Gardenvisit.com The Garden Guide

Book: History of Garden Design and Gardening
Chapter: Chapter 3: European Gardens (500AD-1850)

Seventeenth Century Italian Garden Design

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95. About the beginning of the seventeenth century, L'Adamo, a poem, was written, and published at Milan, in 1617, by G. B. Andreini, a Florentine. The prints, Dr. Warton observes (Essay on Pope), that are to represent paradise, are full of clipped hedges, square parterres, straight walks, trees uniformly lopped, regular knots and carpets of flowers, groves nodding at groves, marble fountains, and waterworks (fig. 14.); and it is curious to contrast this representation of paradise with that given by Martin in his justly celebrated illustrations of the Bible (fig. 15.), published in the present century; as, of course, each artist wished to represent what was considered most beautiful in pleasure-grounds at the time his picture was designed. Martin's picture, however, as it represents a natural landscape, certainly seems best adapted to realise our ideas of Paradise; and it also accords admirably with Milton's beautiful lines on the subject, in his Paradise Lost, which are supposed, by some writers, to have given landscape gardeners their first ideas of the modern or English style of gardening.