original architecture is that of the Villa d’Este at Cernobbio, a mile
or two from the town of Como, at the southern end of the lake. The
villa, built in 1527 by Cardinal Gallio (who was born a fisher-lad of
Cernobbio), has passed through numerous transformations. In 1816 it was
bought by Caroline of Brunswick, who gave it the name of Este, and
turned it into a great structure of the Empire style. Here for several
years the Princess of Wales held the fantastic court of which Bergami,
the courier, was High Chamberlain if not Prince Consort; and, whatever
disadvantages may have accrued to herself from this establishment, her
residence at the Villa d’Este was a benefit to the village, for she
built the road connecting Cernobbio with Moltrasio, which was the first
carriage-drive along the lake, and spent large sums on improvements in
the neighbourhood of her estate.
Since then the villa has suffered a farther change into a large and
fashionable hotel; but though Queen Caroline anglicized a part of the
grounds, the main lines of the old Renaissance garden still exist.
[Illustration: IN THE GARDENS OF ISOLA BELLA, LAKE MAGGIORE]
Behind the Villa d’Este the mountains are sufficiently withdrawn to
leave a gentle acclivity, which was once laid out in a series of
elaborate gardens. Adjoining the villa is a piece of level ground just
above the lake, which evidently formed the “secret garden” with its
parterres and fountains. This has been replaced by a lawn and
flower-beds, but still keeps its boundary-wall at the back, with a
baroque grotto and fountain of pebbles and shell-work. Above this rises
a _tapis vert_ shaded by cypresses, and leading to the usual Hercules in
a temple. The peculiar feature of this ascent is that it is bordered on
each side with narrow steps of channelled stone, down which the water
rushes under overlapping ferns and roses to the fish-pool below the
grotto in the lower garden. Beyond the formal gardens is the _bosco_, a
bit of fine natural woodland climbing the cliff-side, with winding paths
which lead to various summer-houses and sylvan temples. The rich leafage
of walnut, acacia and cypress, the glimpses of the blue lake far below,
the rush of a mountain torrent through a deep glen spanned by a romantic
ivy-clad bridge, make this _bosco_ of the Villa d’Este one of the most
enchanting bits of sylvan gardening in Italy. Scarcely less enchanting
is the grove of old plane-trees by the water-gate on the lake, where, in
a solemn twilight of over-roofing branches, woodland gods keep watch
above the broad marble steps descending to the water. In the gardens of
the Villa d’Este there is much of the Roman spirit—the breadth of
design, the unforced inclusion of natural features, and that
sensitiveness to the quality of the surrounding landscape which
characterizes the great gardens of the Campagna.
Just across the lake, in the deep shade of the wooded cliffs beneath the
Pizzo di Torno, lies another villa still more steeped in the Italian
garden-magic. This is the Villa Pliniana, built in 1570 by the Count
Anguissola of Piacenza, and now the property of the Trotti family of
Milan. The place takes its name from an intermittent spring in the
court, which is supposed to be the one described by Pliny in one of his
letters; and it is farther celebrated as being the coolest villa on
Como. It lies on a small bay on the east side of the lake, and faces due
north, so that, while the villas of Cernobbio are bathed in sunlight, a
deep green shade envelops it. The house stands on a narrow ledge, its
foundations projecting into the lake, and its back built against the
almost vertical wooded cliff which protects it from the southern sun.
Down this cliff pours a foaming mountain torrent from the Val di Calore,
just beneath the peak of Torno; and this torrent the architect of the
Villa Pliniana has captured in its descent to the lake and carried
through the central apartment of the villa.
The effect produced is unlike anything else, even in the wonderland of
Italian gardens. The two wings of the house, a plain and somewhat
melancholy-looking structure, are joined by an open arcaded room,
against the back wall of which the torrent pours down, over stonework
tremulous with moss and ferns, gushing out again beneath the balustrade
of the loggia, where it makes a great semicircle of glittering whiteness
in the dark-green waters of the lake. The old house is saturated with
the freshness and drenched with the flying spray of the caged torrent.
The bare vaulted rooms reverberate with it, the stone floors are green
with its dampness, the air quivers with its cool incessant rush. The
contrast of this dusky dripping loggia, on its perpetually shaded bay,
with the blazing blue waters of the lake and their sun-steeped western
shores, is one of the most wonderful effects in _sensation_ that the
Italian villa-art has ever devised.
The architect, not satisfied with diverting a part of the torrent to
cool his house, has led the rest in a fall down the cliff immediately
adjoining the villa, and has designed winding paths through the woods
from which one may look down on the bright rush of the waters. On the
other side of the house lies a long balustraded terrace, between the
lake and the hanging woods, and here, on the only bit of open and level
ground near the house, are the old formal gardens, now much neglected,
but still full of a melancholy charm.
After the Villa Pliniana, the other gardens of Como seem almost
commonplace. All along both shores are villas which, amid many
alterations, have preserved traces of their old garden-architecture,
such as the Bishop of Como’s villa, south of Leno, with its baroque
saints and prophets perched along the garden-balustrade, and the more
famous Villa Carlotta at Cadenabbia, where the fine gateways and the
architectural treatment of the terraces bear witness to the former
beauty of the grounds. But almost everywhere the old garden-magic has
been driven out by a fury of modern horticulture. The pleached alleys
have made way for lawns dotted with palms and bananas, the box-parterres
have been replaced by star-shaped beds of begonias and cinerarias, and
the groves of laurel and myrtle by thickets of pampas-grass and bamboo.
This description applies to all the principal gardens between Como and
Bellagio. Here and there, indeed, in almost all of them, some
undisturbed corner remains—a flight of steps wreathed in Banksian roses
and descending to a shady water-gate; a fern-lined grotto with a stucco
Pan or Syrinx; a clipped laurel-walk set with marble benches, or a
classic summer-house above the lake—but these old bits are so scattered
and submerged under the new order of gardening that it requires an
effort of the imagination to reconstruct from them an image of what the
old lake-gardens must have been before every rich proprietor tried to
convert his marble terraces into an English park.
[Illustration: VILLA CICOGNA, FROM THE TERRACE ABOVE THE HOUSE]
Almost to be included among lake-villas is the beautiful Villa Cicogna
at Bisuschio. This charming old place lies in the lovely but
little-known hill-country between the Lake of Varese and the southern
end of Lugano. The house, of which the history appears to be unknown to
the present owners, is an early Renaissance building of great beauty,
with a touch of Tuscan austerity in its design. The plain front, with
deep projecting eaves and widely spaced windows, might stand on some
village square above the Arno; and the interior court, with its
two-storied arcade, recalls, in purity and lightness of design, the
inheritors of Brunelleschi’s tradition. So few country houses of the
early sixteenth century are to be found in the Milanese that it would be
instructive to learn whether the Villa Cicogna is in fact due to a
Tuscan hand, or whether this mid-Italian style was at that time also
prevalent in Lombardy.
The villa is built against a hillside, and the interior court forms an
oblong, enclosed on three sides by the house, and continued on the
fourth by a beautiful sunken garden, above which runs a balustraded walk
on a level with the upper story. On the other side of the house is
another garden, consisting of a long terrace bounded by a high
retaining-wall, which is tunnelled down its whole length to form a shady
arcaded walk lined with ferns and dripping with runnels of water. At the
back of the house the ground continues to rise, and a _château d’eau_ is
built against the hillside; while beyond the terrace-garden already
described, a gate leads to a hanging woodland, with shady walks from
which, at every turn, there are enchanting views across the southern bay
of Lake Lugano.
The house itself is as interesting as the garden. The walls of the court
are frescoed in charming cinque-cento designs, and the vaulted ceiling
of the loggia is painted in delicate trellis-work, somewhat in the
manner of the semicircular arcade at the Villa di Papa Giulio. Several
of the rooms also preserve their wall-frescoes and much of their
Renaissance furniture, while a series of smaller apartments on the
ground floor are exquisitely decorated with stucco ornament in the light
style of the eighteenth century; so that the Villa Cicogna still gives a
vivid idea of what an old Italian country house must have been in its
original state.
From the hill-villas of the lakes to the country places of the Milanese
rice-fields the descent is somewhat abrupt; but the student of
garden-architecture may mitigate the transition by carrying on his
researches from the southern end of Como through the smiling landscape
of the Brianza. Here there are many old villas, in a lovely setting of
vineyard and woodland, with distant views of the Alps and of the sunny
Lombard plain; but of old gardens few are to be found. There is one of
great beauty, belonging to the Villa Crivelli, near the village of
Inverigo; but as it is inaccessible to visitors, only tantalizing
glimpses may be obtained of its statues and terraces, its cypress-walks
and towering “Gigante.” Not far from Inverigo is the Rotonda Cagnola,
now the property of the Marchese d’Adda, and built in 1813 by the
Marchese Luigi Cagnola in imitation of the Propylæa of the Acropolis.
The house is beautifully placed on a hilltop, with glorious views over
the Alps and Apennines, and is curious to the student as an example of
the neo-classicism of the Empire; but it has of course no gardens in the
old sense of the term.
The flat environs of Milan were once dotted with country houses, but
with the growth of the city and the increased facilities of travel,
these have been for the most part abandoned for villas in the hills or
on the lakes, and to form an idea of their former splendour one must
turn to the pages of Alberto del Rè’s rare volumes. Here one may see in
all its detail that elaborate style of gardening which the French
landscape-gardeners developed from the “grand manner” acquired by Le
Nôtre in his study of the great Roman country-seats. This style, adapted
to the flat French landscape, and complicated by the mannerisms and
elaborations of the eighteenth century, came back to Italy with the
French fashions which Piedmont and Lombardy were so fond of importing.
The time had passed when Europe modelled itself on Italy: France was now
the glass of fashion, and, in northern Italy especially, French
architecture and gardening were eagerly reproduced.
In Lombardy the natural conditions were so similar that the French
geometrical gardens did not seem out of place; yet even here a
difference is felt, both in the architecture and the gardens. Italy, in
spite of Palladio and the Palladian tradition, never freed herself from
the baroque. Her artistic tendencies were all toward freedom,
improvisation, individual expression, while France was fundamentally
classical and instinctively temperate. Just as the French cabinet-makers
and bronze-chisellers and modellers in stucco produced more delicate and
finished, but less personal, work than the Italian craftsmen, so the
French architects designed with greater precision and restraint, and
less play of personal invention. To establish a rough distinction, it
might be said that French art has always been intellectual and Italian
art emotional; and this distinction is felt even in the treatment of the
pleasure-house and its garden. In Italy the architectural detail
remained baroque till the end of the eighteenth century, and the
architect permitted himself far greater license in the choice of forms
and the combination of materials. The old villas of the Milanese have a
very strong individuality, and it is to be regretted that so few remain
intact to show what a personal style they preserved even under the most
obvious French influences.
[Illustration: VILLA PLINIANA, LAKE COMO]
The Naviglio, the canal which flows through Milan and sends various
branches to the Ticino and the Adda, was formerly lined for miles beyond
the city with suburban villas. Few remain unaltered, and even of these
few the old gardens have disappeared. One of the most interesting houses
in Del Rè’s collection, the Villa Alario (now Visconti di Saliceto), on
the Naviglio near Cernusco, is still in perfect preservation without and
within; and though its old gardens were replaced by an English park
early in the nineteenth century, their general outline is still
discoverable. The villa, a stately pile built by Ruggieri in 1736, looks
on a court divided from the highway by a fine wall and beautiful iron
gates. Low wings containing the chapel and offices, and running at right
angles to the main building, connect the latter with the courtyard
walls; and arched passages through the centre of the wings lead to
outlying courts surrounded by stables and other dependencies. The house,
toward the forecourt, has a central open loggia or atrium, and the upper
windows are framed in baroque architraves and surmounted by square attic
lights. The garden elevation is more elaborate. Here there is a central
projection, three windows wide, flanked by two-storied open loggias, and
crowned by an attic with ornamental pilasters and urns. This central bay
is adorned with beautiful wrought-iron balconies, which are repeated in
the wings at each end of the building. All the wrought-iron of the Villa
Visconti is remarkable for its elegance and originality, and as used on
the terraces, and in the balustrade of the state staircase, in
combination with heavy baroque stone balusters, it is an interesting
example of a peculiarly Lombard style of decoration.
Between the house and the Naviglio there once lay an elaborate _parterre
de broderie_, terminated above the canal by a balustraded retaining-wall
adorned with statues, and flanked on each side by pleached walks,
arbours, trellis-work and fish-ponds. Of this complicated pleasance
little remains save the long terraces extending from each end of the
house, the old flower-garden below one of these, and some bits of
decorative sculpture incorporated in the boundary-walls. The long tank
or canal shown in Del Rè’s print has been turned into an irregular pond
with grass-banks, and the _parterre de broderie_ is now a lawn; even the
balustrade has been removed from the wall along the Naviglio. Still, the
architectural details of the forecourt and the terraces are worthy of
careful study, and the unusual beauty of the old villa, with its
undisturbed group of dependencies, partly atones for the loss of its
original surroundings.
[Illustration: IRON GATES OF THE VILLA ALARIO| (NOW VISCONTI DI
SALICETO)]
Many eighteenth-century country houses in the style of the Villa
Visconti are scattered through the Milanese, though few have retained so
unaltered an outline, or even such faint traces of their formal gardens.
The huge villa of the Duke of Modena at Varese—now the Municipio—is a
good example of the same architecture, and has a beautiful
stone-and-iron balustrade and many wrought-iron balconies in the same
style as those at Cernusco; and its gardens, ascending the hillside
behind the house, and now used as a public park, must once have been
very fine. The Grand Hôtel of Varese is also an old villa, and its
architectural screen and projecting wings form an unusually
characteristic façade of the same period. Here, again, little remains of
the old garden but a charming upper terrace; but the interior
decorations of many of the rooms are undisturbed, and are exceptionally
interesting examples of the more delicate Italian baroque.
Another famous country house, Castellazzo d’Arconate, at Bollate, is
even more palatial than the Duke of Modena’s villa at Varese, and, while
rather heavy in general outline, has an interesting interior façade,
with a long arcade resting on coupled columns, and looking out over a
stately courtyard with statues. This villa is said to have preserved a
part of its old gardens, but it is difficult of access, and could not be
visited at the time when the material for these chapters was collected.
[Illustration: RAILING OF THE VILLA ALARIO]
VILLAS OF VENETIA
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF THE BOTANIC GARDEN, PADUA]
VII
VILLAS OF VENETIA
Writers on Italian architecture have hitherto paid little attention to
the villa-architecture of Venetia. It is only within the last few years
that English and American critics have deigned to recognize any
architectural school in Italy later than that of Vignola and Palladio,
and even these two great masters of the sixteenth century have been held
up as examples of degeneracy to a generation bred in the Ruskinian code
of art ethics. In France, though the influence of Viollet-le-Duc was
nearly as hostile as Ruskin’s to any true understanding of Italian art,
the Latin instinct for form has asserted itself in a revived study of
the classic tradition; but French writers on architecture have hitherto
confined themselves chiefly to the investigation of their national
styles.
It is only in Germany that Italian architecture from Palladio to Juvara
has received careful and sympathetic study. Burckhardt pointed the way
in his “Cicerone” and in “The Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy”;
Herr Gustav Ebe followed with an interesting book on the late
Renaissance throughout Europe; and Herr Gurlitt has produced the most
masterly work yet written on the subject, his “History of the Baroque
Style in Italy.” These authors, however, having to work in a new and
extensive field, have necessarily been obliged to restrict themselves to
its most important divisions. Burckhardt’s invaluable “Renaissance
Architecture,” though full of critical insight, is rather a collection
of memoranda than a history of the subject; and even Herr Gurlitt,
though he goes into much greater detail, cannot forsake the highroad for
the by-paths, and has consequently had to pass by many minor
ramifications of his subject. This is especially to be regretted in
regard to the villa-architecture of Venetia, the interest and
individuality of which he fully appreciates. He points out that the
later Venetian styles spring from two sources, the schools of Palladio
and of Sansovino. The former, greatly as his work was extolled, never
had the full sympathy of the Venetians. His art was too pure and severe
for a race whose taste had been formed on the fantastic mingling of
Gothic and Byzantine and on the glowing decorations of the greatest
school of colourists the world has known. It was from the warm and
picturesque art of Sansovino and Longhena that the Italian baroque
naturally developed; and though the authority of Palladio made itself
felt in the official architecture of Venetia, its minor constructions,
especially the villas and small private houses, seldom show any trace of
his influence save in the grouping of their windows. So little is known
of the Venetian villa-builders that this word as to their general
tendencies must replace the exact information which still remains to be
gathered.
Many delightful examples of the Venetian _maison de plaisance_ are still
to be found in the neighbourhood of Padua and Treviso, along the Brenta,
and in the country between the Euganeans and the Monti Berici.
Unfortunately, in not more than one or two instances have the old
gardens of these houses been preserved in their characteristic form;
and, by a singular perversity of fate, it happens that the villas which
have kept their gardens are not typical of the Venetian style. One of
them, the castle of Cattajo, at Battaglia in the Euganean Hills, stands
in fact quite apart from any contemporary style. This extraordinary
edifice, built for the Obizzi of Venice about 1550, is said to have been
copied from the plans of a castle in Tartary brought home by Marco Polo.
It shows, at any rate, a deliberate reversion, in mid-cinque-cento, to a
kind of Gothicism which had become obsolete in northern Italy three
hundred years earlier; and the mingling of this rude style with classic
detail and Renaissance sculpture has produced an effect picturesque
enough to justify so quaint a tradition.
Cattajo stands on the edge of the smiling Euganean country, its great
fortress-like bulk built up against a wooded knoll with a little river
at its base. Crossing the river by a bridge flanked by huge piers
surmounted with statues, one reaches a portcullis in a massive
gatehouse, also adorned with statues. The portcullis opens on a long
narrow court planted with a hedge of clipped euonymus; and at one end a
splendid balustraded stairway _à cordon_ leads up to a flagged terrace
with yew-trees growing between the flags. To the left of this terrace is
a huge artificial grotto, with a stucco Silenus lolling on an elephant,
and other life-size animals and figures, a composition recalling the
zoölogical wonders of the grotto at Castello. This Italian reversion to
the grotesque, at a time when it was losing its fascination for the
Northern races, might form the subject of an interesting study of race
æsthetics. When the coarse and sombre fancy of mediæval Europe found
expression in grinning gargoyles and baleful or buffoonish images,
Italian art held serenely to the beautiful, and wove the most tragic
themes into a labyrinth of lovely lines; but in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, when the classical graces had taken possession of
northern Europe, the chimerical animals, the gnomes and goblins, the
gargoyles and broomstick-riders, fled south of the Alps, and reappeared
in the queer fauna of Italian grottoes and in the leering dwarfs and
satyrs of the garden-walk.
[Illustration: VIEW AT VAL SAN ZIBIO, NEAR BATTAGLIA]
From the yew-tree terrace at Cattajo an arcaded loggia gives access to
the interior of the castle, which is a bewilderment of low-storied
passageways and long flights of steps hewn in the rock against which the
castle is built. From a vaulted tunnel of stone one passes abruptly into
a suite of lofty apartments decorated with seventeenth-century frescoes
and opening on a balustraded terrace guarded by marble divinities; or,
taking another turn, one finds one’s self in a sham Gothic chapel or in
a mediæval _chemin de ronde_ on the crenelated walls. This fantastic
medley of styles, in conjunction with the unusual site of the castle,
has produced several picturesque bits of garden, wedged between the
walls and the hillside, or on the terraces overhanging the river; but
from the architectural point of view, the most interesting thing about
Cattajo is the original treatment of the great stairway in the court.
Six or seven miles from Battaglia, in a narrow and fertile valley of the
Euganeans, lies one of the most beautiful pleasure-grounds in Italy.
This is the garden of the villa at Val San Zibio. On approaching it, one
sees, across a grassy common, a stately and ornate arch of triumph with
a rusticated façade and a broken pediment enriched with statues. This
arch, which looks as though it were the principal entrance-gate, appears
to have been placed in the high boundary-wall merely in order to afford
from the highway a vista of the _château d’eau_ which is the chief
feature of the gardens. The practice of breaking the wall to give a view
of some special point in the park or garden was very common in France,
but is seldom seen in Italy, though there is a fine instance of it in
the open grille below the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati.