THE ITALIAN FORMAL GARDEN 
By A. D. F. HAMLIN 
ADJUNCT PROFESSOR. OF A RCHITEC'l'URE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
I. 
GARDEN is a portion of the earth’s surface humanized. 
Nature is subjected to the designer’s will; trees, grass, 
X A_ flowers and shrubs are made to do his bidding, and 
an ordered design takes the place of the capricious wildness 
of the primitive growth. Gardening, as one of the decorative 
arts, deals with the materials of the earth’s surface, and the 
vegetation and water which diversify and embellish it. In any 
style of gardening the results of the designer’s labors are, and 
must be, artificial, whether he seek to counterfeit the appear¬ 
ance of the primitive meadow, forest and thicket, or to arrange 
his combinations of earth, rock, plants and water upon some 
arbitrary and conventional system. The different schools of 
the art are distinguished largely by the degree to which they 
incline towards one or the other of these systems of treatment:— 
towards naturalistic picturesqueness, or towards monumental 
and artificial regularity. The Italian villa gardens of the 
Renaissance are the highest representative of the second 
system. 
Gardening is an art of peace and luxury, and, as an 
accompaniment of buildings, follows in the wake of architec¬ 
ture. “ Without it,” says Bacon, writing in Elizabeth’s time, 
“ buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks; and a man 
shall ever see that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, 
men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely.” As 
an art of luxury it fared poorly in the Dark and Middle Ages; 
but when the Renaissance revived the arts of ancient Rome in 
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the increasing sta¬ 
bility of the social order permitted the indulgence of personal 
luxury, gardening was revived with the other arts of antiquity, 
and its practice modelled after the suggestions offered by the 
ruins of ancient Roman prototypes. What these were we may 
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