Paradise came from abroad
Mary Keen
GARDEN AND GROVE: THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE GARDEN IN THE ENGLISH IMAGINATION 1600-1750 by John Dixon Hunt
Dent, £25
It is generally assumed that nothing in particular led up to the English Landscape Movement, but that it was triggered off by a few articles in the Spectator and a nodding acquaintance with the works of Poussin, Claude and Salvator Rosa. It is also received knowledge that the 18th- century garden was something peculiarly English which represented a clean break with all the styles that went before; a reaction against the borrowed French geometry of clipped trees and straight avenues. We believe that out of thin air landscapes like Studley Royal in Yorkshire were conjured at the beginning of the 18th century, that Stourhead materialised about a quarter of a century later and that from then on Capability Brown swept away villages, flooded parks and threw up hills all over England in pursuit of the poet's feeling and the painter's eye. This revolu- tion in garden design was, we are con- vinced, a very English affair — give or take a little help from the Grand Tour — which has made our gardens the envy of the world; and ever since the Landscape Movement began, the Germans, the French and the Italians have copied our style, producing the tired Jardin Anglais, the dry Giardina Inglese and the Englische Garten where you may not walk upon the grass. At gardens we excel and making parks is our unaided national art.
Professor Dixon Hunt knows better. He sets out to change the map of garden history and for one reader at least he has pulled it off. His argument is that the so-called English Landscape Garden be- fore Capability Brown owed much to a continuing emulation of Italian models. The first half of his book contains some careful research on the travellers who went to Italy from 1600 and who recorded what they saw in the gardens there. The second half concentrates on an analysis of Italian garden features which were carried out in England, where the author demonstrates there was a long tradition of adapting Italian ideas. Most scholars seem to have missed this tradition and confused Italian features with French ones, which Professor Dixon Hunt shows are not the same thing at all. French gardens were forbidding and of a princely scope, Italian gardens were much more easily adapted, often piecemeal to a smaller scale. John Raymond at the Villa d'Este declared that 'this shall be my patterne for a country seat', but most travellers were content with less and all of them seem to have been fascinated by the varied and magical ele- ments which they found in Italian gardens.
I had always thought that the strongest influences on English 17th-century gardens were French and Dutch, and that Italian taste arrived in England only via France, but Professor Dixon Hunt proves that this is a mistaken assumption. The travellers were 'struck most of all by the variety of Italian gardens and they must have talked so much about what they had seen, that other people who never got as far as Italy were familiar with the style. John Evelyn the diarist, who emerges from this book as a pioneer of the Landscape Movement, rather than just the author of a treatise on woods, did go to Italy and created two gardens at Wolton and Albury which were influenced by what he had seen. Another literary figure, John Aubrey, never man- aged the journey, but for him the Italian influence was just as strong.
Garden and Grove is a dense and scho- larly book with too many ideas to absorb at a single reading, but what is retained after only a day with the book will do for a start. In it we learn that Italian gardens are 'Heaven's Center, Nature's Lap and Para- dise's only Map'; that views are character- istic of Italian gardens and not of French; that for two centuries the English educated man was drawn to the cult of Old Rome and to the sort of agriculture which Virgil wrote about in the Georgics. (Addison actually went to Italy to identify the sites mentioned in classical verse and Milton, Whose descriptions of the 'garden of Eden have always been regarded as the gospel of the Landscape Movement, 'could not have laid his Paradise had he not seen the gardens of Italy'). Italian gardens, we find, are the places where the visitor is stopped by an inscription promising rare things and enchanted places and is never dis- appointed: they are theatrical spaces and anthologies of the fuller world and they were often meant to be initiators of compli- cated trains of thought. They also inspired mechanical devices in English gardens, like the three rainbows at Wilton which could be made to appear at will, but whose secret disappeared with the death of their inven- tor. They were 'a world of wonders in one closet shut . . .'. It is all a far cry from Gardener's World and the hints on Gro- 1.3ags and tomatoes which is what garden- ing has come to mean today. Any patriotic insistence on the English- ness of the Landscape Movement seems rather silly after reading John Dixon Hunt's book. Even Walpole is made to look a fool as he describes Kent's work as an 'Adieu to canals, circular basons and cascades tumbling down marble steps, that last magnificence of Italian and French villas', when you see the illustration of Kent's treatment of the Vale of Venus at Rousham, where the rustic cascades of the Villa Aldobrandini are translated to the Oxfordshire countryside. Batty Langley emerges none too well-either. The frontis- piece to his New Principles of Gardening in ,1728 is an engraving of the gardens at the villa Doria Pamphili. The only new princi- Ple in the design is the substitution of an English ruin for the Italian baroque foun- tain. The new English garden was not such an- Anglo-Saxon brainwave after all but was born of a direct tradition from the Ilassies through the Renaissance, in much the same way as our art and literature Were. It all seems so simple and explains so much that was previously• unexplained ab- out the landscape phenomenon that I „cannot now imagine why nobody has spot- t_ed it before. Congratulations to Professor "Ion Hunt for his intriguing and scholarly research, which has produced one of the 111°st enjoyable gardening books to come MY way for a long time.
Previous page
