ITALIAN GARDENS OF THE RENAISSANCE 



as the next Pope, and Raphael, who stood in high favour 

 at the Vatican, could hardly decline the new commis- 

 sion that was pressed upon him. More than this, the 

 task was a congenial one, and called out all his 

 sympathies. 



Since the young painter of Urbino first came to 

 Rome in 1508, he had lived in close intercourse with 

 his fellow-citizen Bramante. Ever ready to learn, the 

 wonderful youth had quickly absorbed the great archi- 

 tect's principles and caught his enthusiasm for classical 

 art. As he wrote to Castiglione, soon after he was 

 appointed architect of St. Peter's : "I long to find out 

 more about the form of classical buildings, and yet 

 I know not if my dreams may not end as the flight 

 of Icarus." When he took that famous excursion to 

 Tivoli with Bembo and Castiglione and their Venetian 

 friends in April 1516, the Cardinal's Vigna may already 

 have been in his mind. He found inspiration, there 

 can be little doubt, in the stupendous fragments of 

 Hadrian's villa, and reproduced certain features of the 

 ruins in the gardens on Monte Mario. We have no 

 positive information as to the date when the building of 

 the villa was actually begun, but we know that con- 

 siderable progress had been made by June 1519, and 

 that the work was already exciting great interest at 

 the Vatican. This we learn from a letter in which 

 Castiglione, writing to Isabella, after describing the new 

 84 



