Luke Morgan

‘Anciently modern and modernly ancient’: ruins and reconstructions in sixteenth-century Italian landscape design

One of the earliest literary representations of ruins in a landscape setting appears in Francesco Colonna’s antiquarian romance, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) (figure 1). Encountering huge ruined columns and ‘wishing to know their type’, Poliphilo, the protagonist of the book, ‘measured one that was lying on the ground and found that its shaft, from the socle to the thin end, was seven times the diameter of its bottom’. From the fifteenth century onwards, Roman ruins were carefully studied for what they revealed about ancient design principles and building practices, and compared with the information provided by Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture. The Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi, for example, must have adopted similar methods to Poliphilo so as to become, as Giorgio Vasari writes, ‘completely capable of seeing Rome in his mind’s eye, just as it was before it was ruined’. Ruins frequently elicited poetic reverie. The Hypnerotomachia again provides an example when the nymph Polia encourages Poliphilo ‘to go and admire these deserted temples which have collapsed through the ravages of time, or have been consumed by fire, or shattered by old age. Take your pleasure in looking at these, and examine the noble fragments that remain, which are worthy of admiration’. The ruin is in this context a form of memento mori (reminder of death) — not just of living things, but also of civilizations, no matter how great. These approaches toward ruins— archaeological and poetic— can be traced in early modern texts. In this essay, I suggest that they also influenced the design and experience of landscape during the period. Arguably, for example, the Fountain of Rome, or ‘Rometta’, in the garden of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli and the Tempietto in the Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo were both motivated, albeit with different results, by the sixteenth-century impulse toward archaeological reconstruction. The artificially ruined ‘Etruscan’ tomb that Pierfrancesco ‘Vicino’ Orsini constructed in the Sacro Bosco also suggests the relevance of contemporary ideas about ancient fragments to early modern landscape design. Unlike the Rometta and the Tempietto, however, the tomb is less a reconstruction than a simulation or, as I will argue, a ‘substitution’. Sources fromOrsini’s period suggest that it would have been understood as substituting for, and as the equivalent of, the ancient Etruscan tombs of the surrounding landscape, despite its modernity. Authenticity was not, in other words, dependent on the verifiable antiquity of the artefact. The essay concludes with a further connotation of the motif of the artificial ruin. Orsini’s tomb was encountered in a forest. It is thus associated with early modern concepts of the ‘dark wood’ as a threatening landscape, suggesting another contemporary approach to ruins besides those of the archaeological and the poetic. Ruins could also signify the destructive forces of nature and time.

Living Rocks and Petrified Giants in Vicino Orsini’s Sacro Bosco

Despite over half a century of research into Pierfrancesco “Vicino” Orsini’s Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo (c.1560–1584)—one of the most enigmatic designed landscapes of the sixteenth century—the fact that its figures were carved from “living” rock has received little attention. This essay focuses on the implications and meanings of this unusual sculptural practice in the context of sixteenth-century garden design. It examines sources from literature and natural history for the idea of living rock, before considering Renaissance approaches to rock carving in situ, “pietra viva” as a poetic image, and the relevance of the legends of the giants. The essay concludes with the suggestion that Orsini’s choice of medium militates against the presence of a coherent or linear narrative, despite the many past attempts to find a textual source that might help to clarify the Sacro Bosco’s meaning.

Early modern Edens: the landscape and language of paradise

Abstract In Jan Collaerts engraving after Maerten de Vos, God is depicted as a benevolent patriarch engaged in his Creation (figurer). Slightly later, the print was reissued by a different publisher (C.J. Visscher) under the more specific title of The Creation of Eve (figure 2). Here, Collaerts anthropornorphic God has become an aureole of light inscribed with the Latin word ‘pater’ (father), which is itself intertwined with the Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name for God. In its transliterated form — as the four consonants YHWH — the Tetragrammaton is unpronounceable owing to the conviction that the name of God is too sacred to be uttered. This has complex implications for the representation of the Creation, particularly for the depiction of God speaking to Adam and Eve and of Adam in his role as ‘nomothete’ (name-giver) (figure 3).1