GARDENS OF FLORENTINE HUMANISTS 
became an essential part of Italian gardens. In that 
strange romance printed at the Aldine Press in 1499, 
the Hypernotomachia of Francesco Colonna, Polyphilus 
and his beloved are led through an enchanted garden, 
where banquet-houses, temples, and statues stand in 
the midst of myrtle groves and labyrinths on the 
banks of a shining stream. The pages of this 
curious book are adorned with a profusion of wood- 
cuts, by some Venetian engraver, representing pergolas, 
fountains, sunk parterres, pillared loggie , clipped box 
and ilex trees of every variety, which give a good idea 
of the garden-architecture then in vogue. 
Many other delightful pictures of Tuscan gardens 
are to be found in the works of contemporary painters. 
Everyone who has visited the Campo Santo of Pisa 
will remember the gay knights and ladies seated on 
the grassy bank under the orange-groves in the famous 
fresco of the “ Triumph of Death,” and Puccio’s 
“ Garden of Eden,” with the rose-trellis and fruit 
trees, the song birds, and marble fountain adorned 
with lions’ heads. In the cells of San Marco, Fra 
Angelico shows us the Magdalen and her risen Lord 
walking in a garden planted with olive, cypress, and 
palm, and the Archangel bending before the lowly 
Virgin in a loggia opening on the convent garden, 
where pinks and daisies flower in the grass, and rose¬ 
bushes and cypresses rise behind the wooden paling. 
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