ITALIAN VILLAS 
gives an indescribable touch of poetry to the upper gar- 
den of Caprarola. There is a quality of inevitableness 
about it — one feels of it, as of certain great verse, that 
it could not have been otherwise, that, in Vasari’s happy 
phrase, it was born, not built . 
Not more than twelve miles from Caprarola lies the 
other famous villa attributed to Vignola, and which one 
wishes he may indeed have built, if only to show how a 
great artist can vary his resources in adapting himself 
to a new theme. The Villa Lante, at Bagnaia, near 
Viterbo, appears to have been the work not of one car- 
dinal, but of four. Raphael Riario, Cardinal Bishop of 
Viterbo, began it toward the end of the fifteenth century, 
and the work, carried on by his successors in the see, 
Cardinals Ridolfi and Gambara, was finally completed 
in 1588 by Cardinal Montalto, nephew of Sixtus V, 
who bought the estate from the bishops of Viterbo and 
bequeathed it to the Holy See. Percier and Fontaine 
believe that several architects collaborated in the work, 
but its unity of composition shows that the general 
scheme must have originated in one mind, and Herr 
Gurlitt thinks there is nothing to disprove that Vignola 
was its author. 
Lante, like Caprarola, has been exhaustively sketched 
and photographed, but so perfect is it, so far does it 
surpass, in beauty, in preservation, and in the quality 
of garden-magic, all the other great pleasure-houses of 
Italy, that the student of garden-craft may always find 
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