Literary and historical gardens in selected Renaissance poetry
Abstract
The Renaissance integration of garden and villa into one unit led
also to the integration of the garden into the intellectual and
cultural life of the time. Garden design became as much a creative and
self-conscious exercise as any cartoon by Raphael. Within the garden
walls nature was freely moulded according to the principles of ut
pictura poesis. The garden was designed to give pleasure, intellectual
stimulation, and moral instruction in accordance with particular
programmes. It incorporated the ideal of the philosopher's garden of
the ancients with the Renaissance delight in the visual icon.
The study of garden imagery in selected poetry of the period against
this background of actual gardens gives the student another approach to
the complex field of Renaissance iconography. It provides additional
data in a field whose usefulness depends on precise-definition, and it
has the further interest of providing an insight into the difficult
relationship between art and nature. In the controlled space of the
enclosed garden, art and nature met directly and not at one remove.
The iconographical garden in its purest sense appears in Chapman's
Ovids Banquet of Sence, while its rejection in Milton's Paradise Lost
is in itself a statement with important implications. The study of
individual features such as the garden labyrinth shows the vitality
of the icon and the inter-relationship of a variety of mediums and
sources. Spenser in Faerie Queene I.i. uses these parameters of the
labyrinth to direct his reader's expectations. The plants of the
garden in a period of rapid expansion of species nevertheless preserved
much of their symbolism. The popularity of the flower catalogue
attests to the utility of this symbolism and also warns against its
use as a short-cut to understanding. Coronal symbolism is often used
in conjunction with other schemes creating a new and more precise
significance, perhaps for the work as a whole, as in Herbert's 'The
Rose' and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.
The growing attention to realistic details and the interest in
perspective led in England in the mid-century to a different attitude
to nature and a profound change in garden design. This gradual process
can be examined in the entertainments held in gardens and in the
masques of Ben Jonson and Indigo Jones. The problems of this
transitional period lie behind some of the difficulties of Marvell s
'Upon Appleton House.
The iconography of the Renaissance garden provides the contemporary
reader with a valuable tool for understanding the poetry of the period
and a number of insights into the strategies of such poetic imagery.