VILLAS NEAR ROME 
be known how much Ligorio owed to the taste of Orazio 
Olivieri, the famous hydraulic engineer, who raised the 
Anio to the hilltop and organized its distribution through 
the grounds. But it is apparent that the whole compo- 
sition was planned about the central fact of the rushing 
Anio : that the gardens were to be, as it were, an organ 
on which the water played. The result is extraordinarily 
romantic and beautiful, and the versatility with which 
the stream is used, the varying effects won from it, bear 
witness to the imaginative feeling of the designer. 
When all has been said in praise of the poetry and 
charm of the Este gardens, it must be owned that from 
the architect’s standpoint they are less satisfying than 
those of the other great cinque-cento villas. The plan 
is worthy of all praise, but the details are too compli- 
cated, and the ornament is either trivial or cumbrous. 
So inferior is the architecture to that of the Lante gar- 
dens and Caprarola that Burckhardt was probably right 
in attributing much of it to the seventeenth century. 
Here for the first time one feels the heavy touch of the 
baroque. The fantastic mosaic and stucco temple con- 
taining the water-organ above the great cascade, the 
arches of triumph, the celebrated “grotto of Arethusa,” 
the often-sketched fountain on the second terrace, all 
seem pitiably tawdry when compared with the garden- 
architecture of Raphael or Vignola. Some of the details 
of the composition are absolutely puerile — such as the 
toy model of an ancient city, thought to be old Rome, 
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