Part 8
On the lakes, where the garden-architect was often restricted to a narrow ledge of ground between mountains and water, these transformations were less easy, for the new style required a considerable expanse of ground for its development. Along the shores of Como especially, where the ground rises so abruptly from the lake, landscape effects were difficult to produce, nor was it easy to discover a naturalistic substitute for the marble terraces built above the water. Even here, however, the narrow gardens have been as much modified as space permitted, the straight paths have been made to wind, and spotty flower-beds in grass have replaced the ordered box-gardens with their gravelled walks and their lemon-trees in earthen vases.
The only old garden on Como which keeps more than a fragment of its original architecture is that of the Villa d’Este at Cernobbio, a mile or two from the town of Como, at the southern end of the lake. The villa, built in 1527 by Cardinal Gallio (who was born a fisher-lad of Cernobbio), has passed through numerous transformations. In 1816 it was bought by Caroline of Brunswick, who gave it the name of Este, and turned it into a great structure of the Empire style. Here for several years the Princess of Wales held the fantastic court of which Bergami, the courier, was High Chamberlain if not Prince Consort; and, whatever disadvantages may have accrued to herself from this establishment, her residence at the Villa d’Este was a benefit to the village, for she built the road connecting Cernobbio with Moltrasio, which was the first carriage-drive along the lake, and spent large sums on improvements in the neighbourhood of her estate.
Since then the villa has suffered a farther change into a large and fashionable hotel; but though Queen Caroline anglicized a part of the grounds, the main lines of the old Renaissance garden still exist.
[Illustration: IN THE GARDENS OF ISOLA BELLA, LAKE MAGGIORE]
Behind the Villa d’Este the mountains are sufficiently withdrawn to leave a gentle acclivity, which was once laid out in a series of elaborate gardens. Adjoining the villa is a piece of level ground just above the lake, which evidently formed the “secret garden” with its parterres and fountains. This has been replaced by a lawn and flower-beds, but still keeps its boundary-wall at the back, with a baroque grotto and fountain of pebbles and shell-work. Above this rises a _tapis vert_ shaded by cypresses, and leading to the usual Hercules in a temple. The peculiar feature of this ascent is that it is bordered on each side with narrow steps of channelled stone, down which the water rushes under overlapping ferns and roses to the fish-pool below the grotto in the lower garden. Beyond the formal gardens is the _bosco_, a bit of fine natural woodland climbing the cliff-side, with winding paths which lead to various summer-houses and sylvan temples. The rich leafage of walnut, acacia and cypress, the glimpses of the blue lake far below, the rush of a mountain torrent through a deep glen spanned by a romantic ivy-clad bridge, make this _bosco_ of the Villa d’Este one of the most enchanting bits of sylvan gardening in Italy. Scarcely less enchanting is the grove of old plane-trees by the water-gate on the lake, where, in a solemn twilight of over-roofing branches, woodland gods keep watch above the broad marble steps descending to the water. In the gardens of the Villa d’Este there is much of the Roman spirit—the breadth of design, the unforced inclusion of natural features, and that sensitiveness to the quality of the surrounding landscape which characterizes the great gardens of the Campagna.
Just across the lake, in the deep shade of the wooded cliffs beneath the Pizzo di Torno, lies another villa still more steeped in the Italian garden-magic. This is the Villa Pliniana, built in 1570 by the Count Anguissola of Piacenza, and now the property of the Trotti family of Milan. The place takes its name from an intermittent spring in the court, which is supposed to be the one described by Pliny in one of his letters; and it is farther celebrated as being the coolest villa on Como. It lies on a small bay on the east side of the lake, and faces due north, so that, while the villas of Cernobbio are bathed in sunlight, a deep green shade envelops it. The house stands on a narrow ledge, its foundations projecting into the lake, and its back built against the almost vertical wooded cliff which protects it from the southern sun. Down this cliff pours a foaming mountain torrent from the Val di Calore, just beneath the peak of Torno; and this torrent the architect of the Villa Pliniana has captured in its descent to the lake and carried through the central apartment of the villa.
The effect produced is unlike anything else, even in the wonderland of Italian gardens. The two wings of the house, a plain and somewhat melancholy-looking structure, are joined by an open arcaded room, against the back wall of which the torrent pours down, over stonework tremulous with moss and ferns, gushing out again beneath the balustrade of the loggia, where it makes a great semicircle of glittering whiteness in the dark-green waters of the lake. The old house is saturated with the freshness and drenched with the flying spray of the caged torrent. The bare vaulted rooms reverberate with it, the stone floors are green with its dampness, the air quivers with its cool incessant rush. The contrast of this dusky dripping loggia, on its perpetually shaded bay, with the blazing blue waters of the lake and their sun-steeped western shores, is one of the most wonderful effects in _sensation_ that the Italian villa-art has ever devised.
The architect, not satisfied with diverting a part of the torrent to cool his house, has led the rest in a fall down the cliff immediately adjoining the villa, and has designed winding paths through the woods from which one may look down on the bright rush of the waters. On the other side of the house lies a long balustraded terrace, between the lake and the hanging woods, and here, on the only bit of open and level ground near the house, are the old formal gardens, now much neglected, but still full of a melancholy charm.
After the Villa Pliniana, the other gardens of Como seem almost commonplace. All along both shores are villas which, amid many alterations, have preserved traces of their old garden-architecture, such as the Bishop of Como’s villa, south of Leno, with its baroque saints and prophets perched along the garden-balustrade, and the more famous Villa Carlotta at Cadenabbia, where the fine gateways and the architectural treatment of the terraces bear witness to the former beauty of the grounds. But almost everywhere the old garden-magic has been driven out by a fury of modern horticulture. The pleached alleys have made way for lawns dotted with palms and bananas, the box-parterres have been replaced by star-shaped beds of begonias and cinerarias, and the groves of laurel and myrtle by thickets of pampas-grass and bamboo. This description applies to all the principal gardens between Como and Bellagio. Here and there, indeed, in almost all of them, some undisturbed corner remains—a flight of steps wreathed in Banksian roses and descending to a shady water-gate; a fern-lined grotto with a stucco Pan or Syrinx; a clipped laurel-walk set with marble benches, or a classic summer-house above the lake—but these old bits are so scattered and submerged under the new order of gardening that it requires an effort of the imagination to reconstruct from them an image of what the old lake-gardens must have been before every rich proprietor tried to convert his marble terraces into an English park.
[Illustration: VILLA CICOGNA, FROM THE TERRACE ABOVE THE HOUSE]
Almost to be included among lake-villas is the beautiful Villa Cicogna at Bisuschio. This charming old place lies in the lovely but little-known hill-country between the Lake of Varese and the southern end of Lugano. The house, of which the history appears to be unknown to the present owners, is an early Renaissance building of great beauty, with a touch of Tuscan austerity in its design. The plain front, with deep projecting eaves and widely spaced windows, might stand on some village square above the Arno; and the interior court, with its two-storied arcade, recalls, in purity and lightness of design, the inheritors of Brunelleschi’s tradition. So few country houses of the early sixteenth century are to be found in the Milanese that it would be instructive to learn whether the Villa Cicogna is in fact due to a Tuscan hand, or whether this mid-Italian style was at that time also prevalent in Lombardy.
The villa is built against a hillside, and the interior court forms an oblong, enclosed on three sides by the house, and continued on the fourth by a beautiful sunken garden, above which runs a balustraded walk on a level with the upper story. On the other side of the house is another garden, consisting of a long terrace bounded by a high retaining-wall, which is tunnelled down its whole length to form a shady arcaded walk lined with ferns and dripping with runnels of water. At the back of the house the ground continues to rise, and a _château d’eau_ is built against the hillside; while beyond the terrace-garden already described, a gate leads to a hanging woodland, with shady walks from which, at every turn, there are enchanting views across the southern bay of Lake Lugano.
The house itself is as interesting as the garden. The walls of the court are frescoed in charming cinque-cento designs, and the vaulted ceiling of the loggia is painted in delicate trellis-work, somewhat in the manner of the semicircular arcade at the Villa di Papa Giulio. Several of the rooms also preserve their wall-frescoes and much of their Renaissance furniture, while a series of smaller apartments on the ground floor are exquisitely decorated with stucco ornament in the light style of the eighteenth century; so that the Villa Cicogna still gives a vivid idea of what an old Italian country house must have been in its original state.
From the hill-villas of the lakes to the country places of the Milanese rice-fields the descent is somewhat abrupt; but the student of garden-architecture may mitigate the transition by carrying on his researches from the southern end of Como through the smiling landscape of the Brianza. Here there are many old villas, in a lovely setting of vineyard and woodland, with distant views of the Alps and of the sunny Lombard plain; but of old gardens few are to be found. There is one of great beauty, belonging to the Villa Crivelli, near the village of Inverigo; but as it is inaccessible to visitors, only tantalizing glimpses may be obtained of its statues and terraces, its cypress-walks and towering “Gigante.” Not far from Inverigo is the Rotonda Cagnola, now the property of the Marchese d’Adda, and built in 1813 by the Marchese Luigi Cagnola in imitation of the Propylæa of the Acropolis. The house is beautifully placed on a hilltop, with glorious views over the Alps and Apennines, and is curious to the student as an example of the neo-classicism of the Empire; but it has of course no gardens in the old sense of the term.
The flat environs of Milan were once dotted with country houses, but with the growth of the city and the increased facilities of travel, these have been for the most part abandoned for villas in the hills or on the lakes, and to form an idea of their former splendour one must turn to the pages of Alberto del Rè’s rare volumes. Here one may see in all its detail that elaborate style of gardening which the French landscape-gardeners developed from the “grand manner” acquired by Le Nôtre in his study of the great Roman country-seats. This style, adapted to the flat French landscape, and complicated by the mannerisms and elaborations of the eighteenth century, came back to Italy with the French fashions which Piedmont and Lombardy were so fond of importing. The time had passed when Europe modelled itself on Italy: France was now the glass of fashion, and, in northern Italy especially, French architecture and gardening were eagerly reproduced.
In Lombardy the natural conditions were so similar that the French geometrical gardens did not seem out of place; yet even here a difference is felt, both in the architecture and the gardens. Italy, in spite of Palladio and the Palladian tradition, never freed herself from the baroque. Her artistic tendencies were all toward freedom, improvisation, individual expression, while France was fundamentally classical and instinctively temperate. Just as the French cabinet-makers and bronze-chisellers and modellers in stucco produced more delicate and finished, but less personal, work than the Italian craftsmen, so the French architects designed with greater precision and restraint, and less play of personal invention. To establish a rough distinction, it might be said that French art has always been intellectual and Italian art emotional; and this distinction is felt even in the treatment of the pleasure-house and its garden. In Italy the architectural detail remained baroque till the end of the eighteenth century, and the architect permitted himself far greater license in the choice of forms and the combination of materials. The old villas of the Milanese have a very strong individuality, and it is to be regretted that so few remain intact to show what a personal style they preserved even under the most obvious French influences.
[Illustration: VILLA PLINIANA, LAKE COMO]
The Naviglio, the canal which flows through Milan and sends various branches to the Ticino and the Adda, was formerly lined for miles beyond the city with suburban villas. Few remain unaltered, and even of these few the old gardens have disappeared. One of the most interesting houses in Del Rè’s collection, the Villa Alario (now Visconti di Saliceto), on the Naviglio near Cernusco, is still in perfect preservation without and within; and though its old gardens were replaced by an English park early in the nineteenth century, their general outline is still discoverable. The villa, a stately pile built by Ruggieri in 1736, looks on a court divided from the highway by a fine wall and beautiful iron gates. Low wings containing the chapel and offices, and running at right angles to the main building, connect the latter with the courtyard walls; and arched passages through the centre of the wings lead to outlying courts surrounded by stables and other dependencies. The house, toward the forecourt, has a central open loggia or atrium, and the upper windows are framed in baroque architraves and surmounted by square attic lights. The garden elevation is more elaborate. Here there is a central projection, three windows wide, flanked by two-storied open loggias, and crowned by an attic with ornamental pilasters and urns. This central bay is adorned with beautiful wrought-iron balconies, which are repeated in the wings at each end of the building. All the wrought-iron of the Villa Visconti is remarkable for its elegance and originality, and as used on the terraces, and in the balustrade of the state staircase, in combination with heavy baroque stone balusters, it is an interesting example of a peculiarly Lombard style of decoration.
Between the house and the Naviglio there once lay an elaborate _parterre de broderie_, terminated above the canal by a balustraded retaining-wall adorned with statues, and flanked on each side by pleached walks, arbours, trellis-work and fish-ponds. Of this complicated pleasance little remains save the long terraces extending from each end of the house, the old flower-garden below one of these, and some bits of decorative sculpture incorporated in the boundary-walls. The long tank or canal shown in Del Rè’s print has been turned into an irregular pond with grass-banks, and the _parterre de broderie_ is now a lawn; even the balustrade has been removed from the wall along the Naviglio. Still, the architectural details of the forecourt and the terraces are worthy of careful study, and the unusual beauty of the old villa, with its undisturbed group of dependencies, partly atones for the loss of its original surroundings.
[Illustration: IRON GATES OF THE VILLA ALARIO| (NOW VISCONTI DI SALICETO)]
Many eighteenth-century country houses in the style of the Villa Visconti are scattered through the Milanese, though few have retained so unaltered an outline, or even such faint traces of their formal gardens. The huge villa of the Duke of Modena at Varese—now the Municipio—is a good example of the same architecture, and has a beautiful stone-and-iron balustrade and many wrought-iron balconies in the same style as those at Cernusco; and its gardens, ascending the hillside behind the house, and now used as a public park, must once have been very fine. The Grand Hôtel of Varese is also an old villa, and its architectural screen and projecting wings form an unusually characteristic façade of the same period. Here, again, little remains of the old garden but a charming upper terrace; but the interior decorations of many of the rooms are undisturbed, and are exceptionally interesting examples of the more delicate Italian baroque.
Another famous country house, Castellazzo d’Arconate, at Bollate, is even more palatial than the Duke of Modena’s villa at Varese, and, while rather heavy in general outline, has an interesting interior façade, with a long arcade resting on coupled columns, and looking out over a stately courtyard with statues. This villa is said to have preserved a part of its old gardens, but it is difficult of access, and could not be visited at the time when the material for these chapters was collected.
[Illustration: RAILING OF THE VILLA ALARIO]
VILLAS OF VENETIA
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF THE BOTANIC GARDEN, PADUA]
VII
VILLAS OF VENETIA
Writers on Italian architecture have hitherto paid little attention to the villa-architecture of Venetia. It is only within the last few years that English and American critics have deigned to recognize any architectural school in Italy later than that of Vignola and Palladio, and even these two great masters of the sixteenth century have been held up as examples of degeneracy to a generation bred in the Ruskinian code of art ethics. In France, though the influence of Viollet-le-Duc was nearly as hostile as Ruskin’s to any true understanding of Italian art, the Latin instinct for form has asserted itself in a revived study of the classic tradition; but French writers on architecture have hitherto confined themselves chiefly to the investigation of their national styles.
It is only in Germany that Italian architecture from Palladio to Juvara has received careful and sympathetic study. Burckhardt pointed the way in his “Cicerone” and in “The Architecture of the Renaissance in Italy”; Herr Gustav Ebe followed with an interesting book on the late Renaissance throughout Europe; and Herr Gurlitt has produced the most masterly work yet written on the subject, his “History of the Baroque Style in Italy.” These authors, however, having to work in a new and extensive field, have necessarily been obliged to restrict themselves to its most important divisions. Burckhardt’s invaluable “Renaissance Architecture,” though full of critical insight, is rather a collection of memoranda than a history of the subject; and even Herr Gurlitt, though he goes into much greater detail, cannot forsake the highroad for the by-paths, and has consequently had to pass by many minor ramifications of his subject. This is especially to be regretted in regard to the villa-architecture of Venetia, the interest and individuality of which he fully appreciates. He points out that the later Venetian styles spring from two sources, the schools of Palladio and of Sansovino. The former, greatly as his work was extolled, never had the full sympathy of the Venetians. His art was too pure and severe for a race whose taste had been formed on the fantastic mingling of Gothic and Byzantine and on the glowing decorations of the greatest school of colourists the world has known. It was from the warm and picturesque art of Sansovino and Longhena that the Italian baroque naturally developed; and though the authority of Palladio made itself felt in the official architecture of Venetia, its minor constructions, especially the villas and small private houses, seldom show any trace of his influence save in the grouping of their windows. So little is known of the Venetian villa-builders that this word as to their general tendencies must replace the exact information which still remains to be gathered.
Many delightful examples of the Venetian _maison de plaisance_ are still to be found in the neighbourhood of Padua and Treviso, along the Brenta, and in the country between the Euganeans and the Monti Berici. Unfortunately, in not more than one or two instances have the old gardens of these houses been preserved in their characteristic form; and, by a singular perversity of fate, it happens that the villas which have kept their gardens are not typical of the Venetian style. One of them, the castle of Cattajo, at Battaglia in the Euganean Hills, stands in fact quite apart from any contemporary style. This extraordinary edifice, built for the Obizzi of Venice about 1550, is said to have been copied from the plans of a castle in Tartary brought home by Marco Polo. It shows, at any rate, a deliberate reversion, in mid-cinque-cento, to a kind of Gothicism which had become obsolete in northern Italy three hundred years earlier; and the mingling of this rude style with classic detail and Renaissance sculpture has produced an effect picturesque enough to justify so quaint a tradition.
Cattajo stands on the edge of the smiling Euganean country, its great fortress-like bulk built up against a wooded knoll with a little river at its base. Crossing the river by a bridge flanked by huge piers surmounted with statues, one reaches a portcullis in a massive gatehouse, also adorned with statues. The portcullis opens on a long narrow court planted with a hedge of clipped euonymus; and at one end a splendid balustraded stairway _à cordon_ leads up to a flagged terrace with yew-trees growing between the flags. To the left of this terrace is a huge artificial grotto, with a stucco Silenus lolling on an elephant, and other life-size animals and figures, a composition recalling the zoölogical wonders of the grotto at Castello. This Italian reversion to the grotesque, at a time when it was losing its fascination for the Northern races, might form the subject of an interesting study of race æsthetics. When the coarse and sombre fancy of mediæval Europe found expression in grinning gargoyles and baleful or buffoonish images, Italian art held serenely to the beautiful, and wove the most tragic themes into a labyrinth of lovely lines; but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the classical graces had taken possession of northern Europe, the chimerical animals, the gnomes and goblins, the gargoyles and broomstick-riders, fled south of the Alps, and reappeared in the queer fauna of Italian grottoes and in the leering dwarfs and satyrs of the garden-walk.
[Illustration: VIEW AT VAL SAN ZIBIO, NEAR BATTAGLIA]