ITALIAN VILLAS 
while the whole is so planned that from the central hall 
of the villa (and in fact from its entrance-door) one may 
look across the court and down the long vista of columns, 
into what were once the shady depths of the garden. 
In all Italian garden-architecture there is nothing 
quite comparable for charm and delicately reminiscent 
classicalism with this grotto-bath of Pope Julius’s villa. 
Here we find the tradition of the old Roman villa-archi- 
tecture, as it had been lovingly studied in the letters 
of Pliny, transposed into Renaissance forms, with the 
sense of its continued fitness to unchanged conditions 
of climate and a conscious return to the splendour of 
the old patrician life. It is instructive to compare this 
natural reflowering of a national art with the frigid 
archaeological classicalism of Winckelmann and Canova. 
Here there is no literal transcription of uncompre- 
hended detail: the spirit is preserved, because it is still 
living, but it finds expression in subtly altered forms. 
Above all, the artist has drawn his inspiration from 
Roman art, the true source of modern architecture, and 
not from that of Greece, which, for all its beauty and far- 
reaching aesthetic influences, was not the starting-point 
of modern artistic conceptions, for the plain historical 
reason that it was utterly forgotten and unknown when 
the mediaeval world began to wake from its lethargy 
and gather up its scattered heritage of artistic tradi- 
tions. 
When John Evelyn came to Rome in 1644 an d 
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