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The monster in the garden: the grotesque, the gigantic, and the monstrous in Renaissance landscape design

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 31; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14601176.2010.530389

1943-2186

Luke Morgan,

Architecture and Art History Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 325. 2. Ibid., p. 331. 3. Ibid., p. 325. 4. See Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, translated by Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), p. 20. 5. Paul Barolsky mentions Rabelais in relation to Giambologna's Appennino in his Michelangelo's Nose: A Myth and its Maker (University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), as does Horst Bredekamp in his exhaustive Vicino Orsini e il Sacro Bosco di Bomarzo (Rome: Edizioni dell'Elefante, 1989), but the comments of both on the subject are very brief. 6. Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 26. 7. The open mouth also appears in strictly architectural contexts at, for example, the Palazzo Zuccari, Rome (a door and a window), the Palazzo Thiene, Vicenza (a fireplace), and the Villa della Tore, Valpolicella (another fireplace). 8. See Michael Niedermeier, Erotik in der Garten-Kunst (Leipzig: Editions Leipzig, 1995), p. 201, for Lauremberg and an illustration of the parterre. The erotic, or merely genital, is a longstanding theme of the garden. Gervase Jackson-Stops has, for instance, noted that the cave below the Temple of Venus at Sir Francis Dashwood's West Wycombe ‘seems to have been a very literal interpretation of the mons veneris, with the entrance representing a vagina, and the curving walls spread-open legs’. See his An English Arcadia, 1600–1990 (London: The National Trust, 1992), p. 94. See also Wendy Frith, ‘Sexuality and Politics in the Gardens at West Wycombe and Medmenham Abbey’, in Bourgeois and Aristocratic Encounters in Garden Art, 1550–1850, edited by Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), pp. 285–309. See also, less credibly perhaps, Edmund Wilson's comments on the meaning of the reference to Vicino Orsini's ‘wood’ inscribed at Bomarzo. The Devils and Canon Barham: Ten Essays on Poets, Novelists, and Monsters (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), p. 208. 9. See, especially, Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on Top’, in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 124–151. 10. Michael Holquist, for example, argues in his prologue to Hélène Iswolsky's translation of Bakhtin's book that the concept of ‘grotesque realism’ is a ‘point-by-point inversion of the categories used in the thirties to define Socialist Realism’. Rabelais, p. xvii. 11. Ibid., pp. 317–318. 12. Ibid., p. 318, n. 6. 13. The phrase is Claudia Lazzaro's. See her The Italian Renaissance Garden: From the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Italy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 150. 14. There was, in addition, a chamber for a small orchestra located in the head. My thanks to John Dixon Hunt for this point. 15. Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 339. 16. For the sources, see Lazzaro, Renaissance Garden, pp. 148–149. 17. Charles Seymour Jr., Michelangelo's David (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967), p. 34. 18. For a discussion of these sources, see Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, Medici Gardens: From Making to Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 19. This was also noted by Roswitha Stewering in her ‘The Relationship Between World, Landscape and Polia in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, Word & Image, 14/1, January–June 1998, pp. 3–4. 20. Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, translated by Joscelyn Godwin (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), pp. 35–36. 21. Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (London: Academy Editions, 1996), p. 48. 22. In his The Villa d'Este at Tivoli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 40, David Coffin notes that: ‘During the deadly hot Roman summers the gardens of the Villa d'Este were to bathe all one's senses, visual, aural, and tactile, with the refreshment of water’. See also his brief comments on p. 39. 23. Cited in Anatole Tchikine, ‘Giochi d'acqua: Water Effects in Renaissance and Baroque Italy’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 30/1, January–March 2010, p. 63. 24. Ibid., p. 66. 25. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 3, edited by William Gaunt (London: Dent, 1963), p. 172. See Tchikine, ‘Giochi d'acqua’, for numerous other examples. 26. See Webster Smith, ‘Pratolino’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 20/4, p. 167. 27. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Montaigne's Travel Journal, translated by Donald M. Frame (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), p. 64. 28. For Bosse, see Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 9. 29. Vasari, Lives, Vol. 3, p. 170. 30. Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 370–371. 31. According to Vasari: ‘From the mouth of Antaeus water issues in a great quantity, instead of his spirit’. Lives, Vol. 3, p. 173. 32. Discussed in David Coffin, ‘Pirro Ligorio on the Nobility of the Arts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 27, 1964, p. 199. 33. Tchikine, ‘Giochi d'acqua’, p. 63. 34. Noted in J. Scott, Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 50. (The text was written under a pseudonym — Perlone Zipole, which is an anagram of Lorenzo Lippi.) 35. The Meaning of Gardens, edited by Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), p. 4. 36. See Lazzaro, Renaissance Garden, p. 27. 37. Coffin, Villa d'Este, p. 38. 38. Claudia Lazzaro, ‘Gendered Nature and its Representation in Sixteenth-Century Garden Sculpture’, in Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture, edited by Sarah Blake McHam (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 249. See also her ‘Politicizing a National Garden Tradition: The Italianness of the Italian Garden’, in Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 157–169. 39. Lazzaro, ‘Gendered Nature’, p. 249. 40. R. W. Darré, ‘Marriage Laws and the Principles of Breeding’, in Nazi Ideology before 1933, ed. Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J. Rupp (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1978), p. 115. Discussed in Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 27. 41. For Bonfadio and the concept of the ‘three natures’ in general, see John Dixon Hunt's publications: ‘Paragone in Paradise: Translating the Garden’, Comparative Criticism, 18, 1996, pp. 55–70, and Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 53–54. See also my forthcoming chapters on ‘Design’ and ‘Meaning’ in A Cultural History of Gardens, Vol. 3, edited by Elizabeth Hyde (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2011). 42. See Lazzaro, Renaissance Garden, p. 9. 43. Ibid., p. 61. 44. Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Montaigne, Cannibals and Grottoes’, History and Anthropology, 6/2–3, 1993, p. 135. 45. Quoted in ibid., p. 130. 46. Georges Canguilhem, ‘Monstrosity and the Monstrous’, in The Body: A Reader, edited by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 192. 47. Ibid., p. 187. 48. Ibid. Canguilhem's point recalls Bakhtin's claim that in grotesque realism, ‘all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable’. Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 19. 49. Canguilhem, ‘Monstrosity’, p. 187. 50. Ibid., p. 188. 51. Quoted in Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 177. 52. Paré’s treatise has been translated into English by Janis L. Pallister as On Monsters and Marvels (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982). See pp. 3–4 for the ‘causes’. 53. Jean Céard, La Nature et les prodiges (Geneva: Droz, 1977). 54. Paré, On Monsters, p. 107, and p. 125. 55. The best discussion of the concept of fantasia in cinquecento art theory, is in David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 103ff. 56. See Rensselaer Lee, ‘Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting’, Art Bulletin, xxii/4, December 1940, pp. 197–229, for the classic account of Horace's much-quoted dictum. 57. Quoted and translated in John F. Moffitt, ‘An Exemplary Humanist Hybrid: Vasari's “Fraude” with Reference to Bronzino's “Sphinx”’, Renaissance Quarterly, 49/2, Summer 1996, p. 316. 58. Quoted and translated in Summers, Michelangelo, pp. 135–136. 59. Coffin, ‘Nobility’, p. 200. 60. Ibid. 61. Edmund Wilson, The Devils, p. 203. 62. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London: Collins, 1960), p. 236. See Paulette Singley, ‘Devouring Architecture’, Assemblage, 32, April 1997, pp. 108–125, for a useful discussion of this passage. 63. Ruskin, Stones, p. 238. 64. For Basil's view, see John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Recreation of Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 18. For Polybius and Philostratus, see Erwin Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1955), p. 343. 65. The Classical literary ideal of the locus amoenus is familiar from the works of Homer, Theocritus and Virgil. The notion became a standard topos of Renaissance evocations of real and ideal gardens, much used for example by Bartolomeo Taegio in his La villa. Un dialogo (1559). See Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, ‘Writing the Garden in the Age of Humanism: Petrarch and Boccaccio’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 23/3, 2003, pp. 213–257. For Taegio, see Thomas Edward Beck, ‘A Critical Edition of Bartolomeo Taegio's “La Villa”’, PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2001. Beck's study will be published in 2011 in the University of Pennsylvania Press series Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture. 66. Isabella Barisi, Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna, Villa d'Este (Rome: De Luca Editori d'Arte, 2003), p. 92. 67. Frith, ‘Sexuality and Politics’, p. 304. 68. Metamorphoses, 4, pp. 373–379. 69. Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 25. 70. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 58. 71. Discussed by Erwin Panofsky in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 10. 72. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (London: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 33.