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Preface
David R. Coffin
Description: Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome
Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome
~This study is to parallel my previous work on Roman villas, but to carry the material to the late eighteenth century, when the English mode of gardening replaced the previous principles of classical gardening and often destroyed Italianate gardens. The study is meant to attempt to consider every aspect of the classical garden in Rome and, therefore, is...
Author
David R. Coffin
PublisherPrinceton University Press
Copyright© 1991 by Princeton University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00055.003
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-19203
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Preface
This study is to parallel my previous work on Roman villas, but to carry the material to the late eighteenth century, when the English mode of gardening replaced the previous principles of classical gardening and often destroyed Italianate gardens. The study is meant to attempt to consider every aspect of the classical garden in Rome and, therefore, is not organized on a chronological formal development. There is a slight chronological organization in some of the separate chapters as they proceed from the universal mediaeval hortus conclusus to a consideration of ancient statuary decoration, waterworks, and classical allusions and iconography, which define the characteristic Roman garden of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. A consideration of Roman gardening in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is important to understand the gradual departure from the Renaissance principle enunciated by the sculptor Bandinelli in the mid-sixteenth century that “built things should be the guide and dominate those things that are planted.” The great garden parks of the Borghese and the Pamphili villas proclaim the art of landscaping and gardening as an independent art in which architecture, like sculpture, plays only an incidental role.
As in my book on Roman villas, Rome is defined geographically as “the land surrounding the city which is owned by persons whose political, religious, commercial, or social activities are centered within it,” or roughly the modern region of Latium or Lazio.
Chapter 14 on the public and Roman gardens has appeared previously in a somewhat different form in the Journal of Garden History, II, 1982, pp. 201–32, and is republished with permission of the editor, John Dixon Hunt. The occasional references to access to gardens of other countries in the original publication have been omitted here.
This study has percolated for many years parallel with my consideration of Roman villas. Numerous colleagues and former students have contributed material or ideas which I have ingested, sometimes unwittingly, but particular thanks are offered to Lynette Bosch, Sharon Cather, Tracy Cooper, Sabine Eiche, Meredith Gill, David Gobel, Edward Harwood, Claudia Lazzaro, Robert McVaugh, John Shearman, and David Wright. The librarians and staff of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Biblioteca Estense at Modena, the American Academy at Rome, and Marquand Library of Princeton University have been most helpful and kind in their aid during extensive periods of research, as have the directors and staff of the state archives at Florence, Modena, Parma, and Rome. The Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University has generously supported this project through its Spears research and publication funds. I particularly wish to thank Elizabeth Powers of the Princeton University Press for her gracious encouragement and direction of the editing of the work; Brian R. MacDonald for his impeccable and exacting copy editing; Cynthia Arbour for her enthusiastic guidance of the work through the intricacies of the Press; and Mike Burton, the designer, for his skill in ordering the whole.
JUNE 5, 1990
PRINCETON, N.J.