INTRODUCTORY. 
6. — A WASHING PLACE. 
with its four graceful bridges, is truly related to the sculptural group that it supports, to the 
surrounding parterre and the twin casinos, and the scheme, as a whole, is free from the taint of 
the theatrical. Lastly, the garden w’orks vanish naturally into the larger field of the w'ooded 
hillside ; man’s calculated effort ceases at the embrace of an unsophisticated nature that can 
never be eliminated. It is this transition which marks the true garden architect, who alone 
know’s where to stay his hand. 
The Villa d’Este at Tivoli (Chap. XVII) is another work wdiich must always rank as one 
of the greatest creations of Italian garden art. It must be understood as a vast conception of 
the music of water. The great structural organ is, as it w’ere, a mere key to a scheme whose 
parent idea is that of so spreading the force of a mountain torrent over the descending 
slopes of the garden as to create a great tone poem of rushing water. The long 
terrace, with a hundred dripping fountains, conveys the idea of recitative. The foaming 
cascades are floods of sound that rise and fall with the varying volume of the waters. 
The aspiring single jet plays a fantasia of its own. In the face of an idea of this kind 
the excessive rusticity of some of the structural features is of minor importance. The 
Italian architect and sculptor w'ere apt in the later phases of the Renaissance to be misled 
by a false analogy of nature. That is not really natural which is most deliberately assimilated 
to the accidents of nature, as a column is no closer to nature, but really further removed, 
when it is sculptured as a tree with the bark on. The barocco satyr and fawn are degenerate in 
outraging of the modesty of nature, which does not fix the play of passion in an unyielding 
mould. Fewunore fatal steps w'ere taken in the Renaissance than those which smudged the lines 
of architectural propriety and lost the sense of a building art. The constructed rustic clift' 
