Italian Taste in Gardening

118. The Italian taste in gardening affords excellent hints to the English designer for the composition of ornamental garden buildings, and for the disposition of vases, sculptures, and other mural or lapidarian ornaments in pleasure-grounds. For all that relates to terraces it also affords excellent hints; and, as Gilbert Laing Meason has shown, not only the villas of Italy, but the landscape architecture of her great painters (fig. 27. from Domenichino, and fig. 28. from Claude), afford the most beautiful combinations of architectural forms and verdant scenery.