fifth element. Vignola was from Modena, Palladio 

 from Venetia, and Alessi from Perugia. From France came Desgodetz. John Shute and Inigo 

 Jones, from England. Spaniards and Netherlander all alike were attracted by the fame of Raphael 

 and Michael Angelo quite as much as by the grandeur of antiquity itself. Thus once more all roads 

 led to Rome, and the influence of the Renaissance was there concentrated for a time in order 

 that it might be better spread throughout the whole of Europe. There was, however, an 

 clement of Roman palace building which attracted little attention, until Sir Charles Barry, by 

 his Travellers' and Reform Clubs and allied Italian work, drew forcible attention to the value 

 and importance of the real Roman astylar architecture. It is customary to trace this Roman 

 style to Florence, and to consider it as merely a development of the Tuscan fortified house of 

 medieval times. It is at least questionable if this is the true explanation. The marked 

 features of the Roman style, the sheer walls unbroken in length and height, the crowning cornice, 

 the largeness of scale and the cube solidity of the general mass seem instinctive characteristics 

 that are of older origin, and may even be racial in type. It is at least curious that Barry was led 

 to study the style by previous experience of travel in Egypt. In the Etruscan Museum at Rome are 

 fragments of details decisively Egyptian, and that the Etruscans, a strange race of uncertain origin, 

 had striking artistic gifts, all the contents of the wonderful collection in the Villa Papa Giulia 

 sufficiently prove. The Etruscan gateway of Perugia, the remains of the Tabularium, and the 

 great barrel arch of the Cloaca Maxima are all monuments which impress the imagination. 



That the heart of Italy, the land of the olive and vineyard, has an artistic instinct in 

 architecture, which weakens as we go north, is the discovery that all travellers in Italy make 

 sooner or later. Bad taste such as is met with in Venice and Milan is incredible further south. 

 Cellini could speak of the School of Florence as having definite ideas on art and a standard 

 criticism. When he quotes as an axiom, " All things act according to their nature," we feel 

 that he is giving us at first hand one of their most important generalisations. It is the 

 intellectual quality in Florentine work that holds the interest of all students of art ; that mastery 

 which Raphael acknowledged when he raised his hat to Leonardo in Rome, recognising him 

 to his followers as " the Master who taught us all." Horace Walpole, idle traveller as he was, 

 expresses this sense of the special genius of the Italian race in architecture. 



That the Italians were decorators rather than architects seems a hasty deduction of a 

 Gothic-minded student touring in North Italy. In a country which is never free from the fear 

 of an earthquake tie-rods are a proper provision to arches, whether round or pointed. In 

 daring construction the Italians have not been far short of the French mediaeval builders, and their 

 rashness has at times been equally well punished. If architecture means the expression of 



