HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 25 



about ten miles outside Florence, and oi-in-inally was surrounded by beautiful gardens, of which 

 practically nothing- remains except a fine stairway and garden approach. The water for the villa 

 was conducted b)- an innnense aqueduct from the heights of Benistallo. Here were great planta- 

 tions of mulberry-trees, which even to this day yield a considerable source of revenue, and parks 

 containing rare animals bought in Spain and Egypt. The love of strange and rare animals was 

 a curious feature of this age, and Lorenzo might be considered the founder of the zoological 

 garden in the most elevated sense of the term. His prodigious acti\ ity extended to the collection 

 of all kinds of birds and animals, pheasants whose descendants still people the park, pigs from 

 Calabria, cows from India, and even giraffes and other curious animals, of which the travellers of 

 the Renaissance brought home such fabulous descriptions. 



In his interesting and valuable work on the civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, 

 Burckhardt remarks the widespread interest in natural history, and the collection and comparative 

 study of plants and animals. ' Italy claims to be the first creator of botanical gardens, thou'-di 

 possibly they may h:\yc scr\-ed a chiefly practical end, and the claim to priority may be itself 

 disputed. It is of far greater importance that princes and wealthy men, in laying out their 

 pleasure gardens, instinctively made a point of collecting the greatest possible number of different 

 plants in all their species and varieties. Thus, in the fifteenth century, the noble grounds of the 

 Medieean \'ilhi Careggi appear, from the descriptions wq have of them, to have been almost a 

 botanical garden, with countless specimens of different trees and shrubs.^ Of the same kind was 

 a villa of the Cardinal Trivulzio at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in the Roman Campagna, 

 towards Tivoli, with evidently something very different from the score or so of familiar medicinal 

 plants which were to be found in the garden of any castle or monastery of Western Europe.' 



'The collections, too, of foreign animals not only gratified curiosity, but served also the 

 higher purposes of observation. The facility of transport from the southern and eastern harbours 

 of the Mediterranean, and the mildness of the Italian climate, made it practicable to buy the 

 largest animals of the South, or to accept them as presents from the sultans. The cities and 

 princes were particularly anxious to keep live lions, even \\hen the lion was not, as in Florence, 

 an emblem of the State. The lion's den was gencrall)- in or near the go\-ernnient palace, as In 

 Perugia and Florence; in Rome It lay on the blupe of the Capitol; the beasts sometimes ser^'ed 

 as executioners of political jutlgments, and no doubt, apart from tliis, they kept alive a certain 

 terror in the popular mind. Their condition was also held to be ominous of good or evil. 

 By the end of the fifteenth century, however, true menageries {serragli), now reckoned part of the 

 suitable appointments of a court, were kept by many of the princes. "It belongs to the position 

 of tlic great," says Matarazzo, "to keep horses, dogs, mules, falcons and other birds, court jesters, 

 singers, and foreign animals."' 



Some ten miles outside Florence, Lorenzo do' Medici built the villa at Poggio-a-Cajano, 



' 'A!cxandri Braccii descriptin horti T.:itirciUl! ^fi-d.,' printc-cl in npprndix to Ro-^roe's Zife of Lonnzo. 



