ITALIAN GARDENS OF THE RENAISSANCE 
as the next Pope, and Raphael, who stood in high favour 
at the Vatican, could hardly decline the new commis- 
sion that was pressed upon him. More than this, the 
task was a congenial one, and called out all his 
sympathies. 
Since the young painter of Urbino first came to 
Rome in 1508, he had lived in close intercourse with 
his fellow-citizen Bramante. Ever ready to learn, the 
wonderful youth had quickly absorbed the great archi¬ 
tect’s principles and caught his enthusiasm for classical 
art. As he wrote to Castiglione, soon after he was 
appointed architect of St. Peter’s: “ I long to find out 
more about the form of classical buildings, and yet 
I know not if my dreams may not end as the flight 
of Icarus.” When he took that famous excursion to 
Tivoli with Bembo and Castiglione and their Venetian 
friends in April 1516, the Cardinal’s Vigna may already 
have been in his mind. He found inspiration, there 
can be little doubt, in the stupendous fragments of 
Hadrian’s villa, and reproduced certain features of the 
ruins in the gardens on Monte Mario. We have no 
positive information as to the date when the building of 
the villa was actually begun, but we know that con¬ 
siderable progress had been made by June 15 1 9 > ant ^ 
that the work was already exciting great interest at 
the Vatican. This we learn from a letter in which 
Castiglione, writing to Isabella, after describing the new 
84 
