Giacomo della Porta in designing the princely gardens of the villa.
Below the house a series of splendid stone terraces lead to a long
_tapis vert_, with an ilex avenue down its centre, which descends to the
much-admired grille of stone and wrought-iron enclosing the grounds at
the foot of the hill. Behind the villa, in a semicircle cut out of the
hillside, is Fontana’s famous water-theatre, of which Evelyn gives a
picturesque description: “Just behind the Palace ... rises a high hill
or mountain all overclad with tall wood, and so formed by nature as if
it had been cut out by art, from the summit of which falls a cascade ...
precipitating into a large theatre of water. Under this is an artificial
grot wherein are curious rocks, hydraulic organs, and all sorts of
singing birds, moving and chirping by force of the water, with several
other pageants and surprising inventions. In the centre of one of these
rooms rises a copper ball that continually dances about three feet above
the pavement, by virtue of a wind conveyed secretly to a hole beneath
it; with many other devices for wetting the unwary spectators.... In one
of these theatres of water is an Atlas spouting, ... and another monster
makes a terrible roaring with a horn; but, above all, the representation
of a storm is most natural, with such fury of rain, wind and thunder as
one would imagine oneself in some extreme tempest.”
[Illustration: GARDEN OF VILLA LANCELLOTTI, FRASCATI]
Atlas and the monster are silent, and the tempest has ceased to roar;
but the architecture of the great water-theatre remains intact. It has
been much extolled by so good a critic as Herr Gurlitt, yet compared
with Vignola’s loggia at Mondragone or the terrace of the Orti
Farnesiani, it is a heavy and uninspired production. It suffers also
from too great proximity to the villa, and from being out of scale with
the latter’s modest elevation: there is a distinct lack of harmony
between the two façades. But even Evelyn could not say too much in
praise of the glorious descent of the cascade from the hilltop. It was
in the guidance of rushing water that the Roman garden-architects of the
seventeenth century showed their poetic feeling and endless versatility;
and the architecture of the upper garden at the Aldobrandini merits all
the admiration which has been wasted on its pompous theatre.
Another example of a _théâtre d’eau_, less showy but far more beautiful,
is to be seen at the neighbouring Villa Conti (now Torlonia). Of the
formal gardens of this villa there remain only the vast terraced
stairways which now lead to an ilex-grove level with the first story of
the villa. This grove is intersected by mossy alleys, leading to
circular clearings where fountains overflow their wide stone basins, and
benches are ranged about in the deep shade. The central alley, on the
axis of the villa, leads through the wood to a great grassy semicircle
at the foot of an ilex-clad hill. The base of the hillside is faced with
a long arcade of twenty niches, divided by pilasters, and each
containing a fountain. In the centre is a great baroque pile of
rock-work, from which the spray tosses into a semicircular basin, which
also receives the cascade descending from the hilltop. This cascade is
the most beautiful example of fountain-architecture in Frascati. It
falls by a series of inclined stone ledges into four oval basins, each a
little wider than the one above it. On each side, stone steps which
follow the curves of the basins lead to a grassy plateau above, with a
balustraded terrace overhanging the rush of the cascade. The upper
plateau is enclosed in ilexes, and in its centre is one of the most
beautiful fountains in Italy—a large basin surrounded by a richly
sculptured balustrade. The plan of this fountain is an interesting
example of the variety which the Italian garden-architects gave to the
outline of their basins. Even in the smaller gardens the plan of these
basins is varied with taste and originality; and the small
wall-fountains are also worthy of careful study.
[Illustration: CASINO, VILLA FALCONIERI, FRASCATI]
Among the villas of Frascati there are two, less famous than the
foregoing, but even more full of a romantic charm. One is the Villa
Muti, a mile or two beyond the town, on the way to Grotta Ferrata. From
the gate three ancient ilex avenues lead to the villa, the central one
being on the axis of the lowest garden. The ground rises gradually
toward the house, and the space between the ilex avenues was probably
once planted in formal _boschi_, as fragments of statuary are still seen
among the trees. The house, set against the hillside, with the usual
fortress-like basement, is two stories lower toward the _basse-cour_
than toward the gardens. The avenue to the left of the entrance leads to
a small garden, probably once a court, in front of the villa, whence one
looks down over a mighty retaining-wall at the _basse-cour_ on the left.
On the right, divided from the court by a low wall surmounted by vases,
lies the most beautiful box-garden in Italy, laid out in an elaborate
geometrical design, and enclosed on three sides by high clipped walls of
box and laurel, and on the fourth by a retaining-wall which sustains an
upper garden. Nothing can surpass the hushed and tranquil beauty of the
scene. There are no flowers or bright colours—only the contrasted tints
of box and ilex and laurel, and the vivid green of the moss spreading
over damp paths and ancient stonework.
In the upper garden, which is of the same length but narrower, the
box-parterres are repeated. This garden, at the end nearest the villa,
has a narrow raised terrace, with an elaborate architectural
retaining-wall, containing a central fountain in stucco-work. Steps
flanked by statues lead up to this fountain, and thence one passes by
another flight of steps to the third, or upper, garden, which is level
with the back of the villa. This third garden, the largest of the three,
was once also laid out in formal parterres and _bosquets_ set with
statues, and though it has now been remodelled in the landscape style,
its old plan may still be traced. Before it was destroyed the three
terraces of the Villa Muti must have formed the most enchanting garden
in Frascati, and their plan and architectural details are worthy of
careful study, for they belong to the rare class of small Italian
gardens where grandeur was less sought for than charm and sylvan
seclusion, and where the Latin passion for the monumental was
subordinated to a desire for moderation and simplicity.
[Illustration: THE ENTRANCE, VILLA FALCONIERI, FRASCATI]
The Villa Falconieri, on the hillside below Mondragone, is remarkable
for the wealth of its garden-architecture. The grounds are entered by
two splendid stone gateways, the upper one being on an axis with the
villa. A grass avenue leads from this gate to an arch of triumph, a
rusticated elevation with niches and statues, surmounted by the
inscription “Horatius Falconieris,” and giving access to the inner
grounds. Hence a straight avenue runs between formal ilex-groves to the
court before the house. On the right, above the _bosco_, is a lofty wall
of rock, picturesquely overgrown by shrubs and creepers, with busts and
other fragments of antique sculpture set here and there on its
projecting ledges. This natural cliff sustains an upper plateau, where
there is an oblong artificial water (called “the lake”) enclosed in
rock-work and surrounded by a grove of mighty cypresses. From this shady
solitude the wooded slopes of the lower park are reached by a double
staircase so simple and majestic in design that it harmonizes perfectly
with the sylvan wildness which characterizes the landscape. This
staircase should be studied as an example of the way in which the
Italian garden-architects could lay aside exuberance and whimsicality
when their work was intended to blend with some broad or solemn effect
of nature.
The grounds of the Villa Falconieri were laid out by Cardinal Ruffini in
the first half of the sixteenth century, but the villa was not built
till 1648. It is one of the most charming creations of Borromini, that
brilliant artist in whom baroque architecture found its happiest
expression; and the Villa Falconieri makes one regret that he did not
oftener exercise his fancy in the construction of such pleasure-houses.
The elevation follows the tradition of the Roman _villa suburbana_. The
centre of the ground floor is an arcaded loggia, the roof of which forms
a terrace to the recessed story above; while the central motive of this
first story is another semicircular recess, adorned with stucco ornament
and surmounted by a broken pediment. The attic story is set still
farther back, so that its balustraded roof-line forms a background for
the richly decorated façade, and the building, though large, thus
preserves the airy look and lightness of proportion which had come to be
regarded as suited to the suburban pleasure-house.
To the right of the villa, the composition is prolonged by a gateway
with coupled columns surmounted by stone dogs, and leading from the
forecourt to the adjoining _basse-cour_. About the latter are grouped a
number of low farm-buildings, to which a touch of the baroque gives
picturesqueness. In the charm of its elevation, and in the happy
juxtaposition of garden-walls and outbuildings, the Villa Falconieri
forms the most harmonious and successful example of garden-architecture
in Frascati.
[Illustration: VILLA LANCELLOTTI, FRASCATI]
The elevation which most resembles it is that of the Villa Lancellotti.
Here the house, which is probably nearly a century earlier, shows the
same happy use of the open loggia, which in this case forms the central
feature of the first story, above a stately pedimented doorway. The
loggia is surmounted by a kind of square-headed gable crowned by a
balustrade with statues, and the façade on each side of this central
composition is almost Tuscan in its severity. Before the house lies a
beautiful box-garden of intricate design, enclosed in high walls of
ilex, with the inevitable _théâtre d’eau_ at its farther end. This is a
semicircular composition, with statues in niches between rusticated
pilasters, and a central grotto whence a fountain pours into a wide
balustraded basin; the whole being surmounted by another balustrade,
with a statue set on each pier. It is harmonious and dignified in
design, but unfortunately a fresh coating of brown and yellow paint has
destroyed that exquisite _patina_ by means of which the climate of Italy
effects the gradual blending of nature and architecture.
GENOESE VILLAS
[Illustration: VILLA SCASSI, GENOA]
V
GENOESE VILLAS
Genoa, one of the most splendour-loving cities in Italy, had almost
always to import her splendour. In reading Soprani’s “Lives of the
Genoese Painters, Sculptors and Architects,” one is struck by the fact
that, with few exceptions, these worthies were Genoese only in the sense
of having placed their talents at the service of the merchant princes
who reared the marble city above its glorious harbour.
The strength of the race lay in other directions; but, as is often the
case with what may be called people of secondary artistic instincts, the
Genoese pined for the beauty they could not create, and in the sixteenth
century they called artists from all parts of Italy to embody their
conceptions of magnificence. Two of the most famous of these, Fra
Montorsoli and Pierin del Vaga, came from Florence, Galeazzo Alessi from
Perugia, Giovanni Battista Castello from Bergamo; and it is to the
genius of these four men, sculptor, painter, architect, and _stuccatore_
(and each more or less versed in the crafts of the others), that Genoa
owes the greater part of her magnificence.
Fra Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli, the Florentine, must here be named
first, since his chief work, the Palazzo Andrea Doria, built in 1529, is
the earliest of the great Genoese villas. It is also the most familiar
to modern travelers, for the other beautiful country houses which
formerly crowned the heights above Genoa, from Pegli to Nervi, have now
been buried in the growth of manufacturing suburbs, so that only the
diligent seeker after villa-architecture will be likely to come upon
their ruined gardens and peeling stucco façades among the factory
chimneys of Sampierdarena or the squalid tenements of San Fruttuoso.
The great Andrea Doria, “Admiral of the Navies of the Pope, the Emperor,
the King of France and the Republic of Genoa,” in 1521 bought the villas
Lomellini and Giustiniani, on the western shore of the port of Genoa,
and throwing the two estates together, created a villa wherein “to enjoy
in peace the fruits of an honoured life”—so runs the inscription on the
outer wall of the house.
Fra Montorsoli was first and foremost a sculptor, a pupil of
Michelangelo’s, a plastic artist to whom architecture was probably of
secondary interest. Partly perhaps for this reason, and also because the
Villa Doria was in great measure designed to show the frescoes of Pierin
del Vaga, there is little elaboration in its treatment. Yet the
continuous open loggia on the ground floor, and the projecting side
colonnades enclosing the upper garden, give an airy elegance to the
water-front, and make it, in combination with its mural paintings and
stucco-ornamentation, and the sculpture of the gardens, one of the most
villa-like of Italian villas. The gardens themselves descend in terraces
to the shore, and contain several imposing marble fountains, among them
one with a statue of Neptune, executed in 1600 by the Carloni, and
supposed to be a portrait of the great Admiral.
The house stands against a steep terraced hillside, formerly a part of
the grounds, but now unfortunately divided from them by the railway
cutting. A wide _tapis vert_ still ascends the hill to a colossal
Jupiter (under which the Admiral’s favourite dog is said to be buried);
and when the villa is seen from the harbour one understands how
necessary this stately terraced background was to the setting of the
low-lying building. Beautiful indeed must have been the surroundings of
the villa when Evelyn visited it in 1644, and described the marble
terraces above the sea, the aviary “wherein grew trees of more than two
feet in diameter, besides cypress, myrtles, lentiscuses and other rare
shrubs,” and “the other two gardens full of orange-trees, citrons and
pomegranates, fountains, grots and statues.” All but the statues have
now disappeared, yet much of the old garden-magic lingers in the narrow
strip between house and sea. It is the glory of the Italian
garden-architects that neglect and disintegration cannot wholly mar the
effects they were skilled in creating: effects due to such a fine sense
of proportion, to so exquisite a perception of the relation between
architecture and landscape, between verdure and marble, that while a
trace of their plan remains one feels the spell of the whole.
When Rubens came to Genoa in 1607 he was so impressed by the
magnificence of its great street of palaces—the lately built Strada
Nuova—that he recorded his admiration in a series of etchings, published
in Antwerp in 1622 under the title “Palazzi di Genova,” a priceless
document for the student of Renaissance architecture in Italy, since the
Flemish master did not content himself with mere impressionist sketches,
like Canaletto’s fanciful Venetian etchings, but made careful
architectural drawings and bird’s-eye views of all the principal Genoese
palaces. As many of these buildings have since been altered, Rubens’s
volume has the additional value of preserving a number of interesting
details which might never have been recovered by subsequent study.
The Strada Nuova of Genoa, planned by Galeazzo Alessi between 1550 and
1560, is the earliest example in Europe of a street laid out by an
architect with deliberate artistic intent, and designed to display the
palaces with which he subsequently lined it. Hitherto, streets had
formed themselves on the natural lines of traffic, and individual houses
had sprung up along them without much regard to the site or style of
their nearest neighbors. The Strada Nuova, on the contrary, was planned
and carried out homogeneously, and was thus the progenitor of all the
great street plans of modern Europe—of the Place Royale and the Place
Vendôme in Paris, the great Place at Nancy, the grouping of Palladian
palaces about the Basilica of Vicenza, and all subsequent attempts to
create an organic whole out of a number of adjacent buildings. Even
Lenfant’s plan of Washington may be said to owe its first impulse to the
Perugian architect’s conception of a street of palaces.
When Alessi projected this great work he had open ground to build on,
though, as Evelyn remarked, the rich Genoese merchants had, like the
Hollanders, “little or no extent of ground to employ their estates in.”
Still, there was space enough to permit of spreading porticoes and
forecourts, and to one of the houses in the Strada Nuova Alessi gave the
ample development and airy proportions of a true _villa suburbana_. This
is the Palazzo Parodi, which, like the vanished Sauli palace, shows,
instead of the block plan of the city dwelling, a central _corps de
bâtiment_ with pavilions crowned by open loggias, and a rusticated
screen dividing the court from the street. It is curious that, save in
the case of the beautiful Villa Sauli (now completely rebuilt), Alessi
did not repeat this appropriate design in the country houses with which
he adorned the suburbs of Genoa—those “ravishing retirements of the
Genoese nobility” which prolonged the splendour of the city for miles
along the coast. Of his remaining villas, all are built on the block
plan, or with but slight projections, and rich though they are in
detail, and stately in general composition, they lack that touch of
fantasy which the Roman villa-architects knew how to impart.
Before pronouncing this a defect, however, one must consider the
different conditions under which Alessi and his fellow-architects in
Genoa had to work. Annibale Lippi, Pirro Ligorio, Giacomo della Porta
and Carlo Borromini reared their graceful loggias and stretched their
airy colonnades against masses of luxuriant foliage and above a
far-spreading landscape,
wonderful
To the sea’s edge for gloss and gloom,
while Alessi and Montorsoli had to place their country houses on narrow
ledges of waterless rock, with a thin coating of soil parched by the
wind, and an outlook over the serried roofs and crowded shipping of a
commercial city. The Genoese gardens are mere pockets of earth in coigns
of masonry, where a few olives and bay-trees fight the sun-glare and
sea-wind of a harsh winter and a burning summer. The beauty of the
prospect consists in the noble outline of the harbour, enclosed in
exquisitely modelled but leafless hills, and in the great blue stretch
of sea on which, now and then, the mountains of Corsica float for a
moment. It will be seen that, amid such surroundings, the architectural
quality must predominate over the picturesque or naturalistic. Not only
the natural restrictions of site and soil, but the severity of the
landscape and the nearness of a great city, made it necessary that the
Genoese villa-architects should produce their principal effects by means
of masonry and sculpture, rather than of water and verdure. The somewhat
heavy silhouette of the Genoese country houses is thus perhaps partly
explained; for where the garden had to be a stone monument, it would
have been illogical to make the house less massive.
The most famous of Alessi’s villas lies in the once fashionable suburb
of Sampierdarena, to the west of Genoa. Here, along the shore, were
clustered the most beautiful pleasure-houses of the merchant princes.
The greater number have now been turned into tenements for
factory-workers, or into actual factories, while the beautiful gardens
descending to the sea have been cut in half by the railway and planted
with cabbages and mulberries. Amid this labyrinth of grimy walls,
crumbling loggias and waste ground heaped with melancholy refuse, it is
not easy to find one’s way to the Villa Imperiali (now Scassi), the
masterpiece of Alessi, which stands as a solitary witness to the former
“ravishments” of Sampierdarena. By a happy chance this villa has become
the property of the municipality, which has turned the house into a
girls’ school, while the grounds are used as a public garden; and so
well have house and grounds been preserved that the student of
architecture may here obtain a good idea of the magnificence with which
the Genoese nobles surrounded even their few weeks of _villeggiatura_.
To match such magnificence, one must look to one of the great villas of
the Roman cardinals; and, with the exception of the Villa Doria Pamphily
(which is smaller) and of the Villa Albani, it would be difficult to
cite an elevation where palatial size is combined with such lavish
richness of ornament.
Alessi was once thought to have studied in Rome under Michelangelo; but
Herr Gurlitt shows that the latter was absent from Rome from 1516 to
1535—that is, precisely during what must have been the formative period
of Alessi’s talent. The Perugian architect certainly shows little trace
of Michelangelesque influences, but seems to derive rather from the
school of his own great contemporary, Palladio.
The Villa Scassi, with its Tuscan order below and fluted Corinthian
pilasters above, its richly carved frieze and cornice, and its beautiful
roof-balustrade, is perhaps more familiar to students than any other
example of Genoese suburban architecture. Almost alone among Genoese
villas, it stands at the foot of a hill, with gardens rising behind it
instead of descending below it to the sea. Herr Gurlitt thinks these
grounds are among the earliest in Italy in which the narrow mediæval
_hortus inclusus_ was blent with the wider lines of the landscape;
indeed, he makes the somewhat surprising statement that “all the later
garden-craft has its source in Alessi, who, in the Scassi gardens, has
shown to the full his characteristic gift for preserving unity of
conception in multiplicity of form.”
[Illustration: A GARDEN-NICHE, VILLA SCASSI, GENOA]
There could be no better definition of the garden-science of the Italian
Renaissance; and if, as it seems probable, the Scassi gardens are
earlier in date than the Boboli and the Orti Farnesiani, they certainly
fill an important place in the evolution of the pleasure-ground; but the
Vatican gardens, if they were really designed by Antonio da Sangallo,
must still be regarded as the source from which the later school of
landscape-architects drew their first inspiration. It was certainly
here, and in the unfinished gardens of the Villa Madama, that the
earliest attempts were made to bring the untamed forms of nature into
relation with the disciplined lines of architecture.
Herr Gurlitt is, however, quite right in calling attention to the
remarkable manner in which the architectural lines of the Scassi gardens
have been adapted to their site, and also to the skill with which Alessi
contrived the successive transition from the formal surroundings of the
house to the sylvan freedom of the wooded hilltop beneath which it lies.
A broad terrace, gently sloping with the natural grade of the land,
leads up to a long level walk beneath the high retaining-wall which
sustains the second terrace. In the centre of this retaining-wall is a
beautifully designed triple niche, divided by Atlantides supporting a
delicately carved entablature, while a double flight of steps encloses
this central composition. Niches with statues and marble seats also
adorn the lateral walls of the gardens, and on the upper terrace is a
long tank or canal, flanked by clipped shrubs and statues. Thence an
inclined path leads to a rusticated temple with _colonnes torses_, and
statues in niches above fluted basins into which water once flowed; and
beyond this there is a winding ascent to the grove which crowns the
hill. All the architectural details of the garden are remarkable for a
classical purity and refinement, except the rusticated temple, of which
the fantastic columns are carved to resemble tree-trunks. This may be of
later date; but if contemporary, its baroque style was probably intended
to mark the transition from the formality of the lower gardens to the
rustic character of the naturalistic landscape above—to form, in fact, a
gate from the garden to the park.
The end of the sixteenth century saw this gradual recognition of nature,
and adoption of her forms, in the architecture and sculpture of the
Italian pleasure-house, and more especially in those outlying
constructions which connected the formal and the sylvan portions of the
grounds. “In mid-Renaissance garden-architecture,” as Herr Tuckermann
puts it, “the relation between art and landscape is reversed. Previously
the garden had had to adapt itself to architecture; now architectural
forms are forced into a resemblance with nature.”