Gardens  1

THE ITALIAN GARDEN

Il Giardino di Boboli

in Florence, Italy; 16th century; sculptors and architects: Bartolomeo Ammannati, Giorgio Vasari, Bernardo Buontalenti and others. 

More info on Wikipedia: Boboli Gardens.

Villa Aldobrandini

in Frascati, near Rome, Italy; 1598-1621, architects: Giacomo della Porta, Carlo Maderno, Giovanni Fontana. More info on Wikipedia: Villa Aldobrandini.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Peter Murray: "The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance",  Schocken Books Publisher, New York City, NY, USA, 1997.

A classic guide to one of the most pivotal periods in art and architectural history, "The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance" remains the most lucid and comprehensive volume available.  From Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Palladio, and Brunelleschi to St. Peter's in Rome, the palaces of Venice, and the Medici Chapel in Florence, Peter Murray's lavishly illustrated book tells readers everything they need to know about the architectural life of Italy from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries.

Peter Murray, a painter and art historian, was a professor of art history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the author of many books, including "Dictionary of Art and Artists".

• Rudolf Wittkower: "Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism",  Academy Press; Cambridge, MA, USA, 1998.

Rudolf Wittkower Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism 'Scores have profited from, and been inspired by, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism and its lesson of the importance of consistent modular relations. No other book on the subject of architectural history written by scholars of his generation has had such a creative effect on men in practice.' Nikolaus Pevsner, Foreword to Art and Architecture in Italy 'Professor Wittkower's mind is not only inquiring but immensely well stored and tenacious. His studies of humanist architecture are masterpieces of scholarship.' Sir Kenneth Clark, Architectural Review 'To say that this is the best study of Italian Renaissance architecture in English is faint praise.' John Coolidge, Magazine of Art Since its original publication in 1949, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism has acquired the status of a classic, having brought to light, through exemplary scholarship, the connections between the architecture and the culture of the Renaissance. Focusing on the work of the main Renaissance architects from Alberti to Palladio, Rudolf Wittkower has produced definitive explanations of the true significance of certain architecture forms, and has at the same time revealed the limitations of a purely aesthetic theory of Renaissance architecture. This fifth edition of Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, intended to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the book, integrates the illustrations with the text and includes an edited selection of lectures on Proportion by Professor Wittkower.

• Giovanni Battista Falda, Giovanni Giacomo Rossi and Giovanni Francesco Venturini: "Le fontane di Roma nelle piazze, e luoghi publici della città, con li loro prospetti, come sono al presente",  Rome, Italy, 1684.

• Luigi Vanvitelli: "Dichiarazione dei disegni del Reale Palazzo di Caserta",  Naples, Italy, 1756.

• Giovanni Battista Falda, (U. Salwa cur.): "Li giardini di Roma. Con le loro piante alzate e vedute in prospettiva disegnate ed intagliate da Giovan Battista Falda",  illustrated, Italian text, Intra Moenia, Napoli, Italy, 2018.

• Alfred-Auguste Ernouf: "L'art des jardins: parcs, jardins, promenades",  Rothschild Éditeur, Paris, France, 1886.

• Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot: "The Architecture of Western Gardens: A Design History from the Renaissance to the Present Day",  544 pages, The MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 1991.

The Architecture of Western Gardens presents an international tour of garden design from the Renaissance to the present. As object and as literature, it is a sumptuous and unprecedented resource. The more than seventy essays by scholars from Europe and America all commissioned for this book - and over 650 illustrations raise the standard of garden literature to a new level. The result is an invaluable compendium that will serve as a fundamental starting point for exploring the many expressions of the place where nature and culture, project and diversion, work and pleasure meet. Organized chronologically, the essays and illustrations make up a mosaic of the garden in the Western world. The humanist garden in Renaissance Italy, the concepts of the "Sublime" and the "Picturesque," mazes, grottoes, and other curiosities, city parks, American land art, and even Disneyland are among the topics treated. Discussions of characteristic aspects of history and theory are followed by analyses of individual gardens as paradigms of their type: the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, the Parc Monceau in Paris, the Park Güell in Barcelona, Stowe in England, and many more. The illustrations are a model of how iconography can function as text. They include ground plans meticulously redrawn from original archival material to provide precise information on the scale and nature of many of the projects, as well as a wealth of drawings, reconstructions, paintings, and photographs.