Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2021.1982568
John Dixon Hunt
This book’s first chapter in called ‘Introducing Humphry Repton’, which is a slight surprise, until some reader gets into it and realizes, first, how much Repton differed from his (perhaps more famous) predecessor — ‘Capability’ Brown — and then is faced with Tom Williamson’s question, ‘Why another Book on Repton?” He acknowledges, rightly, two of the most recent and crucial books by Stephen Daniels (1999) and Alain Rogger (2007), but then in later chapters enlarges upon that introductory one by explaining how his own approach adds substantial and extremely welcome insights and directions. Those chapters focus on the shape of Repon’s career, the working methods of his business, central notions of ‘Character’ and ‘Appropriation’, an emphasis in ‘Domesticity’ and ‘Cheerfulness’, and finally on the influence of contemporaries and social change that shaped his style. Even for those who know Repton may find the Introduction, and its ‘Epilogue: Repton’s Legacy’, useful ways to enter into this book. They bracket an authoritative and often fresh examination of his career and its contributions to national landscape history (and, briefly, to that legacy in the USA). If individual aspects of his proposals did not achieve wide acceptance, it was nonetheless that his ‘overall style’ was well suited to the needs of contemporary society, to which he brought ‘hard work’ and exceptional intelligence. He began his professional practice at a point when attitudes and approaches to landscape were ‘particularly suited to the times’ and to his abilities. Yet, as the ‘Epilogue’ argues, his work ‘in many respects did not fully emerge until the twentieth century’ — Williamson notes Denys Lasdun’s perception that his influence was apparent in Williamson’s own campus at the University of East Anglia. (One wonders whether that Reptonian influence and emphasis might tempt Williamson into undertaking another book that studies this legacy). It is a daunting book to review, in part because Williamson largely refuses to contribute to the standard and often too generalized narrative of 18century English gardening; to this he brings a widely researched enquiry into actual sites, either in the Red Books or into whatever original designs have survived: hence an image of Sheringham Hall, designed by the Repton father and son in 1820, or the remains of a grotto or ‘Souterrein’ that remains in an educational establishment at Ashridge. One of Williamson’s more useful remarks is to note that we cannot take refuge in our usual safe havens. He cautions on several occasions against taking on too readily connections between Repton’s style and his clients, for example, or against ‘oversimplified stories’ and approaches that are too closely focused on one approach. So while he properly praises Daniel’s approach from ‘historical and geographical geography’, or Rogger’s art historical discussion of the Red Books (notably their concern with representation and Repton’s concern with what he wanted t
{"title":"Humphry Repton. Landscape Design in an Age of Revolution","authors":"John Dixon Hunt","doi":"10.1080/14601176.2021.1982568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.1982568","url":null,"abstract":"This book’s first chapter in called ‘Introducing Humphry Repton’, which is a slight surprise, until some reader gets into it and realizes, first, how much Repton differed from his (perhaps more famous) predecessor — ‘Capability’ Brown — and then is faced with Tom Williamson’s question, ‘Why another Book on Repton?” He acknowledges, rightly, two of the most recent and crucial books by Stephen Daniels (1999) and Alain Rogger (2007), but then in later chapters enlarges upon that introductory one by explaining how his own approach adds substantial and extremely welcome insights and directions. Those chapters focus on the shape of Repon’s career, the working methods of his business, central notions of ‘Character’ and ‘Appropriation’, an emphasis in ‘Domesticity’ and ‘Cheerfulness’, and finally on the influence of contemporaries and social change that shaped his style. Even for those who know Repton may find the Introduction, and its ‘Epilogue: Repton’s Legacy’, useful ways to enter into this book. They bracket an authoritative and often fresh examination of his career and its contributions to national landscape history (and, briefly, to that legacy in the USA). If individual aspects of his proposals did not achieve wide acceptance, it was nonetheless that his ‘overall style’ was well suited to the needs of contemporary society, to which he brought ‘hard work’ and exceptional intelligence. He began his professional practice at a point when attitudes and approaches to landscape were ‘particularly suited to the times’ and to his abilities. Yet, as the ‘Epilogue’ argues, his work ‘in many respects did not fully emerge until the twentieth century’ — Williamson notes Denys Lasdun’s perception that his influence was apparent in Williamson’s own campus at the University of East Anglia. (One wonders whether that Reptonian influence and emphasis might tempt Williamson into undertaking another book that studies this legacy). It is a daunting book to review, in part because Williamson largely refuses to contribute to the standard and often too generalized narrative of 18century English gardening; to this he brings a widely researched enquiry into actual sites, either in the Red Books or into whatever original designs have survived: hence an image of Sheringham Hall, designed by the Repton father and son in 1820, or the remains of a grotto or ‘Souterrein’ that remains in an educational establishment at Ashridge. One of Williamson’s more useful remarks is to note that we cannot take refuge in our usual safe havens. He cautions on several occasions against taking on too readily connections between Repton’s style and his clients, for example, or against ‘oversimplified stories’ and approaches that are too closely focused on one approach. So while he properly praises Daniel’s approach from ‘historical and geographical geography’, or Rogger’s art historical discussion of the Red Books (notably their concern with representation and Repton’s concern with what he wanted t","PeriodicalId":53992,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF GARDENS & DESIGNED LANDSCAPES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49229862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-03DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2021.1984697
K. Gu
One of the most important and significant elements of a Chinese garden is the man-made feature of artificial mountains. This element embodies the cultural theme of shanshui 山水(mountains and rivers) and produces a distinctive and recognisable visual effect. Scholars note that artificial mountains became a principal feature of garden design during the 17th century, a time when garden culture was especially prosperous. In the lower Yangtze river delta area of Jiangnan during the late-Ming period, the artificial mountain became almost indispensable for a garden. Crucial insights about the art of mountain making in 17th-century Jiangnan have been provided by the work of contemporary scholars who base their work on some important historical texts such as ‘Biography of Zhang Nanyuan’ (Zhang Nanyuan zhuan 張南垣傳) by Wu Weiye 吳偉業 (1609–1672), Craft of Gardens (Yuan ye園冶, c.1630–35) by Ji Cheng 計成 (b.1582) and Casual Expressions of Idle Feeling (Xianqing ouji 閑情偶寄) by Li Yu 李漁 (1611– 1680). There is, however, another text that may provide important new insight into the art of 17th-century artificial mountain making. ‘On Artificial Mountains’ (Jiashan shuo假山說), a translation of which is appended to this article, was written by Ye Xie 葉燮 (1627–1703), a well-known literary theorist whose work The Origins of Poetry (Yuan shi 原詩) is considered the first serious attempt at a comprehensive and organised poetics since Liu Xie’s 劉勰 (c. 465–522) The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕 龍). Mostly elided by contemporary scholarship until now, only two texts have afforded it some limited discussion. Jin Xuezhi notices Ye’s ideas of zhen 真 (true/natural) and jia 假 (false/artificial) in his book Chinese Garden Aesthetics (Zhongguo yuanlin meixue中國園林美學). An essay by Qiu Chunlin introduces Ye’s questioning of ‘garden imitating painting’ with a brief discussion about the historical background. Unfortunately, both of these mentions of Ye Xie and his ideas tend to be somewhat simplistic as neither enters into an accurate and penetrating understanding of the garden-making ideas of the 17th century. Ye Xie’s text is somewhat unusual in Chinese garden history because of the rare form it takes. Ye Xie uses dialogue to express his ideas and to offer a critique of the opposing view. It is precisely this form that carries a special theoretical and historical significance, and helps us to elaborate our understanding of apparently conflicting ideas about artificial mountain making. The polemic within the essay works to evoke the notion that, while some ideas had dominance over others, in fact a variety of ideas on artificial mountain making were present in the specific region and period. In this text, both the idea that Ye opposes and the idea he supports can be distinguished by the two key concepts of ‘painting-like’ (ruhua 如畫) and ‘lifelike’ (rusheng 如生), respectively. The presence of both of these concepts prompts a further study of the text’s historical con
{"title":"‘Painting-like’ and ‘lifelike’: Two ideas in artificial mountain making in Ye Xie’s ‘on artificial mountains’","authors":"K. Gu","doi":"10.1080/14601176.2021.1984697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.1984697","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most important and significant elements of a Chinese garden is the man-made feature of artificial mountains. This element embodies the cultural theme of shanshui 山水(mountains and rivers) and produces a distinctive and recognisable visual effect. Scholars note that artificial mountains became a principal feature of garden design during the 17th century, a time when garden culture was especially prosperous. In the lower Yangtze river delta area of Jiangnan during the late-Ming period, the artificial mountain became almost indispensable for a garden. Crucial insights about the art of mountain making in 17th-century Jiangnan have been provided by the work of contemporary scholars who base their work on some important historical texts such as ‘Biography of Zhang Nanyuan’ (Zhang Nanyuan zhuan 張南垣傳) by Wu Weiye 吳偉業 (1609–1672), Craft of Gardens (Yuan ye園冶, c.1630–35) by Ji Cheng 計成 (b.1582) and Casual Expressions of Idle Feeling (Xianqing ouji 閑情偶寄) by Li Yu 李漁 (1611– 1680). There is, however, another text that may provide important new insight into the art of 17th-century artificial mountain making. ‘On Artificial Mountains’ (Jiashan shuo假山說), a translation of which is appended to this article, was written by Ye Xie 葉燮 (1627–1703), a well-known literary theorist whose work The Origins of Poetry (Yuan shi 原詩) is considered the first serious attempt at a comprehensive and organised poetics since Liu Xie’s 劉勰 (c. 465–522) The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (Wenxin diaolong 文心雕 龍). Mostly elided by contemporary scholarship until now, only two texts have afforded it some limited discussion. Jin Xuezhi notices Ye’s ideas of zhen 真 (true/natural) and jia 假 (false/artificial) in his book Chinese Garden Aesthetics (Zhongguo yuanlin meixue中國園林美學). An essay by Qiu Chunlin introduces Ye’s questioning of ‘garden imitating painting’ with a brief discussion about the historical background. Unfortunately, both of these mentions of Ye Xie and his ideas tend to be somewhat simplistic as neither enters into an accurate and penetrating understanding of the garden-making ideas of the 17th century. Ye Xie’s text is somewhat unusual in Chinese garden history because of the rare form it takes. Ye Xie uses dialogue to express his ideas and to offer a critique of the opposing view. It is precisely this form that carries a special theoretical and historical significance, and helps us to elaborate our understanding of apparently conflicting ideas about artificial mountain making. The polemic within the essay works to evoke the notion that, while some ideas had dominance over others, in fact a variety of ideas on artificial mountain making were present in the specific region and period. In this text, both the idea that Ye opposes and the idea he supports can be distinguished by the two key concepts of ‘painting-like’ (ruhua 如畫) and ‘lifelike’ (rusheng 如生), respectively. The presence of both of these concepts prompts a further study of the text’s historical con","PeriodicalId":53992,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF GARDENS & DESIGNED LANDSCAPES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44378637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Opportunity and plausibility in landscape meanings","authors":"John Dixon Hunt","doi":"10.1080/14601176.2021.1923996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.1923996","url":null,"abstract":"(2021). Opportunity and plausibility in landscape meanings. Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 197-202.","PeriodicalId":53992,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF GARDENS & DESIGNED LANDSCAPES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138541837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2021.1859267
L. Morgan
In 1564, Pierfrancesco ‘Vicino’ Orsini wrote to the humanist Annibale Caro to request advice about the frescoes of a loggia of his palazzo in the town of Bomarzo. Orsini had already chosen the subject — a Gigantomachy, or Battle of Gods and Giants — but he needed Caro’s learned assistance to work out the details of the cycle. Orsini’s choice of subject indicates that he intended to create a relationship between the imagery of the loggia and the Sacro Bosco in the valley directly below, which he had begun to lay out more than ten years earlier in c. 1552. The figures of the wood were conceived and executed on a colossal scale; and the sculptural group of Orlando and the Woodsman derived from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532) explicitly depicts a battle between giants (Figure 1). In this sense, then, the theme of the frescoes that Orsini planned for his loggia was supposed to link the palazzo and what Caro, in his reply of 12 December 1564, called the ‘cose stravaganti e soprannaturali’ of the wood. In contrast to the detailed iconographic scheme that, as Clare Robertson has made clear, Caro devised with reference to ‘the mass of esoteric matter made easily available in the new mythographic handbooks,’ the Sacro Bosco lacks a clear narrative program. This absence of an obvious (or even recondite) interpretative key has inspired a wide range of readings, but no consensus about Orsini’s intentions or the cumulative meaning of the statuary and structures of the wood has been reached. The literature on the Sacro Bosco has become large, although it is widely dispersed and not easy to assimilate. Nevertheless, the main trajectories of interpretation can be summarized as follows. One early approach could be described as ‘cross-cultural’. Mario Praz was among the first to propose in 1953 that the carved war elephant supporting a castle refers to India. He speculated that knowledge of Indian sculptural practices could have reached Bomarzo through travelers’ tales. Horst Bredekamp (1985) developed this hypothesis further, arguing (unconvincingly) that a handful of the monuments of the Sacro Bosco, including the Fighting Giants, the Tortoise, and the Mask of Madness, are Pre-Columbian in inspiration. Another recurring premise has been that the Sacro Bosco deliberately alludes to the Etruscan history of the region. Beginning with Ezio Bacino in 1951, and now championed by Katherine Coty, this school of thought holds that the key to Orsini’s creation lies in local campanilismo and what has been called the ‘Etruscomania’ of the sixteenth century. The scholar Annius of Viterbo’s fabricated history of the Alto Lazio, in which he claimed that the civilization of the area was both more ancient and more noble than that of Rome, epitomizes this local emphasis. Orsini would surely have been aware of Annius’s widely-read Antiquities (1498), which was translated into Italian by his friend and family biographer Francesco Sansovino. The Sacro Bosco also contains a
1564年，Pierfrancesco“Vicino”Orsini写信给人文主义者Annibale Caro，请求对他位于Bomarzo镇的宫殿的一处长廊的壁画提出建议。奥尔西尼已经选定了主题——《巨人之战》，或者《众神与巨人之战》，但他需要卡罗的渊博知识帮助他找出这个循环的细节。奥尔西尼对主题的选择表明，他打算在凉廊的意象与正下方山谷中的圣坛之间建立一种关系，这是他在十多年前的1552年开始绘制的。这些木头的形象是在一个巨大的规模上构思和制作的;从这个意义上说，奥尔西尼为他的长廊设计的壁画主题应该是将宫殿和卡罗在1564年12月12日的回信中所说的木材的“亲密的stravaganti e soprannaturali”联系起来。正如克莱尔·罗伯逊(Clare Robertson)明确指出的那样，卡罗参照“新神话手册中容易获得的大量深奥事物”设计了详细的图像方案，与之相反，圣坛缺乏清晰的叙事程序。这种明显的(甚至是深奥的)解释关键的缺失激发了广泛的解读，但对于奥尔西尼的意图或雕像和木材结构的累积意义尚未达成共识。关于Sacro Bosco的文献已经变得很大，尽管它分布广泛，不容易被吸收。然而，解释的主要轨迹可以概括如下。一种早期的方法可以被描述为“跨文化”。1953年，马里奥·普拉茨(Mario Praz)是最早提出支撑城堡的雕刻战象指印度的人之一。他推测，波马佐对印度雕塑实践的了解可能是通过旅行者的故事传到他那里的。霍斯特·布里德坎普(1985)进一步发展了这一假设，他(不令人信服地)认为，圣博斯克的一些纪念碑，包括战斗巨人、乌龟和疯狂面具，都是前哥伦布时期的灵感。另一个反复出现的前提是Sacro Bosco故意暗指该地区的伊特鲁里亚历史。从1951年的埃齐奥·巴基诺开始，现在由凯瑟琳·科蒂支持，这个思想流派认为奥尔西尼创作的关键在于当地的鼓乐和16世纪被称为“伊特鲁斯科马尼亚”。学者Annius of Viterbo编造了上拉齐奥的历史，他声称该地区的文明比罗马更古老、更高贵，这是对当地重视的缩影。奥尔西尼肯定知道安纽斯广为流传的《古物》(1498)，这本书是由他的朋友兼家族传记作者弗朗西斯科·桑索维诺翻译成意大利语的。圣坛也有一个仿伊特鲁里亚墓穴;它的雕塑和周围地区现存的墓地一样，都是用
{"title":"‘Bizzarrie del boschetto del Signor Vicino’: the figurative language of the Sacro Bosco","authors":"L. Morgan","doi":"10.1080/14601176.2021.1859267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.1859267","url":null,"abstract":"In 1564, Pierfrancesco ‘Vicino’ Orsini wrote to the humanist Annibale Caro to request advice about the frescoes of a loggia of his palazzo in the town of Bomarzo. Orsini had already chosen the subject — a Gigantomachy, or Battle of Gods and Giants — but he needed Caro’s learned assistance to work out the details of the cycle. Orsini’s choice of subject indicates that he intended to create a relationship between the imagery of the loggia and the Sacro Bosco in the valley directly below, which he had begun to lay out more than ten years earlier in c. 1552. The figures of the wood were conceived and executed on a colossal scale; and the sculptural group of Orlando and the Woodsman derived from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532) explicitly depicts a battle between giants (Figure 1). In this sense, then, the theme of the frescoes that Orsini planned for his loggia was supposed to link the palazzo and what Caro, in his reply of 12 December 1564, called the ‘cose stravaganti e soprannaturali’ of the wood. In contrast to the detailed iconographic scheme that, as Clare Robertson has made clear, Caro devised with reference to ‘the mass of esoteric matter made easily available in the new mythographic handbooks,’ the Sacro Bosco lacks a clear narrative program. This absence of an obvious (or even recondite) interpretative key has inspired a wide range of readings, but no consensus about Orsini’s intentions or the cumulative meaning of the statuary and structures of the wood has been reached. The literature on the Sacro Bosco has become large, although it is widely dispersed and not easy to assimilate. Nevertheless, the main trajectories of interpretation can be summarized as follows. One early approach could be described as ‘cross-cultural’. Mario Praz was among the first to propose in 1953 that the carved war elephant supporting a castle refers to India. He speculated that knowledge of Indian sculptural practices could have reached Bomarzo through travelers’ tales. Horst Bredekamp (1985) developed this hypothesis further, arguing (unconvincingly) that a handful of the monuments of the Sacro Bosco, including the Fighting Giants, the Tortoise, and the Mask of Madness, are Pre-Columbian in inspiration. Another recurring premise has been that the Sacro Bosco deliberately alludes to the Etruscan history of the region. Beginning with Ezio Bacino in 1951, and now championed by Katherine Coty, this school of thought holds that the key to Orsini’s creation lies in local campanilismo and what has been called the ‘Etruscomania’ of the sixteenth century. The scholar Annius of Viterbo’s fabricated history of the Alto Lazio, in which he claimed that the civilization of the area was both more ancient and more noble than that of Rome, epitomizes this local emphasis. Orsini would surely have been aware of Annius’s widely-read Antiquities (1498), which was translated into Italian by his friend and family biographer Francesco Sansovino. The Sacro Bosco also contains a ","PeriodicalId":53992,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF GARDENS & DESIGNED LANDSCAPES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14601176.2021.1859267","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47602071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2021.1854504
A. Tchikine
Scholars reveal odd hesitance, almost unease, in trying to situate the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo among the conventional typologies of landscape architecture. Is it truly a garden? And, if not, what else could it be — a villa, a park, or perhaps a grove, but sacred to what or to whom? Standard Italian glossaries offer little guidance in that respect. The word bosco, which means ‘wood’, evoked vernacular landscapes, where densely forested areas alternated with lush meadows and tilled fields. Although rife with well-known dangers, these patches of woodland were not necessarily seen as wilderness. To the eye of a landowner, they represented a productive resource that promised a range of materials and foodstuffs: from timber for construction and firewood for fuel to acorns for the pigs, chestnuts for the peasants, and truffles for the elite. Boschetto, Vicino Orsini’s preferred name for his creation, had less somber or utilitarian associations. Whether natural or curated (with parallel rows of trees composed of specimens of the same size and age to facilitate surveying and felling), it was primarily a place of leisure: of amorous encounters, hunting parties, and recreational strolls. The same word, however, could also designate fowling grounds that made it synonymous with ragnaia. A related term, selvatico (from selva or silva meaning ‘forest’ or ‘thicket’), referred to areas of imitated woodland within the garden’s confines. Dense but geometrically ordered and regularly spaced, this artificial wilderness helped mitigate the transition between designed and vernacular landscapes, blurring the boundaries of a property to blend it with the natural surroundings. In early modern imagination, bosco, therefore, represented a well-defined type of landscape, its sylvan aspect usually conveyed by a predominantly arboreal palette and a distinct system of planting and orientation. In this regard, it resembled barco or hunting park — although, not always intended as a game preserve, it did not have to be walled and thus lacked the inherent character of an enclosure. The garden proper, giardino, lay on the opposite end of the notional scale of wilderness and cultivation. Usually given a terraced layout with commanding vistas and manicured parterres, it retained many features of an agricultural property as exemplified by dividing hedges, irrigation ditches, and planting beds. By contrast, bosco, even when governed by the same geometric logic, claimed no such control over the visitors’ vision and movement, allowing for oblique views and meandering routes independent of the orthogonal patterns of agriculture. In its categorization as bosco, Bomarzo was hardly unique among other evocations or imitations of wilderness in early modern Italian garden design. A notable example from the same period was the Casino of Pius IV in the Vatican, begun as a woodland retreat for the ailing Pope Paul IV (r. 1555–59). Known to contemporaries as the ‘Casino del Bosco’, this pleasure hous
{"title":"Among the wonders of Bomarzo: the sylvan landscape, the paragone, and memory games in the Orsini Sacro Bosco","authors":"A. Tchikine","doi":"10.1080/14601176.2021.1854504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.1854504","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars reveal odd hesitance, almost unease, in trying to situate the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo among the conventional typologies of landscape architecture. Is it truly a garden? And, if not, what else could it be — a villa, a park, or perhaps a grove, but sacred to what or to whom? Standard Italian glossaries offer little guidance in that respect. The word bosco, which means ‘wood’, evoked vernacular landscapes, where densely forested areas alternated with lush meadows and tilled fields. Although rife with well-known dangers, these patches of woodland were not necessarily seen as wilderness. To the eye of a landowner, they represented a productive resource that promised a range of materials and foodstuffs: from timber for construction and firewood for fuel to acorns for the pigs, chestnuts for the peasants, and truffles for the elite. Boschetto, Vicino Orsini’s preferred name for his creation, had less somber or utilitarian associations. Whether natural or curated (with parallel rows of trees composed of specimens of the same size and age to facilitate surveying and felling), it was primarily a place of leisure: of amorous encounters, hunting parties, and recreational strolls. The same word, however, could also designate fowling grounds that made it synonymous with ragnaia. A related term, selvatico (from selva or silva meaning ‘forest’ or ‘thicket’), referred to areas of imitated woodland within the garden’s confines. Dense but geometrically ordered and regularly spaced, this artificial wilderness helped mitigate the transition between designed and vernacular landscapes, blurring the boundaries of a property to blend it with the natural surroundings. In early modern imagination, bosco, therefore, represented a well-defined type of landscape, its sylvan aspect usually conveyed by a predominantly arboreal palette and a distinct system of planting and orientation. In this regard, it resembled barco or hunting park — although, not always intended as a game preserve, it did not have to be walled and thus lacked the inherent character of an enclosure. The garden proper, giardino, lay on the opposite end of the notional scale of wilderness and cultivation. Usually given a terraced layout with commanding vistas and manicured parterres, it retained many features of an agricultural property as exemplified by dividing hedges, irrigation ditches, and planting beds. By contrast, bosco, even when governed by the same geometric logic, claimed no such control over the visitors’ vision and movement, allowing for oblique views and meandering routes independent of the orthogonal patterns of agriculture. In its categorization as bosco, Bomarzo was hardly unique among other evocations or imitations of wilderness in early modern Italian garden design. A notable example from the same period was the Casino of Pius IV in the Vatican, begun as a woodland retreat for the ailing Pope Paul IV (r. 1555–59). Known to contemporaries as the ‘Casino del Bosco’, this pleasure hous","PeriodicalId":53992,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF GARDENS & DESIGNED LANDSCAPES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14601176.2021.1854504","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48292703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2021.1882801
A. Tchikine
... Having got off the train at Attigliano-Bomarzo (it was 6:20 am), we discovered that Bomarzo was connected to the railway station in quite a primitive way. In fact, it was necessary first to use a ferry; one had to traverse an impassible marshy area to reach it and then to walk for 6 km on foot along a poorly maintained horse track. The town appeared to us clinging to the ridge of a rock dominated by the castle (one of the Orsini castles), which now houses the municipal offices. In a small valley below the town we found, rising on a plateau, the temple that we were looking for, from which point on one could discern some colossal statues that compelled us to make a quick reconnaissance of the area. The sight of the whole architectural ensemble, half-concealed by shrubbery, confounded our vision, astounded us, and made us forget the purpose of our journey. When, at 3 pm, we had to leave the area to avail of the ferry (which operated only until sunset), a decision had already matured among us. We no longer wanted to limit our research to the temple, but to include the whole architectural ensemble in an attempt to capture its overall design, which the villa’s ingenious creator (for, indeed, we were dealing with the remains of the former Villa Orsini at Bomarzo) had used as the basis for his project. Monsters, fountains, nymphaea, and the strange leaning house, which seemed as though it was trying to regain equilibrium, captivated our imagination and compelled us to master the language of these monuments, making them the object of our study. A realization of this desire turned out anything but easy. In fact, time and human actions cut the binding thread that had connected different pieces and imposed on us research tasks that ranged from excavations to interpreting shapeless ruins that emerged from the earth. (The greatest damage seems to have been caused by treasure-hunters attracted by the hoard that, according to legend, lay hidden in the area.) Besides, the distance from Rome imposed on us considerable material costs. A great difficulty we faced was that vast amount of work had to be carried out in the uneven terrain full of scrubs and rocky outcroppings, which time and again made our operations very hard. We managed all along; and, initially by using steps and then with the help of a tachymeter [a surveying instrument for measuring distances], produced the first plan of the villa. With accurate measurements, we captured the dimensions of the monsters and every part of the temple. (In the latter’s case, for the sake of precision, we even had to hoist ourselves precariously to the cupola.) And yet, all along, we still could not find the binding thread connecting various pieces, which, for this reason, appeared to us sadly isolated from each another in space. We decided to move in and live on site. The ‘leaning house’ offered us a hard and cold, almost hostile, dwelling, but hardly anything else in its state of abandonment. It could not even give
{"title":"(Mis)understanding Bomarzo: the Sacro Bosco between history and myth","authors":"A. Tchikine","doi":"10.1080/14601176.2021.1882801","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.1882801","url":null,"abstract":"... Having got off the train at Attigliano-Bomarzo (it was 6:20 am), we discovered that Bomarzo was connected to the railway station in quite a primitive way. In fact, it was necessary first to use a ferry; one had to traverse an impassible marshy area to reach it and then to walk for 6 km on foot along a poorly maintained horse track. The town appeared to us clinging to the ridge of a rock dominated by the castle (one of the Orsini castles), which now houses the municipal offices. In a small valley below the town we found, rising on a plateau, the temple that we were looking for, from which point on one could discern some colossal statues that compelled us to make a quick reconnaissance of the area. The sight of the whole architectural ensemble, half-concealed by shrubbery, confounded our vision, astounded us, and made us forget the purpose of our journey. When, at 3 pm, we had to leave the area to avail of the ferry (which operated only until sunset), a decision had already matured among us. We no longer wanted to limit our research to the temple, but to include the whole architectural ensemble in an attempt to capture its overall design, which the villa’s ingenious creator (for, indeed, we were dealing with the remains of the former Villa Orsini at Bomarzo) had used as the basis for his project. Monsters, fountains, nymphaea, and the strange leaning house, which seemed as though it was trying to regain equilibrium, captivated our imagination and compelled us to master the language of these monuments, making them the object of our study. A realization of this desire turned out anything but easy. In fact, time and human actions cut the binding thread that had connected different pieces and imposed on us research tasks that ranged from excavations to interpreting shapeless ruins that emerged from the earth. (The greatest damage seems to have been caused by treasure-hunters attracted by the hoard that, according to legend, lay hidden in the area.) Besides, the distance from Rome imposed on us considerable material costs. A great difficulty we faced was that vast amount of work had to be carried out in the uneven terrain full of scrubs and rocky outcroppings, which time and again made our operations very hard. We managed all along; and, initially by using steps and then with the help of a tachymeter [a surveying instrument for measuring distances], produced the first plan of the villa. With accurate measurements, we captured the dimensions of the monsters and every part of the temple. (In the latter’s case, for the sake of precision, we even had to hoist ourselves precariously to the cupola.) And yet, all along, we still could not find the binding thread connecting various pieces, which, for this reason, appeared to us sadly isolated from each another in space. We decided to move in and live on site. The ‘leaning house’ offered us a hard and cold, almost hostile, dwelling, but hardly anything else in its state of abandonment. It could not even give","PeriodicalId":53992,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF GARDENS & DESIGNED LANDSCAPES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14601176.2021.1882801","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44273293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2021.1885855
K. Coty
Rarely are the characteristics of a people and the region they live in so intimately linked as they are in Tuscia. In the silence, nestled between the copper-colored walls of the forre (almost like churches excavated from tufo, whose vault is the sky), there resonates an arcane but unmistakably present air of subtle enchantment. The landscape, the rocks, the trees, the air itself, are impregnated with it.
{"title":"‘Nel cuore di tufo’: vernacular architecture and the genius loci of Bomarzo","authors":"K. Coty","doi":"10.1080/14601176.2021.1885855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.1885855","url":null,"abstract":"Rarely are the characteristics of a people and the region they live in so intimately linked as they are in Tuscia. In the silence, nestled between the copper-colored walls of the forre (almost like churches excavated from tufo, whose vault is the sky), there resonates an arcane but unmistakably present air of subtle enchantment. The landscape, the rocks, the trees, the air itself, are impregnated with it.","PeriodicalId":53992,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF GARDENS & DESIGNED LANDSCAPES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14601176.2021.1885855","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44639377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2021.1866338
J. Beardsley
Rediscovered by the Surrealists and embraced in popular culture, Bomarzo is aguably as important a twentiethand twenty-first-century landscape as a sixteenth-century one. Few places are as revealing of Bomarzo’s meanings and values in recent culture as Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden, built near the small hill town of Capalbio in coastal southern Tuscany between the late 1970s and the artist’s death in 2002. Reportedly conceived in a dream, the Tarot Garden occupies about 14 acres on the side of a hill over the remains of a stone quarry, sometimes described as an Etruscan site. It is filled with the artist’s fanciful sculptures, fabricated on steel armatures coated with concrete and then covered in ceramic, mirror, and glass mosaic. As the name of the garden suggests, its imagery was derived from the 22 cards of the major arcana, one of the five suits of the Tarot, a Renaissance-era card game. What does this striking twentieth-century garden have to do with Bomarzo? Initially, it might seem, very little. Niki de Saint Phalle was born in France in 1930 and raised primarily in the United States. She came to prominence with a group of French assemblage and performance artists known as the Nouveau Realists in Paris in the 1960s. Her particular trademark was firing bullets at canvases encrusted with household implements set in plaster and hung with bags of pigment that spattered on impact, creating what she called ‘shooting paintings’. The first one was made in Paris in 1961, around the time French police killed dozens of protestors during a mass demonstration in support of the Algerian National Liberation Front. But she came to be better known eventually for large, painted plaster or concrete and mosaic figures of big-breasted and ample-bottomed women she called Nanas, who populated both her gallery and museum exhibitions as well as public spaces around the world. Large-scale fantastical assemblages of these figures were always a substantial part of her output as an artist, from the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal to the Stravinsky Fountain outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Figure 1). Several of these installations, including the Stravinsky Fountain, were made in collaboration with her on-again, off-again lover, Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, known for creating enormous kinetic machines, some of which self-destructed in dramatic performances. Saint Phalle’s ambitions for these large environments were in some measure both political and artistic: she wanted to prove, she said, that women could work on a monumental scale just as capably as men. If the Tarot Garden owed its origins to a dream, it was a dream with many waking elements. A chronology on the garden’s official website traces its beginnings to the artist’s 1955 visit to Antoni Gaudí’s early twentieth-century Parc Güell in Barcelona, with its imaginative botanical and zoological imagery in colorful mosaic and stone (Figures 2 and 3). The artist and her friends thereafter became connoisseur
{"title":"Alchemy and Archetype? Bomarzo and Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden","authors":"J. Beardsley","doi":"10.1080/14601176.2021.1866338","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.1866338","url":null,"abstract":"Rediscovered by the Surrealists and embraced in popular culture, Bomarzo is aguably as important a twentiethand twenty-first-century landscape as a sixteenth-century one. Few places are as revealing of Bomarzo’s meanings and values in recent culture as Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden, built near the small hill town of Capalbio in coastal southern Tuscany between the late 1970s and the artist’s death in 2002. Reportedly conceived in a dream, the Tarot Garden occupies about 14 acres on the side of a hill over the remains of a stone quarry, sometimes described as an Etruscan site. It is filled with the artist’s fanciful sculptures, fabricated on steel armatures coated with concrete and then covered in ceramic, mirror, and glass mosaic. As the name of the garden suggests, its imagery was derived from the 22 cards of the major arcana, one of the five suits of the Tarot, a Renaissance-era card game. What does this striking twentieth-century garden have to do with Bomarzo? Initially, it might seem, very little. Niki de Saint Phalle was born in France in 1930 and raised primarily in the United States. She came to prominence with a group of French assemblage and performance artists known as the Nouveau Realists in Paris in the 1960s. Her particular trademark was firing bullets at canvases encrusted with household implements set in plaster and hung with bags of pigment that spattered on impact, creating what she called ‘shooting paintings’. The first one was made in Paris in 1961, around the time French police killed dozens of protestors during a mass demonstration in support of the Algerian National Liberation Front. But she came to be better known eventually for large, painted plaster or concrete and mosaic figures of big-breasted and ample-bottomed women she called Nanas, who populated both her gallery and museum exhibitions as well as public spaces around the world. Large-scale fantastical assemblages of these figures were always a substantial part of her output as an artist, from the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal to the Stravinsky Fountain outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Figure 1). Several of these installations, including the Stravinsky Fountain, were made in collaboration with her on-again, off-again lover, Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, known for creating enormous kinetic machines, some of which self-destructed in dramatic performances. Saint Phalle’s ambitions for these large environments were in some measure both political and artistic: she wanted to prove, she said, that women could work on a monumental scale just as capably as men. If the Tarot Garden owed its origins to a dream, it was a dream with many waking elements. A chronology on the garden’s official website traces its beginnings to the artist’s 1955 visit to Antoni Gaudí’s early twentieth-century Parc Güell in Barcelona, with its imaginative botanical and zoological imagery in colorful mosaic and stone (Figures 2 and 3). The artist and her friends thereafter became connoisseur","PeriodicalId":53992,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF GARDENS & DESIGNED LANDSCAPES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14601176.2021.1866338","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47087840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2021.1879584
John Garton
The Orsini Sacro Bosco, or Sacred Wood, has always been considered just that — a forest or wooded grove rather than a garden. Recreating its presence in the lives of the owner Pier Francesco (‘Vicino’) Orsini (1523–1585), the duke of Bomarzo, and his guests means attending to the flora once prevalent in the sixteenth century. Here, the historical record fails, for although Orsini’s letter of 3 April 1583 to his friend Giovanni Drouet references ‘taking solace among the plants’, their correspondence says nothing about specific trees or shrubs. What meets the modern eye is a mix of native and foreign species introduced since the mid-twentieth century, as well as fruits of two species of trees — pine and oak — carved repeatedly in ‘peperino’ tufo stone as a prominent sculptural motif on the park’s central terrace (Figure 1). The non-native plants deserve only a few words, since they tend to mislead the historical perceptions of present-day visitors. The colossal pinecones and acorns, however, amount to a significant and intentional part of the Sacro Bosco’s sculptural program that has been mostly overlooked in scholarly literature. Enrico Guidoni’s 2006 study of the sculptural program of the Sacro Bosco synthesizes earlier efforts to interpret the pinecone and acorn terrace. He posits that these sculptures may allude to an occult, now lost, meaning involving preparation for an afterlife, with cones being perfectly designed to hold the seeds of such robust species of plants — a suggestion that seems plausible if difficult to buttress in any surviving texts. The acorns Guidone links with the heraldic device of Pope Julius II della Rovere (r. 1503–1513), whose illegitimate daughter, Felice della Rovere (1483–1536) after the death of her first husband married Gian Giordano Orsini (ca. 1460–1517), becoming the progenitor of the subsequent Orsini dukes of Bracciano. The present study explores the multivalent symbolism of the carved pinecones and acorns by drawing on the patron’s classical knowledge, the emblemata studies practiced by his nephew Fulvio Orsini (1529–1600) for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589), and the contemporaneous political significance of the representations of pinecones in Rome, where the ancient bronze Pigna had become a Vatican symbol and was relocated to the Cortile del Belvedere in 1562–65 by Pope Pius IV. In particular, I will advance a thesis that the pinecones held symbolic allusions to Orsini’s political allegiance to pro-Farnese popes. Together with the acorns’ long association with Roman civic service and military valor, the alternating motif affirms the patron’s past soldierly prowess while also fitting the bosco’s classicizing sculptural program. As someone who served reliably in papal military campaigns but later came to view himself, as he wrote in a letter to a friend, as a ‘denizen of the woods’, I will also argue that the pinecone and acorn motif served Orsini’s selffashioning. Insomuch as the identities of any a
{"title":"Botanical Symbolism in Vicino Orsini’s Sacro Bosco","authors":"John Garton","doi":"10.1080/14601176.2021.1879584","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.1879584","url":null,"abstract":"The Orsini Sacro Bosco, or Sacred Wood, has always been considered just that — a forest or wooded grove rather than a garden. Recreating its presence in the lives of the owner Pier Francesco (‘Vicino’) Orsini (1523–1585), the duke of Bomarzo, and his guests means attending to the flora once prevalent in the sixteenth century. Here, the historical record fails, for although Orsini’s letter of 3 April 1583 to his friend Giovanni Drouet references ‘taking solace among the plants’, their correspondence says nothing about specific trees or shrubs. What meets the modern eye is a mix of native and foreign species introduced since the mid-twentieth century, as well as fruits of two species of trees — pine and oak — carved repeatedly in ‘peperino’ tufo stone as a prominent sculptural motif on the park’s central terrace (Figure 1). The non-native plants deserve only a few words, since they tend to mislead the historical perceptions of present-day visitors. The colossal pinecones and acorns, however, amount to a significant and intentional part of the Sacro Bosco’s sculptural program that has been mostly overlooked in scholarly literature. Enrico Guidoni’s 2006 study of the sculptural program of the Sacro Bosco synthesizes earlier efforts to interpret the pinecone and acorn terrace. He posits that these sculptures may allude to an occult, now lost, meaning involving preparation for an afterlife, with cones being perfectly designed to hold the seeds of such robust species of plants — a suggestion that seems plausible if difficult to buttress in any surviving texts. The acorns Guidone links with the heraldic device of Pope Julius II della Rovere (r. 1503–1513), whose illegitimate daughter, Felice della Rovere (1483–1536) after the death of her first husband married Gian Giordano Orsini (ca. 1460–1517), becoming the progenitor of the subsequent Orsini dukes of Bracciano. The present study explores the multivalent symbolism of the carved pinecones and acorns by drawing on the patron’s classical knowledge, the emblemata studies practiced by his nephew Fulvio Orsini (1529–1600) for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589), and the contemporaneous political significance of the representations of pinecones in Rome, where the ancient bronze Pigna had become a Vatican symbol and was relocated to the Cortile del Belvedere in 1562–65 by Pope Pius IV. In particular, I will advance a thesis that the pinecones held symbolic allusions to Orsini’s political allegiance to pro-Farnese popes. Together with the acorns’ long association with Roman civic service and military valor, the alternating motif affirms the patron’s past soldierly prowess while also fitting the bosco’s classicizing sculptural program. As someone who served reliably in papal military campaigns but later came to view himself, as he wrote in a letter to a friend, as a ‘denizen of the woods’, I will also argue that the pinecone and acorn motif served Orsini’s selffashioning. Insomuch as the identities of any a","PeriodicalId":53992,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF GARDENS & DESIGNED LANDSCAPES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14601176.2021.1879584","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43930999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2021.1883936
Thalia Allington-Wood
The history of a garden is a narrative constructed on the basis of factual evidence, but also shaped by shifting ideological pressures and historical circumstances over the long durée of its existence. The study of the reception or afterlife of a particular garden allows us to see how it changed over time, was reformulated by its visitors, and how these changes have influenced its subsequent interpretations. Despite this widely shared understanding, the afterlife of the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo has received little critical attention, though its complex historiography was inseparably tied to political and social shifts in twentieth-century Italy. The traditional histories of the Sacro Bosco suggest that in the early seventeenth century this garden had fallen into disrepair and obscurity until it was suddenly ‘rediscovered’ after World War II. In less than a decade, between the late 1940s and mid-1950s, Bomarzo became the subject of an unprecedented amount of public and scholarly attention, being caught on camera and featured on screen, publicized in newspapers and discussed in academic journals. From 1955 onwards, it also prominently entered the art historical discourse. This article scrutinizes and corrects this picture by taking a fresh look both at the early twentieth-century reception and historiography of the Sacro Bosco and various writings and media devoted to it in post-war Italy. In doing so, it reveals the origins and production of dominant scholarly narratives that continue to influence our understanding of Bomarzo, their relationship with political pressures and ideological agendas of the time, and their long-lasting effects on the garden’s image in both popular culture and specialist literature. The point of departure for this analysis is the concept of the giardino all’italiana fostered by Mussolini’s fascist regime, from which I move to the discussion of contrasting interpretative frameworks – Surrealist art, Neorealist cinema and the notion of Mannerism as an ‘anti-classical’ style – mobilized in post-war Italy to explain this intriguing site. In addition, this article draws on previously unpublished evidence – such as personal photographs, films and various writings – that shed new light on such debated questions as the extent to which the Sacro Bosco was known to early twentieth-century visitors and its place in the history of Italian gardens and sculpture. By bringing together these divergent approaches, media and contexts that informed the afterlife of Bomarzo, this article’s aim is to launch a critical reevaluation of the early historiography of this site. This task, as the following analysis shows, only becomes feasible if we acknowledge various, often poorly known, ways in which the post-war ‘rediscovery’ of the Sacro Bosco was intimately tied to the social and political history of twentieth-century Italy.
{"title":"‘Impressions so alien’: the afterlives of the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo","authors":"Thalia Allington-Wood","doi":"10.1080/14601176.2021.1883936","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14601176.2021.1883936","url":null,"abstract":"The history of a garden is a narrative constructed on the basis of factual evidence, but also shaped by shifting ideological pressures and historical circumstances over the long durée of its existence. The study of the reception or afterlife of a particular garden allows us to see how it changed over time, was reformulated by its visitors, and how these changes have influenced its subsequent interpretations. Despite this widely shared understanding, the afterlife of the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo has received little critical attention, though its complex historiography was inseparably tied to political and social shifts in twentieth-century Italy. The traditional histories of the Sacro Bosco suggest that in the early seventeenth century this garden had fallen into disrepair and obscurity until it was suddenly ‘rediscovered’ after World War II. In less than a decade, between the late 1940s and mid-1950s, Bomarzo became the subject of an unprecedented amount of public and scholarly attention, being caught on camera and featured on screen, publicized in newspapers and discussed in academic journals. From 1955 onwards, it also prominently entered the art historical discourse. This article scrutinizes and corrects this picture by taking a fresh look both at the early twentieth-century reception and historiography of the Sacro Bosco and various writings and media devoted to it in post-war Italy. In doing so, it reveals the origins and production of dominant scholarly narratives that continue to influence our understanding of Bomarzo, their relationship with political pressures and ideological agendas of the time, and their long-lasting effects on the garden’s image in both popular culture and specialist literature. The point of departure for this analysis is the concept of the giardino all’italiana fostered by Mussolini’s fascist regime, from which I move to the discussion of contrasting interpretative frameworks – Surrealist art, Neorealist cinema and the notion of Mannerism as an ‘anti-classical’ style – mobilized in post-war Italy to explain this intriguing site. In addition, this article draws on previously unpublished evidence – such as personal photographs, films and various writings – that shed new light on such debated questions as the extent to which the Sacro Bosco was known to early twentieth-century visitors and its place in the history of Italian gardens and sculpture. By bringing together these divergent approaches, media and contexts that informed the afterlife of Bomarzo, this article’s aim is to launch a critical reevaluation of the early historiography of this site. This task, as the following analysis shows, only becomes feasible if we acknowledge various, often poorly known, ways in which the post-war ‘rediscovery’ of the Sacro Bosco was intimately tied to the social and political history of twentieth-century Italy.","PeriodicalId":53992,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF GARDENS & DESIGNED LANDSCAPES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14601176.2021.1883936","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46831056","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：