The Aesthetics of the Undersea

Edited ByMargaret Cohen, Killian Quigley

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Chapter  1
The aesthetics of the early modern grotto and the advent of an
empirical nature 1
WithLuis Rodríguez Rincón
Pages14
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Whenever a submarine world was imagined in the Renaissance it took the form of a grotto.
This pagan architectural topos was revived in fifteenth-century Italy and spread throughout
Europe by the turn of the seventeenth century. Grottos were ubiquitous in early modern poetry
and prose as well as in the gardens, palaces, and stages of cardinals and noblemen. They were a
microcosm representing a submarine world mediated by the artistic and philosophical traditions
of antiquity. With its rustic aesthetic imitating the look and feel of a natural space, grottos by
the seventeenth century began to convey an empirical fascination with understanding and re-
creating natural phenomena that gradually displaced the natural historical tradition that initially
animated its fifteenth-century revival. In other words, grottos represent a time when a
fascination with re-creating a rustic aesthetic inspired by antiquity catalyzed an empirical
investigation of natural phenomena that gradually disproved the natural historical knowledge of
the ancients. The origins of the Scientific Revolution can thus be traced in part to the shifting
frontier between nature and art in the early modern grotto.

Cada vez que se imaginaba un mundo submarino en el Renacimiento tomaba la forma

de una gruta. Este topos arquitectónico pagano fue revivido en la Italia del siglo XV y
se extendió por toda Europa a comienzos del siglo XVII. Las grutas eran
omnipresentes en la poesía y la prosa modernas tempranas, así como en los jardines,
palacios y escenarios de cardenales y nobles. Eran un microcosmos que
representaba un mundo submarino mediado por las tradiciones artísticas y filosóficas
de la antigüedad. Con su estética rústica que imita la apariencia de un espacio
natural, las grutas del siglo XVII comenzaron a transmitir una fascinación empírica por
la comprensión y la recreación de fenómenos naturales que gradualmente
desplazaron la tradición histórica natural que inicialmente animó su renacimiento del
siglo XV. En otras palabras, Las grutas representan un momento en que una
fascinación por recrear una estética rústica inspirada en la antigüedad catalizó una
investigación empírica de los fenómenos naturales que gradualmente refutaron el
conocimiento histórico natural de los antiguos. Los orígenes de la Revolución
científica se pueden rastrear en parte a la frontera cambiante entre la naturaleza y el
arte en la gruta moderna temprana.
 River Gods and Grottoes: 4 Italian
Renaissance Gardens
By David Laskin

 Aug. 24, 2003

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PERHAPS on the whole, the most enchanting place in Rome,'' the 30-year-old
Henry James sighed after visiting Villa Medici in January 1873, and indeed, I felt
like something out of Henry James as I stood, dazed with awe and jet lag, before
the villa's arched and studded door on a hot July morning. I was in Rome to see
four Renaissance gardens that have been preserved in the city and within a few
hours' drive -- gardens inspired by the stately villas of classical antiquity but tricked
out with all the competitive splendor, aquatic panache and passion for mythology
typical of 16th-century potentates. Somewhere behind that door, I knew, lay one of
those gardens -- a geometrical pleasure ground of terraces, allées and peerless
views created by Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici in the 1570's to house his vast
collection of classical statuary.

Georgina Masson, in her 1965 book ''The Companion Guide to Rome,'' notes that
the Villa Medici is the only Roman Renaissance garden in which the ''ground plan
is the same as when it was first laid out.''

''It is fascinating,'' she muses, ''to think that we are treading the selfsame paths as
Velazquez,'' who lived and painted here in 1630.

My first impression -- after mounting the grand staircase, pausing to admire the
statue of Louis XIV in Roman imperial garb, emerging on the dazzling white loggia
and hurrying past the dainty bronze Mercury -- was that these paths had not seen a
lick of pruning or weeding since Velázquez trod them. The Roman version of
crabgrass all but strangled the immense parterre. A pink granite obelisk rose from
a basin of green slime. The hedges of laurel, boxwood and holly that line the long,
straight, intersecting paths of the ''bosco'' (woodland) have grown into shaggy
walls.
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Since 1803, the villa has housed the French Academy, a school for promising Gallic
artists and architects, now offering a broader arts curriculum, and sprinkled
throughout the grounds was the disturbing artwork (skeletons, rotting sofas, beer
bottles, masses of fake white peonies) crafted by the current crop of art students.

I had taken pains to e-mail the villa well in advance (in French) to secure the
required permission to visit the garden, but was beginning to wonder why I'd
bothered.

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But the venerable stone pines cast a welcome shade, a stretch of the old Aurelian
wall lured me deeper into the garden past nude goddesses and draped angels, and
after a while I relaxed into the forlorn grandeur of the place.

Set high on the Pincian Hill overlooking the domes and red-tiled roofs of Rome,
Villa Medici was one of the first ''gardens to look out from'' -- a garden of carefully
stage-managed views. You walk in the dark of a leafy tunnel for a score of paces and
then, at the juncture of two paths, you get a circle of dappled light set with benches,
herms (busts set on stone pillars) and vistas terminating in a goddess, a glimpse of
St. Peter's or a classical arch rising before a stand of velvety cypress trees.

A gardening friend remarked that Italian gardens are not about plants and flowers
but about theater -- and I began to see the Villa Medici as one of the world's great
horticultural stages, its drama compounded of the very best bones and the very
worst maintenance.
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The next morning I picked up a rental car at the Rome train station and after a two-
hour drive north through city sprawl that soon shaded into the tawny fields, rolling
hills and ancient towns of the province of Lazio, I presented myself at the gates of
Villa Lante. This was the garden about which Edith Wharton raved in ''Italian Villas
and Their Gardens'' -- ''so perfect is it, so far does it surpass, in beauty, in
preservation, and in the quality of garden-magic, all the other great pleasure-
houses of Italy, that the student of garden-craft may always find fresh inspiration in
its study.''

I was not disappointed. The moment I entered the grounds and stood before the
statue of Pegasus shooting water over the heads of a solemn company of drooling
muses mounted on towering pedestals, I felt as if I'd stepped into the pages of
Spenser or Ariosto. Up a flight of mellow stone steps, past a stand of Italian
cypresses glowing in the midday sun, through a gate, and I burst upon the great
water parterre. Intricate compartments of boxwood embroidery framed a square
pool set with ascending rings of balustrades. In the center, four naked youths held
aloft a heraldic device of stylized mountains capped by a star, all of it glistening
with arcs of water.

Presiding over the scene were the twin toylike pavilions that Cardinal Giovanni
Francesco Gambara commissioned the fashionable architect Jacopo Barozzi da
Vignola to build for him in the 1560's. Vignola's masterstroke was to set the houses
in the grounds like a matched pair of garden ornaments so that the whole space is a
symmetrical composition fixed on an axis of flowing water. The terraces that rise in
tiers behind the houses have been softened with hydrangeas, camellias and plane
trees.

Though it could stand a bit of grooming, Villa Lante still casts an exuberant spell.
This quintessential Renaissance pleasure ground glorifies pagan sensuality, the
rules of proportion and the rebirth of hydraulic ingenuity (even 440 years later one
wonders how the Sienese engineer Tommaso Ghinucci got water to rise and fall
from so many orifices simultaneously -- though sadly some of them no longer run).

At the end of the topmost terrace, past the immense stone table set with a gently
flowing canal, above the river gods furred in moss, beyond the water staircase in
the shape of an elongated crayfish (a play on the cardinal's name), the garden's
rigid symmetry finally disintegrates in the Fountain of the Flood, a dripping ferny
grotto that rises into a precipice of untamed woods.

Villa Lante and Villa Farnese at Caprarola are only about a half-hour drive apart, so
it's possible to see both in the same day, but I'm glad I didn't. Though the
properties are closely related -- both gardens are attributed to Vignola and were
laid out within a few years of each other for allied cardinals -- each is so intense
that I was happy to have some down time to let the impressions sink in.

Like Villa Lante, Caprarola sits on a rise overlooking the narrow streets and
rooftops of a medieval town -- but everything about Caprarola is a couple of
notches grander. The ascent through the town is steeper, the surrounding
landscape more rugged, the view from the entrance more mountainous, and the
villa itself far more imposing. The house here is a true palace with acres of frescoed
and gilded chambers that fit together in a complex pentagonal design.
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But I was here for the gardens, not the décor, and quickly became frustrated at
having to make a forced march through the grandiose interior in the company of a
monolingual guard and my fellow visitors. No, I was not permitted to wander the
grounds by myself; yes, there were guided tours of the palace and gardens on
weekends, but only in Italian.

Patience was rewarded, for the extensive gardens, once we got there, were
astonishing. From the rear of the palace a stone bridge over the (dry) moat leads to
a walled garden with four tree-shaded squares outlined in waist-high boxwood.
Before I could quite absorb the aura of the place, the guard was prodding us up past
a ''secret garden'' (trellised climbing roses and grapes) and then on to a series of
rough earthen steps bordered by soft masses of camellia and rhododendron.

Nice, I was thinking, if a bit predictable -- until the trees parted and we emerged on
the first fountain of the Casino del Piacere (Cardinal Alessandro II Farnese's
pleasure house). My eye fell first on a goat's head gushing clear water from its
mouth, nose, ears and eyes. I traced the flow up the water stairs fed by a cascade
spilling off a colossal goblet to a pair of river gods reclining amid bubbling stone
pots.

As we climbed to the next level, the swirls of stone and spray gave way to the serene
geometry of meticulously clipped foliage. We had reached the famous terrace of the
herms -- two squares of smooth grass and clipped box edged with a low stone wall
on which high pedestals set at regular intervals support a collection of 28 male and
female herms, each with an urn balanced on its head. I've been in Japanese gardens
that attain this kind of eerie stillness by paring down nature to its essence, but I
never dreamed that severe formality and rampant pomp could create so surreal a
space.

After a few days back in the splendor and heat of Rome, I was ready for another
garden, and so one warm and breezy morning I headed out to Tivoli, site of Villa
d'Este, a public park and the final Renaissance garden on my list. It proved to be
the perfect day trip, easily accessible in under two hours by public transportation,
notably cooler and less crowded than Rome, and absolutely ravishing. The
spectacular fountains that the architect and antiquarian Pirro Ligorio and other
artists fashioned here for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este between 1550 and 1569 deserve
all their fame -- but the garden is much more than a series of hydraulic show-
stoppers.

At Villa d'Este Ligorio enlisted ''caprice and cunning,'' as one writer put it, to turn a
challenging site into an exciting and inspiring garden.

With no guard to slow me down, I breezed by the sunny courtyard, through a series
of frescoed but otherwise bare rooms, and out to the terrace. The sweeping view
stopped me in my tracks. In the distance, the hazy plain of the Roman campagna;
to the right, a clump of knobby hills; and directly beneath my feet, the treetops,
urns, pots, statues, stairs and ramps of the garden, which covers almost nine acres.
I could hear the ceaseless rush of water below, but from this first perch over the
precipitous face of the upper garden, the only fountain in sight was a delicate tripod
that Ligorio pinched from the nearby villa of the Roman Emperor Hadrian.
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I was itching to plunge right in, or rather down -- but which way? Every juncture,
every tier, every nook and niche of Villa d'Este confronts you with multiple choices.

Descend directly to the scalloped prowlike lip of the Fountain of the Bicchierone
(big goblet) created by Bernini, or angle off to the foaming oval basin in which the
infant Venus hatches from her scallop shell? Proceed along the Pathway of the
Hundred Fountains, the villa's trademark water feature of spouting masks, boats
and eagles, or skirt the grandiose (but closed for restoration) Fountain of the
Dragon? And what about the Staircase of Bollori, a seemingly infinite series of steps
lined with clipped hedges and carved masks and shaded with huge cypresses
(reputed to be the tallest in Italy)?
I did it all, prancing up and down the terraces, until I finally came to rest where the
steep slope subsides in a chain of three rectangular fish ponds. As I gloried in one
of the great vistas of Western garden art, I tried to recall the lines from Anthony
Hecht's poem ''The Gardens of the Villa d'Este.'' I knew it was something about sex,
which seemed odd when I read it but apt now. One solace of returning home was to
open Hecht's poem again: ''There is no garden to the practiced gaze/Half so erotic:
here the 16th century thew/Rose to its last perfection ''

A passion for antiquity (and water)

Villa Medici, overlooking the Piazza del Popolo in the heart of Rome, is open by
appointment only, though you may be able to sneak a peek at the garden during
public art exhibitions; Viale Trinità dei Monti 1, telephone (39-06) 676 11; fax,
preferably in Italian or French, (39-06) 67 61 305; direttore@villamedici.it. Visitors
should call, fax or e-mail a few days ahead to reserve; tours are on Saturday and
Sunday morning; they are generally held only in Italian and French; $7, at $1.13 to
the euro. An art exhibition, the private collection of Graziella Lonardi, will be held
Sept. 25, when part of the garden will be open to visitors.

Villa Lante is in the town of Bagnaia, Via Jacopo Barozzi 71, about two hours north
of Rome; (39-0761) 288088. The easiest way to get there is by car. From the
Grande Raccordo Anulare (the Roman ring road), take S2 (Via Cassia) to Viterbo
and then ask for directions. Bagnaia is about two and a half miles east of Viterbo.

Open November to February, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; March, to 5:30 p.m.; April 1
to April 15, to 6:30 p.m.; April 16 to mid-October, to 7:30 p.m., mid-October to
November, to 5:30. Admission is $2.25.

If you want to stay overnight, and visit Villa Farnese the next day, there are several
hotels in Viterbo, a splendid old city enriched by the popes during their residence
in the 13th century. I chose one a few miles out of town, the charming Country
Hotel Rinaldone, Via Rinaldone 9, less than a mile from the center of town; (39-
0761) 352137, fax (39-0761) 353116, www.rinaldone.com. It has spacious grounds
around old farm buildings, rustic (though modern) rooms, a large pool and a good
restaurant. My single room cost about $65, and dinner with wine came to about
$30.
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Villa Farnese, Caprarola, Piazzale Farnese 1, is about 11 miles southeast of Viterbo,

about an hour and a half from Rome; (39-0761) 646052. Take the S2 from Rome to
Viterbo; follow signs for Caprarola, then ask for directions out of town and follow
signs.

Open 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.; closed Monday. Chaperoned visits of garden and palace
depart every half hour, with a maximum of 30 visitors. Guided tours on Sunday
from 10 a.m. to noon, 3 to 5 p.m. Admission is $2.25.
Villa d'Este in the town of Tivoli is about an hour and a half from Rome by public
transportation; (39-0774) 312070. Take the Metropolitana Line B east to the
second-to-last stop (Ponte Mammolo). After leaving the subway, go upstairs and
buy a Cotral bus ticket to Tivoli. The bus stops in the center of town, about three
blocks from the entrance to the villa. By car, take the A24 Autostrada (Roma-
L'Aquila) and turn off at the Tivoli exit.

The gardens are closed on Monday. Open 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., January, November,
December; to 4:30 p.m. in February; to 5:15 p.m. in March, to 7:30 p.m. in April, to
6:45 p.m. in May through August, to 6:15 p.m. in September and to 5:30 p.m. in
October. Admission is $7.35.

DAVID LASKIN