la manière noire

"A few days from there, during the festival of the Branches, always in the workshop of Meaume on Aventin, the companion returned to the load near the engraver and asked him why he had been silent when he evoked his visions. "Because when I am in the presence of certain images I suffer", he answered. While climbing up the narrow road one heard the still fresh song Pueri Hebraeorum vestimenta prosternebant in via. Starting from the nave of Bocca della Verità the children went to Santa Sabina. The procession would complete its course for vespers in front of the tomb of the apostle, in Saint-Paul-hors-les-Murs, where it would deposit the last branches.

At the end of a long moment the procession left the alley and gathered at the bank of the Tiber river. The song went away.

Suddenly the song had disappeared.

The engraver and his companion work in silence."

Meaume the engraver, character from the novel of Pascal Quignard "Terrace in Rome", crossed the seventeenth century, from Bruges to Rome, from the Pyrenees to Perreux, from Lunéville to Bologna while engraving in the noir style. Another pedestrian of Europe reconciled ancient landscapes with the Italian countryside, along the Lorraine. He contributed with his companion painters to educating our view of Italy, its landscapes and its gardens.

Landscape in Tuscany. Photo MTP

everything starts from rome... and florence

"Middle Ages before 1492? Renaissance afterwards? Nothing is really distinct on the Italian side. Thus Petrarch (1304-1374) and Giotto (1266-1337) are already Renaissance men. And Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1497) reconciles almost a century later the renaissance perspective of his landscapes with the mediaeval effects of certain foregrounds. In the same way the painted gardens and the real gardens of Quattrocento preserve the "vocabulary" of the medieval hortus conclusus... while already outlining baroque scenery". This is the opening of the collective work devoted to the gardens of the Medicis, in which two experts who regularly worked with the Institute collaborated: Maria Adriana Giusti and Mariachiara Pozzana (Federico Motta for the Italian version and Actes Sud for the French version).

Landscape in Tuscany. Photo MTP

Is this a manner of causing disorder before explaining how the Florentine garden of Quattrocento enables the understanding of the humanistic culture and civilisation? It is rather the best means of penetrating the Italian landscape, from Latium to Tuscany, without any preconceived idea, by accepting that the gardens have to be considered as much from the point of view of engravers and painters of past centuries as with the eyes of today, that it is sometimes necessary to move over into the field of garden restoration and that patience is necessary! But one must certainly still be impregnated with the landscape. "The first handicap in describing the garden of Quattrocento comes from the difficulty of designing a "garden" in the current sense of the word. It was in other words at the same time pot garden and orchard, whose ordinance was explained by the subdivision in pieces already characteristic of agricultural landscape and whose farming techniques were borrowed from agriculture", affirms Mariachiara Pozzana.

And it ends with a symbol: "The cypress, in the gardens, in vegetal architectures and in the landscape, summarises by itself the geometrical inspiration of agriculture and horticulture in Quattrocento. Symbol tree, it will be used much later, in the twentieth century, to recreate precisely the Tuscan landscape of Quattrocento."

Medici Villa, Rome. Photo Frédéric Lefever

Medici Villa, Rome. Photo Lois Weinberger

These pages, or rather this chapter of our site is a founding one. We have written all the part on Rome and Florence. And all returned there in 2000, when the capital of Tuscany accommodated the launching of the European Landscape Convention. But the images of the gardens disseminated throughout the pages inevitably reflect in a kind of mirror that grows bigger the history of the Medici gardens, a little like the painted attic windows of Justus Utens, which wanted to summarise the history of a family passion for the villas.

Between Rome and Florence, we chose some historical images and some reference marks, without other a priori selections than what our guides had offered us: Giulia degli Alberti who lived "in" the Boboli garden, which she regards, somewhat like many Florentines, as her personal garden, or Mariachiara Pozzana, who works at the restoration of Villa Gamberaia and Villa Bardini. Just to make you want to continue on your own.