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INTRODUCTION

The idea of the villa has a persistent relevance. La Villa will be of interest to many who have been entrusted with the making of habitable spaces because, in his treatment of the idea of the villa, Bartolomeo Taegio articulated the purpose and meaningfulness that he associated with a particular kind of place. La Villa contains three elements that make it especially relevant for landscape architects. First, it reveals a Renaissance appreciation of land not only for its economic utility but also for its aesthetic value. Second, it is one of only two extant documents that articulate a theoretical formulation of the position of the garden on a hierarchical scale of landscape interventions in terms of the interaction of art and nature: “third nature.” Finally, it offers rare clues to the appearance of sixteenth-century Milanese gardens, and to their symbolic and metaphorical significance for their owners.

When Taegio took up the idea of the villa as the topic for his dialogue, he brought into focus an idea that had been the subject of reflection by others before him, both in the Renaissance and in antiquity. La Villa appeared toward the end of a long tradition of villa literature in Italy, a verbal tradition that suffered a protracted and nearly complete interruption during the Middle Ages. This tradition originated in ancient Rome in the time of the Republic, and continued until the dissolution of the empire. Its recovery, which has been called a revival of villa literature, began in Florence in the fifteenth century and spread northward through the sixteenth century, with significant echoes well into the eighteenth century within and outside Italy.¹ The common theme of this body of literature, to which La Villa belongs, is the idea of the villa.

Taegio’s subject is the idea of the villa, not the villa as a type. Typology is an analytical tool, useful for defining categories of objects and spaces, but not very helpful for understanding the richness of symbolic and metaphorical associations that works of architecture and landscape architecture can have for the people who use them. Typology relates to form-making more than it does to place making. Taegio never described or even mentioned an actual building in La Villa. Instead, he alluded to villas by rendering their gardens in language so poetical as to frustrate any attempt to reconstruct them. By virtually ignoring the typology of villas, Taegio’s treatise invites the reader to consider what is simultaneously both immaterial and essential about them.

The form of the argument in La Villa, as in many “villa books” written before and after it, is dialogical. But unlike most sixteenth-century dialogues written in the Italian language it is not the kind scholars today call “documentary,” nor is it based on a Ciceronian model. Taegio’s dialogue does not include a scene-setting introduction, an essential feature of documentary dialogues; therefore it demonstrates what Cicero considered a “lack of decorum.” La Villa is properly called a “semifictional dialogue” because it is relatively “transparent”; that is, because readers can look through the dramatic conflict to the contest of ideas behind it, without having to interpret the text in light of their familiarity with the interlocutors’ respective points of view in life.² Sixteenth-century readers of La Villa might have known the true identities of the interlocutors and their real opinions, if they were personally acquainted with the author or his friends. In fact this seems likely, given the typically intimate relationship between writer and reader in the Renaissance. It is possible that Taegio wrote La Villa for a closed group of subscribers who were aristocrats and villa owners, but the dialogue speaks to a larger audience whose understanding of La Villa as a type of the city/country debate is not necessarily complicated by a reading of it as documentary.

A major contributor to villa discourse, Taegio’s voice needs to be heard today. At a time when the balance of nature is being challenged by humanity’s interventions on a scale hitherto unimaginable, the city/country debate needs to be revisited, in order to be imagined anew. Four hundred and fifty years after it was published, La Villa continues to speak about the consequences of the choices human beings make among possible ways of dwelling in the world. Yet, the ability of modern readers to find meaning in the text will depend to a considerable extent on their understanding of the context in which the initial discursive exchange between the author and his sixteenth-century readers took place.

The goal of this Introduction, by unfolding the biographical, political, economic, social, agricultural, horticultural, and philosophical facets of that context, is to situate La Villa within the history of the idea of the villa, thereby orienting the reader to the text and providing a framework for interpreting it. In the field of landscape architecture, which lacks a body of theoretical writing comparable to that of architecture, and in which a comprehensive survey of history, theory, and practice was not even attempted until the eighteenth century, La Villa is an invaluable source of theory from the Renaissance.

The Life and Literary Activity of Bartolomeo Taegio

Bartolomeo Taegio, jurist and man of letters, was born in Milan around 1520 to an old patrician family.³ His father’s name was Girolamo, and the family name (variously spelled Taegio, Taeggio, or Taeggi) is a contraction of Taveggio or Tavecchio, which in turn is derived from Montevecchio, Girolamo’s ancestral home.⁴ It is likely that young Bartolomeo studied law at the University of Pavia, a center of jurisprudence in northern Italy since the fourteenth century.⁵ He was educated not only in law, both civil and canon, but also in humanistic studies. He was admired in the seventeenth century as an orator and as a writer of both prose (in Italian and Latin) and poetry.⁶ When he was in his early twenties he found himself on the wrong side of the law, and his mistake, however faint may be the record of it now, left an indelible mark on his carreer. Whether it ultimately cost him his life is uncertain, but its immediate effect was to compel him to leave the city of his birth.

FIGURE 1. Woodcut portrait of Bartolomeo Taegio, from the verso of the title page of La Villa (Moscheni, 1559).

Sometime between 1540 and 1544, Taegio took up residence in the smaller city of Novara, forty-five kilometers from Milan. A twentieth-century specialist in the history of Novara reports that Taegio was “confinatovi per aver commesso un omocidio” (banished there for having commited a murder).⁷ Taegio adjusted quickly to his new surroundings. He bought land and started his own law practice in Novara.⁸ Between 1544 and 1546 he founded a semisecret literary society called the Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna, in which, according to local historians, “si iscrissero i giovani novaresi più ingegnosi, dando vita così in una piccola città ad un centro di insolita attività letterale culturalmente libera” (the most talented Novarese youth were enrolled, thus giving life in a small city to a center of isolated, culturally free, literary activity).⁹ The emblem of the academy was a palm with hanging fruit and the motto “adversus pondera surgo.” According to Taegio’s nineteeth-century biographer, G. B. Finazzi, “Taegio, speaking about this emblem in a speech, implied that the Academy was intended for something better than the reciting of sonnets or strambotti.”¹⁰ The inference is that the Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna was conceived for the purpose, at least in part, of preparing its members for political action. Including Taegio, who styled himself Vitauro, there were a total of twenty members of the academy. Six besides the founder are known by their real names. Two of them, Giovanni Pietra Testa and Giovanni Iacopo Torniello, were villa owners named in La Villa.¹¹ The other thirteen “shepherds” are known only by their pseudonyms.

FIGURE 2. Frontispiece of L’Essilio. Courtesy of Biblioteca civica, Novara.

It was Taegio’s intention to remain in Novara and make it a “studious Athens, where all the liberal arts would display their splendor by competing with one another.”¹² His vision would never be realized. In 1554 he was, according to Finazzi, “constrained to leave and to be tied again to his city of origin.”¹³ In none of his published writings did Taegio explain the reasons for this forced return to Milan. Finazzi speculated that Taegio’s inclination toward novità (novelty), his involvement with the Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna, and his relationship with Cardinal Giovanni Morone, who had been held in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome for “suspicions in religious matters,” attracted the attention of the Spanish authorities, who might have preferred to keep Taegio in Milan, where “his actions would have been felt less than in Novara, a smaller city.”¹⁴ Taegio remained visible, even holding public office. Cardinal Morone appointed him governor of Lago d’Orta.¹⁵ Taegio also served as one of the vicars general of the state of Milan.¹⁶

Bartolomeo Taegio began his career as a writer at about the time of his return to Milan.¹⁷ By most accounts his first and best published work was Le Risposte (The Replies), which he dedicated to Cardinal Morone. He wrote it in 1554, while he was governor of Lago d’Orta, and probably while he was staying at Isola San Giulio.¹⁸ As the inscription on the frontispiece of Le Risposte indicates, Taegio was already by that time a member of the Collegio di Giureconsulti (College of Jurists) of Milan, a prestigious association of legal specialists. Le Risposte was translated into French in the sixteenth century, and until now it is the only piece of Taegio’s writing that has been published in translation.¹⁹ As many as sixteen more books followed, over a period of eighteen years. Two seventeenth-century encyclopedias of literature that include entries on Bartolomeo Taegio list the same twelve titles, while the earliest of these sources adds that there were other books.²⁰ Later biographical dictionaries of Italian authors provide dates of publication and names of publishers for some of these twelve works, as well as the titles of five additional ones not identified in the earlier sources.²¹ The public library in Novara holds copies of six books by Bartolomeo Taegio.²²

FIGURE 3. Frontispiece of Le Risposte. Courtesy of Biblioteca Civica, Novara.

Le Risposte is a collection of fifty-three essays in the form of replies to inquiries from Taegio’s friends, most of them residents of Novara. All of the Shepherds of the Agogna who are known by name are represented; one suspects that the anonymous ones are as well. The essays contain valuable historical information. The one entitled “Della Bellezza del Isola et Lago d’Orta” (On the Beauty of the Island and Lake of Orta) describes mid-sixteenth-century Isola San Giulio, and helps to locate its author there in 1554. Another, “Della Pittura” (On Painting), is dedicated to Bernardino Lanino, one of the promising young painters of the Vercellese school.²³ The titles of the essays reflect the range of themes, both practical—“Delle Richezza” (On Riches), “Del Studio delle Leggi” (On the Study of Law), and “Delle Qualità che deve haver la Buona Moglie” (On the Qualities That a Good Wife Ought to Have)—and theoretical—“Della Musica” (On Music), “Del Chaos Poetico” (On Poetic Chaos), and “Dell’Amicità c’ha la Pittura con la Poesia” (On the Friendship That Painting Has with Poetry). The titles of other essays are suggestive of Taegio’s interest in country life: they include “Della Caccia” (On Hunting) and “Della Solitudine” (On Solitude). An essay entitled “Di Dialoghi” (On Dialogue) is addressed to Francesco Sesallo, the publisher of Le Risposte.

In the year following the publication of his first book, Taegio produced L’Essilio (The Exile), the only one of his extant works besides La Villa to be published by Moscheni. This slim volume contains a letter addressed to Giovanni Battista Piotto, one of the villa owners named in La Villa, in which Taegio expressed sorrow over the separation from his scholarly friends and his garden in Novara, as well as resignation at being confined in Milan, his “very sweet homeland.” L’Essilio contains other letters addressed to each of the members of the Shepherds of the Agogna, and it is because of this that their pseudonyms are known.

La Villa itself was published in 1559, the year of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, which gave Spain dominion over Milan.²⁴ A twentieth-century Milanese historian calls La Villa “un gustoso libretto” (an enjoyable little book) devoted to the idea of villeggiatura. He provides a concise description of the book:

É un dialogo tra due gentilhuomini, l’uno innamorato della vita campestre, l’altro allora della cittadina. Il primo, per convalidare la propria tesi, enumera i cittadini che passano in villa gran parte dell’anno, una sfilata di circa dugencinquanta nomi di famiglie e di personaggi, preziosa anche perchè ci mette sott’occhio le persone allora più distinte a Milano.

(It is a dialogue between two gentlemen, one enamored of country life, the other of the city. The first, in order to support his thesis, enumerates the citizens who spend a large part of the year in villa, a list of about two hundred and fifty names of families and personnages, especially valuable because it sets before the eyes the most distinguished persons in Milan at that time.)²⁵

The first of the “two gentlemen” is Taegio, using the name Vitauro, his pseudonym in the Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna. The other interlocutor is Partenio, one of the “shepherds” whose real-life identity is unknown. Testimony to the importance of La Villa for a historian is given by a nineteenth-century author who said,

Dalla pag. 55, alla 106, si accennano in parte, ed in parte si descrivono più ville e giardini del milanese rinomate in que’ tempi. L’opera torna molto preziosa anche per la storia dei costumi lombardi di quel secolo.

(From pages 55 to 106, most of the villas and gardens of the prominent Milanese of that time [the middle 1500s] are either alluded to or described. The work is also very valuable for the history of Lombard customs of that century.)²⁶

The first of Taegio’s publications that followed La Villa is L’Humore (The Humors), a dialogue between the author and Giovanni Paolo Barzi, whose name appears in La Villa. It contains numerous poems, many of them translations of works by Virgil. Dedicated to Giuliano Golesino, L’Humore was published in 1564, the same year as Taegio’s treatise on criminal law, Tractatus Criminales, the only work Taegio wrote in Latin.²⁷

Il Liceo (The Lyceum) consists of two volumes, in which “there are riches of historical and biographical facts regarding Milanese literature.”²⁸ The first book of Il Liceo is written in the form of a dialogue between Count Galeazzo Visconti and Ennio Ritio, in which, according to the inscription on its frontispiece, “the order of the Academies and the Nobility is discussed.” It is dedicated to Cardinal Francesco Alziati. The second book, “where the art of making enterprises conform to the concepts of the mind is discussed, and the poetical imaginings of the muses talked about,” is dedicated to Giulio Claro, one of the villa owners named in La Villa.²⁹ Two poetic compositions by Bartolomeo Taegio entitled Paradossi (Paradoxes) were published only in a second edition of Il Liceo book 1 in 1572.³⁰

FIGURE 4. Frontispiece of Il Liceo. Courtesy of Biblioteca Negroni, Novara.

The last of Taegio’s works to be published, in 1572, was L’Officioso (The Dutiful One), a dialogue dedicated to Saint Carlo Borromeo. It shows the author near the end of his life, “intent on works of piety and religion.”³¹ The portrait in the front of this book depicts Taegio in his old age, and carries the legend “Bartholomaeus Taegius Comes Doctor et Eques” (Bartolomeo Taegio, Companion, Teacher, and Knight).

The date, place, and circumstances of Bartolomeo Taegio’s death remain a mystery. A local historian described a marble sepulchral monument, with an inscription dedicated to the Taegio family, in the church of S. Francesco in Vercelli, and he gave 1573 as the year of Bartolomeo’s death.³² It is likely that the stone was installed, as was customary, in the floor of the church, but no trace of it exists today. When the interior of S. Francesco was renovated in the 1980’s the floor was repaved, and a great number of old lapide were removed.

The Political, Economic, and Social Context

When La Villa was published, the state of Milan, a territory that encompassed the western half of present-day Lombardy as well as a large part of Piedmont, was a Spanish possession. Philip II (1527–1598), son of the Habsburg emperor Charles V (1500–1558), had reigned as king of Spain since 1556, the year Charles abdicated and left the empire to his brother Ferdinand I, to whom Taegio dedicated his dialogue in 1559, and whose claim to the imperial throne had just been recognized the previous year.³³ The roots of Spanish control of Milan, and the origins of its sixteenth-century aristocracy, lie in the history of the duchy of Milan from the end of the fourteenth century.

The names of the most active political Milanese families for three hundred years—Visconti, Sforza, Simonetta, Trivulzio, Crivelli, and others—appear repeatedly in the pages of La Villa. Members of the Visconti family had ruled the territory since the title “duke of Milan” was first bestowed by the Holy Roman Emperor Wenceslas on Gian Galeazzo Visconti in 1395.³⁴ Under their leadership the region flourished economically and artistically in the fourteenth century. By Taegio’s day, many Visconti castles had been transformed into hunting lodges and villas that can still be seen today, such as the Visconti-Sforza castle at Cusago, which Taegio identified as the villa of Countess Maximiliana Sforza.

The fall of the Visconti dynasty came with the death of Filippo Maria Visconti, without heirs, in 1447. After a violent struggle for succession, a condottiere by the name of Francesco Sforza took control of the duchy in 1450, and the people of Milan proclaimed him duke. He removed from positions of power several Milanese aristocrats close to the Visconti whose family names (such as Borrromeo, Trivulzio, and Cotta) appear in La Villa, and he replaced them with members of his own entourage of commoners.³⁵ He restored the economic health of the duchy, which had been debilitated by years of warfare.³⁶

Francesco Sforza died in 1466, and his oldest legitimate son, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, succeeded him. During Galeazzo’s reign the Milanese court became the richest in Italy. His profligacy contributed to the eventual financial bankrupcy of the Sforza dynasty.³⁷ He was assassinated by some of his own courtiers in 1476.³⁸ Galeazzo’s son, Gian Galeazzo Maria Sforza, was only seven years old when his father was killed. The duchy was effectively ruled by the late duke’s secretary and minister, Cecco Simonetta, until he was arrested and subsequently executed in 1480 by followers of Lodovico Maria Sforza (“il Moro”), the fourth legitimate son of Francesco. Thus Lodovico Sforza became in effect the sole regent of Milan, while his young nephew reigned as duke in title only. Upon Gian Galeazzo’s death in 1494, Lodovico became duke.

The period in the history of Italy from 1494 to 1559 was “the age of the Italian Wars.”³⁹ The balance of power the duchy of Milan had been able to maintain as the wealthiest and strongest militarily of the Italian city-states was permanently upset in 1494. In that year French troops under their king, Charles VIII, crossed the Alps into Italy to conquer Naples. Lodovico Sforza had endorsed the invasion, but in an about-face he allied himself with the pope, the emperor, Venice, and Spain against the French king, who was expelled from Naples in 1495.⁴⁰ Four years later Charles VIII died, and the duke of Orleans, an old enemy of Lodovico’s, became Louis XII. The new French king claimed the title of duke of Milan on the grounds of his descent from a Visconti princess. In 1499 the Treaty of Blois between France and Venice partitioned Milanese territory, and the army of Louis XII invaded Lombardy under the command of Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, a former captain of the Milanese army who had made himself an expatriot and an enemy of the Sforzas more than ten years earlier when Lodovico passed him over for a promotion.⁴¹ Trivulzio was by no means the only one of his countrymen Lodovico had managed to disaffect. Many of the Milanese, overburdened by taxes levied to support the luxury of the court, welcomed the invaders, and Lodovico Sforza was forced to flee to Innsbruck, where he found refuge and political support from the emperor, whose wife was Lodovico’s sister.⁴² Many works of art commissioned by the duke were stolen or vandalized by the French, and the artists he had assembled dispersed. Noble Milanese families who had been loyal to the Sforza dukes, including the Crivelli and the Visconti, went into exile after the French confiscated their property.⁴³ In February of 1500 the people rebelled, and Lodovico, with the help of many of his old friends, reentered Milan. On his approach to the city he stayed overnight outside Milan at a house mentioned in La Villa called Mirabello, which belonged to the Landriani family at that time.⁴⁴ Backed by imperial troops, Lodovico routed the French forces and was given a hero’s welcome by the people, who had been treated badly by their foreign masters. Lodovico’s restoration was short-lived. A few weeks later he was captured by Trivulzio and imprisoned in France, first at Lyon and then at Loches, where he died in 1508.⁴⁵

FIGURE 5. Frontispiece of L’Officioso. Courtesy of Biblioteca civica, Novara.

Over the next half-century, as French, Spanish, and German rulers competed for mastery of the peninsula, political and cultural preeminence in Italy shifted from Milan to papal Rome.⁴⁶ In 1512 the warlike Pope Julius II, who earlier, as Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, had urged the French to invade Italy, joined forces with Emperor Maxmillian II to remove them, and to install in Milan as his puppet Ludovico Sforza’s oldest son, Massimiliano. After Francis I became king of France upon the death of Louis XII in 1515, he defeated the Italian army at Marignano and negotiated the abdication of Massimiliano.⁴⁷ In 1519 Charles V was elected emperor. In 1521, with the help of Pope Leo X, he expelled the French from Milan and installed the seriously ailing second son of Ludovico Sforza, Francesco II. The 1520s, the decade in which Bartolomeo Taegio was born, was a time of political disorder, disease, famine, and devastation of the countryside. After the death of Francesco II without heirs in 1535, the duchy of Milan passed directly to Charles V and became a province of his empire.⁴⁸

The period of Milanese history from the death of the last Sforza duke in 1535 to the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 was the first part of an era of Spanish domination, which lasted until 1714.⁴⁹ During that era, Milan was ruled by a series of appointed governors who in theory administered the state of Milan for the king of Spain, but who in practice functioned almost autonomously.⁵⁰ Charles V invested his son Philip with the office of duke of Milan in 1540. Philip was installed in 1546, the same year the emperor summoned Ferrante Gonzaga to serve as governor of Milan, which office he filled until his death in 1557.⁵¹ Between 1549 and 1555 a new ring of bastioned defense walls twenty miles in length were built under the supervision of Gonzaga’s architect, Domenico Giunti. Giunti also designed additions, including an innovative portico with superimposed orders, to the suburban villa known today as La Simonetta. Gonzaga bought La Simonetta in 1547 and later sold it to an apostolic nuncio by the name of Alessandro Simonetta, whose name appears in Taegio’s list of villa owners.⁵² Giunti’s portico at La Simonetta still stands today, as do remnants of the defenses he designed for the Spanish government. Commonly called the “Spanish walls,” they enclosed the suburbs that had sprung up in the fifteenth century outside the medieval walls, which were subsequently demolished, and they effectively doubled the area of the city. The part of the navigli (Milan’s system of navigable canals) that had been built to serve initially as a moat outside the medieval walls was thus incorporated into the city.⁵³

In 1554 Philip took possession of the city of Milan and appointed a magistracy, which consisted of a president and nine officials called questors. The chief executive of the city was the podestà, an administrative official like a mayor, but appointed rather than elected. In 1555 Pope Paul IV made a league with France to expel the Spanish from Naples and Milan, and once more Lombardy became a battlefield.⁵⁴ Lasting peace was finally achieved in April of 1559, roughly seven months after the death of Charles V, with the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, in which France, weakened by religious wars at home, renounced its claims in Italy, and Spain retained Milan.

The establishment of Spanish hegemony in Milan contributed to a shift in the regional economy away from manufacturing toward agriculture. The Milanese economy had begun to recover in the middle of the sixteenth century and enjoyed several decades of rapid expansion after the conclusion of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. In spite of attempts by Spain to block the export of cloth, the silk and wool industries made modest gains in the first half of the sixteenth century, as did the manufacture of leather goods, arms, and armor. The publishing trade in Milan, though relatively small with only about a dozen established firms, was profitable enough to lure Francesco Moscheni, the publisher of La Villa, into moving his business from Pavia to Milan in 1553.⁵⁵ But the sector of Milan’s economy that experienced the most remarkable progress in the 1550s was agriculture.⁵⁶ The reasons for the shift from manufacturing to farming in Taegio’s day are related to demographic growth. The population of the city of Milan was probably more than eighty thousand in the middle of the century and increasing rapidly.⁵⁷ The city was home to approximately one-tenth of the growing population of the state of Milan.⁵⁸ Prices for agricultural produce were rising in pace with the demand for foodstuffs.⁵⁹ As farming became increasingly profitable, many wealthy Milanese merchants and aristocrats invested in the acquisition, reclamation, and irrigation of land in the fertile plain of the Po River valley, and many of these new landowners built houses in the countryside.⁶⁰

The names of two hundred and eighty-four owners of villa estates and gardens that existed in the state of Milan in the sixteenth century are listed in La Villa. These names include many of the high officials of the city of Milan in the epoch of Charles V, including nineteen (almost two-thirds) of the podestà who served between 1537 and 1567, three questors, eleven senators, three presidents of the Senate, and one high chancellor.⁶¹ Leaders of the church identified in this list include nine bishops and one who would become the bishop of Novara after 1559. Two of the villa owners named in La Villa would become archbishops (Giovanni Arcimboldo and Carlo Borromeo), and one (Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici) would become a pope, Pius IV. With the exception of the clergy, all of the villa owners named in La Villa were aristocrats.⁶²

Two aristocracies coexisted in the state of Milan in the sixteenth century. One was the feudal nobility, who possessed hereditary titles and fiefs in the countryside. These cavalieri (knights) and conti (counts), from which the Italian word for countryside, contado, is derived, typically received most of their income from agriculture, and they enjoyed judicial and administrative authority over the peasants who worked their lands.⁶³ The other aristocracy was the urban patriciate, whose claim to the highest status in Milanese society was based on their families’ long histories of residency and political leadership in the city.⁶⁴ Conspicuous among the patricians were the lawyers, from whose ranks the senators rose, and who were recruited by the Spanish government for various bureaucratic posts.⁶⁵ At first each kind of aristocracy had its own separate sphere of influence, either the town or the country, but by the second half of the sixteenth century the distinction between the two groups was beginning to become blurred.⁶⁶

The gradual blending of the two aristocracies is indicated by the changing usage in the sixteenth century of the word gentilhuomo (gentleman), an honorific favored by Taegio. In Milan under the Sforzas the title gentilhuomo was used to designate a courtier of high rank and income from the class of the cavalieri. In the epoch of Charles V the term lost some of its specificity outside of the princely court, although it was still reserved for the feudal nobility. By the end of the sixteenth century the meaning of the word would be broadened to include members of either aristocracy, and eventually almost anyone we would call a “gentleman,” on the basis of education and comportment more than social status. Taegio was writing in the midst of these changes, just as the term “gentleman” was beginning to be applied to members of the urban patriciate.

Well over half of the names of villa owners in La Villa appear in two lists of “gentlemen,” one beginning on page 98 and the other on page 109. At first glance it may seem that Taegio used the term gentilhuomini to distinguish the villa owners of the knightly order from those belonging to the urban patriciate; at least nine of the one hundred and forty-six “gentlemen” he lists were counts. Concerning only three of the “gentlemen” villa owners did Taegio say anything about their participation in public life. Only twice in the entire dialogue are city dwellers referred to as gentilhuomini, and then the tone is ironic. In one instance city dwellers are called ociosi gentil’huomini (lazy gentlemen); in another they are said merely to consider themselves to be gentlemen. Closer examination, however, reveals that Taegio’s gentilhuomini are not exclusively knights or counts. Nine of those listed are known to have been podestà, three were senators and one was a president of the Senate; they certainly belonged to the urban elite. Nor do the lists of “gentlemen” include all of the villa owners who might have been knights; only one of the ten villa owners Taegio called cavallieri and fewer than half of those he identified as counts are included. The fact that Taegio did not equate “gentlemen” with feudal nobility suggests that by the time La Villa was written differences between the two aristocracies in Milanese society had already become less marked than they had been at the beginning of the century.

During the course of the sixteenth century the urban patriciate became increasingly exclusive, imitating the feudal nobility in its reliance on lineage more than education or service to the state as the primary condition for admission to its order of society. At the same time as the aristocrats were closing ranks, a wealthy class of commoners, purchasing titles and fiefs from the Spanish government, were challenging all claims to nobility on hereditary grounds.⁶⁷ This “new nobility of mercantile origin” competed with the patriciate “in the refined passion for villeggiatura.”⁶⁸ While the villa owners mentioned by Taegio comprised both kinds of the old aristocracy, they apparently included none of these newly titled bourgeois.

The Agricultural Context

La Villa is an early example of the type of “villa book” that was popular in Italy toward the end of the sixteenth century. Taegio responded to a demand for a new kind of writing in the Renaissance, “the essay, letter or dialog on villa life,” which James Ackerman calls “an innovative literary genre.”⁶⁹ La Villa is typical of the genre, in that it reflects its author’s familiarity with farming and gardening practices in the region of the upper Po River valley. However, Taegio’s dialogue differs from other books on villa life written before and after it, in two important respects: it emphasizes the aesthetic value of gardens and farmland, and it treats the villa as a place of leisure devoted to intellectual activity.

Ackerman includes Bartolomeo Taegio among the four “North Italian agricultural authorities” whose works “offer the greatest insight into villa society,” and he says that Taegio is the only one of them who represented the villa as a setting for the pursuit of scholarly and philosophical otium.⁷⁰ Besides Taegio, the other three “agricultural authorities” whose writings Ackerman discusses are Alberto Lollio, Giuseppe Falcone, and Agostino Gallo. Lollio was from Ferrara, Falcone and Gallo from Brescia. The earliest of their works is the Lettera di M. Alberto Lollio, nella quale rispondendo ad una di M. Hercole Perinato, egli celebra La Villa et lauda molto l’agricoltura …, which was published in Venice in 1544. It describes the practical advantages of life in villa over life in the city. Falcone’s La Nuova, vaga, et dilletevole villa was first published in Brescia in 1559, the same year as Taegio’s La Villa. Of all the Renaissance authors on country life, Falcone is the closest to the ancient Roman authorities, Varro and Columella, in his conviction that the villa owner should be tireless in his commitment to the full-time supervision of his estate. In contrast to Falcone, Gallo’s work emphasizes relaxation and diversion as benefits of life in the country. As originally conceived, Le dieci giornate della vera agricoltura, e piaceri del La Villa, was published first in Brescia in 1564, and then in Venice in 1566.⁷¹ A revised version, with the title Le venti giornate …, came out of Turin in 1580 and Venice in 1584. Like Taegio, Gallo was a jurist, and like La Villa, Le dieci giornate and Le venti giornate were written in dialogue form. Ackerman identifies several other agricultural treatises produced in northern Italy in the sixteenth century, including Trattato dell’agricoltura (Venice, 1572), written by the Paduan Africo Clemente, and Ricordo d’agricoltura (Mantua, 1577), written by Camillo Tarello, a Brescian. Ackerman’s list does not include the verse treatise on agriculture, La Coltivazione, by the Tuscan, Luigi Alamanni (1495–1556), which was published in Paris in 1546, and which Sereni calls “the most important agronomic poem of the sixteenth century.”⁷²

Nor does Ackerman mention two earlier authors of agronomic literature whose treatises were precedents for the type of the sixteenth-century villa book. They are Pietro de’ Crescenzi, the Bolognese lawyer whom Taegio called one of the “more recent” authorities on the nobility of gardening, and Michelangelo Tanaglia, the Florentine author of a verse treatise in three books called De Agricoltura, which was written in 1490 but not published until 1953. Sereni refers to Crescenzi as the “restorer of the science of agronomy in communal Italy.”⁷³ Crescenzi’s Liber ruralium commodorum, written around 1305 and published numerous times, was well diffused throughout Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. Taegio could have known it in the Italian translation published in Venice in 1542. Although Crescenzi’s book was written much earlier than La Villa and reflects the author’s knowledge of a northern Italian agricultural landscape less intensively cultivated than it would become in Taegio’s lifetime, the two works have some features in common. Like Taegio, Crescenzi made use of ancient sources such as Cato, Varro, and Columella. He also provided lists of purely ornamental trees, aromatic herbs, and flowers, thereby implying (although without linking horticulture with the liberal arts and philosophy as Taegio would) that a garden could be appreciated not only for its usefulness but also for its beauty.⁷⁴

Crescenzi wrote his treatise at a time when gradual but dramatic changes were beginning to take place in the agricultural landscape all over Italy, owing to population growth and increased opportunities for individual initiative in farming in the late communal period. The earlier medieval pattern of cultivation in temporary clearings, where livestock were allowed to forage without restriction, was being replaced by a new system that involved enclosing permanent fields with hedges, plowing under stubble, and setting aside part of the tilled land to lie fallow each season. The principle of crop rotation, though known, was not widely diffused. The hills were being deforested and planted with grapevines, a practice that, though profitable because of a steadily increasing demand for wine, led to widespread erosion. Crescenzi addressed the problem of soil conservation by recommending, among other things, that hilly terrain be worked a girapoggio (across the slope) rather than a rittochino (in the direction of the slope). The first great works of irrigation in the Po River valley had already been started at the beginning of the fourteenth century, when Crescenzi was writing.⁷⁵

By the time Tanaglia had written his treatise in the late fifteenth century, a system of drainage, called magalato, had become common in the plains. It involved arranging tilled land annually in porche, or hummocks; that is, narrow, elongated rows separated by shallow furrows. Tanaglia spoke of the increased yield from this system: “Maggior ricolta in piano ha magalato” (The magalato produces the best harvest in the plain).⁷⁶ He referred also to a shortage of pasture land, writing of letting animals graze on the branches of trees planted in rows along the edges of fields to support grapevines, so that “olmi ancor con la foglia nutriranno gli armenti” (elms with their leaves also will nourish the herds).⁷⁷ Tanaglia addressed the problem of forage by advocating the renewal of meadows through reseeding and manuring, and by promoting the cultivation of enclosed meadows.⁷⁸ Tanaglia’s work refers to three landscape forms that appeared on the plains of northern Italy for the first time in the early Renaissance and that persisted in Taegio’s lifetime: the magalato, or fields arranged in porche, rows of trees supporting vines, and hedges protecting fields from indiscriminate pasturage.

Tanaglia paved the way for Taegio by laying the theoretical groundwork for an aesthetic evaluation of agricultural landscape. In book 1 of his treatise, Tanaglia retold the story of the Persian king Cyrus, whom Lysander called “blessed” because of the beauty of his garden in Sardis, to support his argument for the nobility of gardening, just as Taegio would do more than a century and a half later in La Villa.⁷⁹ In La Villa (p. 48) Taegio applied to farms the same standard of beauty he used to judge gardens, saying “that there can be nothing more usefully productive or more beautifully ordered than well-cultivated land.” The priority Taegio gave to geometry and order in the landscape echoes the value placed on similar qualities in the poem by Tanaglia, who advised that the planning of agricultural estates should conform to a rectilinear system: “Agli orti come a’ prati squadra e lista” (Square up and edge the orchards as well as the meadows).⁸⁰ Tanaglia argued that trees should be planted in rows because,

Se per tramite retto e pari sesti

Fien compartiti, più grati saranno,

E par che me’ la terra omor vi presti.

(If in a straight line and with even intervals

they are distributed, they will be more graceful,

and it seems that you do more honor to the earth.)⁸¹

More than half a century after Tanaglia wrote his verses, and only thirteen years before La Villa appeared, Alamanni’s poem La Coltivazione was published. While the agricultural landscape he knew was more elaborated than Tanaglia’s, Alamanni spoke of the same forms and addressed some of the same issues as his predecessors. In the middle of the sixteenth century, soil erosion and shortage of pasture land were still unsolved problems. Echoing Crescenzi’s advice on soil conservation, Alamanni recommended plowing hillsides parallel to the contours rather than up and down the slopes, saying,

… ponga cura

Ch’ ei non rovini in giù rapido e dritto;

Ma traversando il dorso umile e piano

Con soave dolcezza in basso scenda.

( … take care

that [the furrows] do not crash down, rapid and straight;

but cross over the back [of the slope], humble and slow,

with peaceful sweetness in their downward course.)⁸²

Alamanni called even more urgently than Tanaglia for permanent enclosure of pastures, with these words:

Indi volga il pensier coll’opra insieme

Intorno ai prati ch’ il passato verno

Aperti, in abbandon, negletti furo,

Agli armenti, ad ogni uom pastura e preda.

Quei con fossi talor, talor circondi

Con pali e siepi: o se n’ avesse il loco,

Può di sassi compor muraglie e schermi;

Talchè il rozzo pastor, la greggia ingorda

E col morso e col piè non taglie e prema

La novella virtù ch’ all’ erbe infonde

Con soave liquor la terra e ’l cielo.

(Then turn your thoughts and actions

to the meadows, which last spring

were open and abandoned to the herds:

any man’s for pasturage or taking.

These ditches now, now surround

with palisades and hedges, and with enough space,

you can make walls and barriers of stone,

which the rustic shepherd’s greedy flock

will not cut with mouth or foot, or crush

the new life that the grass receives

as sweet liquor from the earth and sky.)⁸³

The soave liquor of which Alamanni sang is the rain, which for most parts of Italy in the sixteenth century did not fall with sufficient regularity during the growing season “to assure a luxuriance of forage in the meadows.”⁸⁴ In the Po River valley, however, the construction of elaborate and widespread works of irrigation had the dual effect of making possible the expansion of needed pasture land and imposing new forms on the landscape.

The planning and execution of great irrigation projects in the Po River valley, particularly in Lombardy, during the second half of the fifteenth century were based on uninterrupted experience and tradition dating from at least the eleventh century. Thirteenth-century Lombard documents mention a method of irrigation called marcita, which involved letting a sheet of water run over the meadows in winter. Beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century, the system of canals for irrigation and transportation around Milan was developed rapidly, generally through the initiative of the new signorie. In 1457 Francesco Sforza ordered the excavation of the Binasco canal to carry the waters of the Naviglio Grande from Milan to Pavia, and in 1464 he had the Martesana canal built to bring the waters of the Adda River from Trezzo to Milan. Twenty years later, under Lodovico Sforza, the irrigation of the countryside around Vigevano and Novara was extended with the construction of the Roggia Mora and the Sforzesco canals.⁸⁵

Owing in part to the fact that in the fifteenth century the “centralized territorial unit” of the duchy of Milan “realized the powerful concentration of force and [economic] means that was necessary to carry out great public works,” an artificially irrigated and intensively cultivated agricultural landscape extended throughout the plain of the Po River valley in Taegio’s lifetime.⁸⁶ This landscape was characterized by canals, meadows, and fields planted primarily with either wheat or rice, a recent introduction that had already become an important export of the neighboring region of Piedmont by the sixteenth century.⁸⁷ The boundaries of the fields in Lombardy were typically marked by embankments and irrigation ditches, along which rows of trees were planted. These plantations consisted of either hardwood species, such as elms, or mulberry trees, which had been introduced into the region with the silk industry in the first half of the sixteenth century. By the second half of the century, with the expansion of meadows and the regular practice of crop rotation based on recently founded modern theory, the old system of fallowing finally came to an end. The arrangement of fields in porche yielded to systematization a prese or a prace, with three or four times greater distance between drainage ditches. The greater length and width of the fields, and the permanent and extensive hydraulic arrangements, distinguished the piantata of Lombardy from the landscape of other parts of Italy. With these improvements the Po valley moved to the forefront of agricultural progress in Italy in the first decades of the sixteenth century.⁸⁸

By the middle of the century, leadership in agricultural theory and technology had shifted from Tuscany and southern Italy to Milan and other northern cities, such as Padua and Venice, which took the place of Florence as the most important centers of publication of agronomic literature. This shift is apparent from the fact that, while earlier the science of agronomy had been dominated by Florentines such as Tanaglia and Alamanni, after 1550 we find at the forefront a Paduan (Clemente) and two Brescians (Falcone and Gallo).⁸⁹

Gallo’s Le dieci giornate is especially illuminating in connection with La Villa because it reflects the landscape of the same region and the same time period as Taegio’s. The salient features of this landscape are the network of canals and ditches for irrigation, the systematization of the plain into a checkerboard of fields, and the cultivation of trees in rows along the boundaries of the fields. That Gallo approved of the works of systematization and irrigation is evident from the great pleasure he took

quando egli fa drizzare vie, quadrare campi, scavezzar tor nature, carettare cavedagne, ugualare prati, fare ponti, argini, canali, e chiaviche per adacquare.

(when someone straightens roads, squares fields, digs out ditches, hauls up embankments, levels meadows, builds bridges, banks, canals, and sluiceways for irrigation.)⁹⁰

He advocated imposing an orthogonal grid on the land: fields

si quadrino di pezzo in pezzo non piu lunghi di quaranta cavezzi l’uno, ne manco di trenta, o di vinti cinque; facendo i fossi attorno, e piantando da ogni lato gli arbori.

(should be well squared one after the other, not more than forty cavecci [240 feet] long, nor less than twenty five or thirty, with ditches all around, and planted on all sides with trees.)⁹¹

Gallo took up the subject of the cultivation of mulberry trees in the section of his treatise on gardens, and in the third section he expounded on the planting of trees to support vines, stating his preference for poplars over the elms of which Tanaglia had sung. In La Villa (p. 112) Taegio described the delightful sight of “the leafy vine, when it reacquires the lost shoots and, marrying itself to the elms, clings to their branches.” The technique of “marrying” vines to trees in Lombardy is as ancient as the period of Etruscan colonization, and in the time of the late empire the Romans, who planted maples, poplars, and elms for the purpose, called this method of viniculture, in what was then known as Cisalpine Gaul, arbrustum gallicum.⁹² The practice of edging the fields with linear plantations dates from at least the last decade of the fifteenth century, when Tanaglia was writing.

The texts by Crescenzi, Tanaglia, Alamanni, and Gallo are vauluable not only as sources of technical information about how land in northern Italy had been cultivated for two centuries before La Villa was published but also as verbal impressions of the changing visual experience of agricultural landscapes in Italy over the same time period. Although he acknowledged Crescenzi, and exposed his familiarity with Tanaglia, Taegio was careful to distinguish his dialogue from the written works of both his predecessors and his contemporaries. La Villa is not an agricultural treatise, as its author made clear at the end of the dialogue where Vitauro decides “to defer the discussion of agriculture to a more convenient occasion.” There is not a single reference in La Villa to the two most important crops produced in the region at the time of its writing: rice and silk. Mulberry trees, the single food source of the silkworm caterpillar, are mentioned only as root stock for grafting oranges, pears, and other fruits. In fact gardening, rather than farming, is the primary focus of Taegio’s treatment of villa landscape.

The Horticultural Context

In the culture of the Italian Renaissance, gardening was understood to be a special case of the imitation of nature in art. A garden could represent, like a painting, the outward appearance of visual effects (and, unlike a painting, the auditory, olfactory, and tangible effects) observable in the world of landscapes both touched and untouched by human hands. In addition, it could represent the hidden cosmic order that was thought to produce those effects. Because the gardener’s palette was the living, growing, changing world of earth, water, and plants, his work could express the interaction of human culture and the natural world in a unique way. In the Italian Renaissance, the garden was considered by many to be the ideal place to reveal the supposed correspondence between the visible and the invisible in a divinely ordered and harmonious universe. This mimetic function distinguished Italian gardens of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from earlier ones. Claudia Lazzaro calls it “the essence of an Italian Renaissance garden.”⁹³ Eugenio Battisti says that the Italian Renaissance garden was, among a great many other things, a “well-ordered model of the universe.”⁹⁴ Lazzaro in particular has specified how gardens in Italy in the Renaissance were made to be representations of the larger world: microcosm imitated macrocosm through conventions of planting and ordering.⁹⁵

The selection of plants in a garden enabled it to serve as a medium for preserving and transmitting knowledge of the divine order of the cosmos in two ways. First, a garden was supposed to represent nature in all its variety by containing a diverse collection of botanical species from all over the known world. In fact, actual gardens created in Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century approached this ideal. The first European example of what later became known as the “botanical garden” was founded at Pisa in 1543. The second, the Orto Botanico at Padua, was constructed two years later.⁹⁶ Taegio mentioned the botanical gardens at both Pisa and Padua in La Villa (p. 105), where he compared the garden of Scipione Simonetta to them. The metaphor of the garden as a catalogue of plants was familiar in fifteenth-century Italy to, among others, Leon Battista Alberti.⁹⁷ In book 3 of his I Libri della Famiglia, in a discussion modeled after Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Alberti said that the ideal setting in which to raise a family would be a villa where “tutti e’ frutti nobilissimi quali nascono per tutti e’ paesi” (all the finest fruits that come from the country) would be grown.⁹⁸ Villa gardens in the state of Milan in the sixteenth century embodied this ideal by including a wide variety of specimens, some exotic. In his description of the garden of Scipione Simonetta in La Villa (p. 104), Taegio listed forty-eight “valuable, famous and exotic simples” from places as remote as Egypt and Calcutta.⁹⁹ Among the exotics Taegio observed in Cesare Simonetta’s garden at Castellazzo were “the sweet-smelling, precious and rare shrubs, brought from parts of India.” The diversity of Cesare Simonetta’s collection of plants is indicated by the passage in which Taegio described a bosco of mixed deciduous and coniferous shade trees, “a shady and delightful wood, where one sees growing the very straight fir tree, the mighty oak, the tall ash, the knotty chestnut, the lofty pine, the shady beech, the delicate tamarisk, the incorruptible linden, the oriental palm, the mournful cypress, the very hard cornel, the humble willow, the very pleasant plane tree, and other very beautiful trees” (p. 67). Variety and rarity of plants were part of what made a garden an imitation of nature in Taegio’s day.

The second way in which planting contributed to the mimetic potential of an Italian Renaissance garden was through symbolism. As Lazzaro has said, “the symbolic significance of plants guided the selection of specimens in the garden.”¹⁰⁰ While the key to much of this symbolism is now lost, it is clear that it was based on associations with moral as well as physical attributes of human beings. In the passage quoted above the oak is called “mighty,” the tamarisk “delicate,” the linden “incorruptible,” the cypress “mournful,” and the willow “humble.” These specimens not only represented the variety of plant species in the world; they also symbolized the range of human physical and psychological types, establishing a correspondence between the garden itself and the larger world, with the human being as the mediator, through conventions of planting.

The microcosm of the Italian Renaissance garden also imitated the macrocosm by means of various strategies for imposing order on the layout of plant materials. Four conventions of ordering gardens in sixteenth-century Italy are recorded in La Villa. The principal one is the subdivision of the garden into three parts corresponding to three categories of plants. The conventional arrangement of the parts of a villa garden placed beds of simples, herbs, or flowers near the house, an orchard of small fruit trees at an intermediate distance, and a bosco, or grove of larger trees, in the most remote part of the garden.¹⁰¹ The second ordering convention is partitioning the garden into regular units, most commonly squares, called compartimenti (quadri in La Villa). Intersecting linear elements such as paths, pergolas, and hedges were typically used to achieve compartmentalization. The third method is the use of geometric designs, epitomized by the quincunx, in the plan of the whole or parts of the garden. The fourth strategy is to fashion plant material into representations of the owner of the garden.¹⁰²

The last three of these conventions were explained in Alberti’s treatise on architecture. In book 9 of De re aedificatoria, where he discussed garden design in the context of ornament appropriate for private dwellings, Alberti advised that “walks should be lined with evergreen plants” such as box, myrtle, and laurel. In the same passage he advocated the use of geometric designs, saying, “Circles, semicircles and other geometric shapes that are favored in the plans of buildings can be modeled out of laurel, citrus and juniper when their branches are bent back and intertwined.”¹⁰³ He went on to express his partiality for the figure that was to become a favorite of sixteenth-century garden theorists: the quincunx.¹⁰⁴ Alberti said that “rows of trees should be laid out in the form of the quincunx as the expression is, at equal intervals and at matching angles.” Finally, Alberti wrote approvingly of the ancient Roman practice of fashioning garden plants into representations of villa owners: “How charming was that custom of our ancestors whereby the gardeners would flatter their master by writing his name on the ground with box or fragrant herbs!”¹⁰⁵ The systematic application of order and measure to garden design is a hallmark of the Renaissance, and a foreshadowing of it can be seen in Alberti’s architectural theory. Its justification is found in a desire, newly expressed in the fifteenth century, for order in the garden to reproduce not only the order proper to the design of buildings but also the cosmic order.

Four conventions of ordering are represented in La Villa. Taegio’s description of Cesare Simonetta’s villa estate (p. 65) reflects the organization of the garden in three parts. The first part of the “well-ordered” garden is composed of “squares of beautiful appearance, both distinct one from another, and equal … where the flowers and the herbs are obliged to dwell.” This is followed by an orchard, where “green and living lemons, oranges and citrons, which have their fruit hanging fresh, unripe and ripe, together with their flowers,” and finally by “a shady and delightful wood.”

The second method of establishing order in the garden is mentioned in several places in La Villa. Compartimento (compartmentalization) is the word Taegio used to describe the partitioning of the garden of Pietro Paolo Arrigono: “In the marvelous and well-contrived construction of a superb palace, as well as in the comparmentalization, in the order, in the charm, and in the loveliness of this very beautiful garden, he shows clearly the splendor and magnificence of his mind” (p. 101). Pergolas are among the means Taegio specified in La Villa (p. 66) for the compartmentalization of Cesare Simonetta’s garden: “The main walkway, which subdivides the place in a cross, is covered by a pergola of new vines, whose sides are nearly all covered with roses and jasmine, so that their big and pleasing fragrance makes the garden seem in truth like all the spiceries of the orient are there. And the alleys are well shaded from the sun, so that one can at all times go everywhere under fragrant and pleasant shade without being touched by its rays.” Taegio added that squares in the same garden were outlined with clipped hedges. “Beside the paths that wind along the aforementioned squares, the pale salvia grows, the green rosemary, the fragrant lavender, the pretty myrtle, the crinkled box, the tenacious mastic, the prickly juniper, the poetical bay laurel, the lowly strawberry bush, and many other similar shrubs, placed regularly and kept low by the masterful hand of the wise cultivator, enclose all the paths of the successful garden.”

The “masterful hand of the wise cultivator” would have been indispensible as well for the third convention of garden art represented in La Villa: the ordering of the plan of the garden with geometric designs such as the labyrinth and the quincunx. In La Villa (p. 108) Taegio called wonderful a “very dense grove of hazel made in the form of a labyrinth” that he saw in the garden of Pietro Novato. He also praised “the wonderful order, the gracefulness, and the careful distribution of the plants that were disposed in the form of a quincunx” in the proverbial garden of King Cyrus. Taegio was so enamored of the quincunx that he illustrated it in La Villa (p. 50).

Finally, Taegio referred to the fourth way of making a garden as an ordered microcosm: by shaping plants into representations of the owner. Rather than spell the owner’s name, as the ancients did in Alberti’s account, Cesare Simonetta’s gardeners reproduced his insignia on the ground with plants. As Taegio wrote in La Villa (p. 67), “the flowers and herbs not only delight the corporeal eyes of the spectators, but with very sweet food they nourish even those of the mind; for inside frames are seen very beautiful devices with very witty and ingenious mottos; and so those like these are composed in flowers and tiny herbs.”

By representing owners, and by means of geometry, compartmentalization, and tripartite organization, Italian Renaissance gardens in general, and the gardens Taegio described in particular, reflected the cosmic order in which human beings were thought to occupy a privileged place. Various adaptations of these conventions of ordering, in combination with those of planting, resulted in sixteenth-century Milanese gardens that functioned as imitations of nature on multiple levels. Horticultural conventions supported the representational quality of Italian Renaissance gardens. Agricultural theories and practices shaped, both literally and figuratively, the terrain in which Taegio’s villa owners lived.

The Idea of the Villa in Antiquity

The idea of the villa has a history. The word villa originated in the Latin language, and it was introduced into English, by way of Italian, in the seventeenth century.¹⁰⁶ The word villa has a great richness of associations for readers of English today, as it did for Taegio and his sixteenth-century Italian readers, both because it was an adaptable term in ancient times and because its meaning developed from a long history of usage beginning in ancient times and continuing through the Renaissance to the present day.¹⁰⁷ Latin authors used the term villa to denote either a building or a group of buildings, built on a piece of land that was cultivated to some extent, and that usually, though not always, was located outside, or at least on the outskirts of, the city. In papal documents of the sixteenth century, villa was used to refer to the whole ensemble of buildings and their landscape setting, while the house itself was called a palazzo.¹⁰⁸ The word villa brings to mind variously a working farm, a simple homestead, an architecturally refined country seat, a refuge from the irritations and dangers of the city, a retreat for study and inspiration, a luxurious vacation house, a locus amoenus (place of pleasure), and a paradise on earth. As this list suggests, these overlapping associations can be thought of as occupying a scale from simple and necessary to elaborate and idealized.

The origin of the word villa is by no means clear, nor is its meaning fixed very securely by its early usage. Pliny the Elder said that in the Twelve Tables, the traditional founding documents of Roman law written in the middle of the fifth century B.C., the word villa never occurs, but that the word hortus is “always used in that sense.”¹⁰⁹ In the later codes of law, villa signified a building in the country that, together with its ager (land), formed a fundus (estate).¹¹⁰ A Latin word closely related to villa is vilicus, which is both an adjective meaning “pertaining to an estate” and a noun meaning “steward,” or “overseer of an estate.” Varro’s Rerum rusticarum contains an etymology of the noun, vilicus.

Vilicus agri colendi causa constitutus atque appellatus a villa, quod ab eo in eam convehuntur fructus et evehuntur, cum veneunt. A quo rustici etiam nunc quoque viam veham appellant propter vecturuas et vellam, non villam, quo vehunt et unde vehunt.

(The vilicus is appointed for the purpose of tilling the ground, and the name is derived from villa, the place into which the crops are hauled [vehuntur], and out of which they are hauled by him when they are sold. For this reason the peasants even now call a road veha, because of the hauling; and they call the place to which and from which they haul vella and not villa.)¹¹¹

Of the ancient Roman authors invoked by Taegio in La Villa to support his argument for the superiority of country life over city life, six prove to be important sources for the origin and early usage of villa: Marcus Porcius Cato, who wrote the earliest extant piece of continuous Latin prose, De agri cultura, in 165 B.C.; Marcus Tullius Cicero, who wrote De senectute in 40 B.C.; Marcus Terentius Varro, who wrote Rerum rusticarum in 37 B.C.; Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella, who wrote the most systematic extant Roman agricultural manual, De re rustica, in 65 A.D.; Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), who wrote Naturalis historia in A.D. 70; and his nephew Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus), whose Epistulae were first published around A.D. 100. Another important ancient source for the meaning of villa, a source Taegio used extensively, is the Greek author Xenophon, who wrote Oeconomicus around 360 B.C.

The term villa may have been relatively new at the time Cato was writing. The villa-residence he described was a working farmhouse, complete with horse stalls and quarters for servants.¹¹² Scholars today commonly refer to this type of building, for which archaeological evidence has been found at Boscoreale and elsewhere, as villa rustica, although Cato never used that term. His word for such a farmhouse is simply villa. Varro, whose description of a villa is more detailed than Cato’s, was the first of the ancient writers to distinguish between villa rustica and villa urbana. In Varro’s day, the villae urbanae of the wealthy were typically more elaborate architecturally than the serviceable farmhouse described by Cato, and they were often adorned with painted decoration and filled with expensive furnishings. That Varro disapproved of this trend is evident in the following passage in which he praised the thrifty ancients and condemned his extravagant contemporaries.

Itaque illorum villae rusticae erant maioris preti quam urbanae, quae nunc sunt pleracque contra…. Nunc contra villam urbanam quam maximam ac politissimam habeant dant operam ac cum Metelli ac Luculli villis pessimo publico aedificatis certant.

(And so their [the ancients’] villae rusticae cost more than their villae urbanae, while now the opposite is usually the case…. Nowadays, on the other hand, people try to have as large and handsome a villa urbana as possible; and they vie with the villas of Metellus and Lucullus, which they have built to the great damage of the state.)¹¹³

As this excerpt from book 1 of Rerum rusticarum shows, Varro used the terms villa rustica and villa urbana to refer to two different kinds of dwellings. Later in Varro’s dialogue, the difference between these kinds of dwellings is elucidated: one is a utilitarian farmhouse, the other a luxurious country residence dissociated from farming. In a long passage in book 3, in which one interlocutor asks what a villa is, a range of examples is given in reply. At one end of the spectrum is a villa that entirely lacks painted or sculpted embellishments. At the other extreme is a villa that serves no purpose related to the tilling of the soil.¹¹⁴ For Varro it was not a building’s location, size, or level of comfort but its economic productivity (which could be based on raising anything from crops to cattle, birds, or bees) that made it a villa.

Like Varro, Columella distinguished between rustica and urbana, but for a purpose different from Varro’s. According to Columella, the rustica (overseer’s residence), the urbana (owner’s residence), and the fructuaria (storehouse) were the three main parts of the villa, differentiated according to use: “Modus autem membroumque numerus aptetur universo consaepto et dividatur in tres partes, urbanam, rusticam, fructuariam” (Moreover, the size [of the villa] and the number of its members should be proportioned to the whole enclosure, and it should be divided into three parts: urbana, rustica, and fructuaria.)¹¹⁵ It is clear from the context that Columella was referring to a building that was composed of more or less loosely related parts. The same building housed, in three sections, everything that needed shelter: the owner’s family; the slave household, cattle, and other animals; and the wine and all the produce of the villa. The two principles Columella set forth that were supposed to guide the arrangement of spaces within each section were solar orientation—“balnearia occidenti aestivo advertantur” (the baths should face the setting sun of summer)—and convenience—“vilico iuxta ianuam fiat habitatio, ut intrantium exeuntiumque conspectum habeat” (quarters should be provided for the overseer alongside the entrance, so that he might have a view of all who come in and go out).¹¹⁶ Columella distinguished between the villa and the consaeptum (fenced enclosure) in which it is built. Even where he said that there should be “vel intra villam vel extrinsecus inductus fons perrenis” (a never-failing spring either within the villa or brought in from outside) and that “salientes rivi … perducendos in villam” (bubbling brooks … should be conducted into the villa), Columella used the word villa to refer to an articulated and functionally differentiated aedificium (building), not an estate.¹¹⁷

Another important ancient source of villa is the late first-century A.D. Roman author Marcus Valerius Martialis. Martial’s Epigrams contain more than thirty references to suburban villa estates, including his own. Where he referred to his own property at Nomentum, a town in Latium northeast of Rome, Martial used the words rus (farm), recessum (retreat), or hortus (garden), or he simply called it his Nomentanus.¹¹⁸ Distinguishing between the land and the building, he called his modest house at Nomentum both casa and rudis villa.¹¹⁹ He repeatedly stated that his main reason for going there was to exchange the incessant noise of the city for the quiet of the countryside, and a good night’s sleep.¹²⁰ Martial praised his friend Faustinus’s villa at Baiae because it “rure vero barbaroque laetatur” (rejoices in the true, rough countryside). He contrasted Faustinus’s villa with a property “sub urbe” (near Rome) that offered its guests “famem mundam” (elegant starvation).¹²¹ Quiet was evidently more important to Martial than either distance from the city or rusticity. He said he preferred the villa of Julius Martialis on the Janiculum in Rome to larger ones at Tibur or Praeneste because there he could view the city below isolated from its noise, even though he wondered whether the “celsa villa” (lofty villa) ought to be called a rus (country place) or a domus (urban residence).¹²²

The ancient author who, more than any other, enlarged the word villa by expanding its range of associations is Pliny the Younger. Of his letters, written at the height of the empire, four in particular reveal the richness of meaning of villa for Romans at the end of the first century A.D. In his letters to Gallus and Domitius Apollinaris, Pliny attributed to his Laurentine and Tuscan villas qualities that are now almost universally associated with the word villa. References to these qualities also occur, among comments on a villa’s purpose, in two less well known letters: one to Baebus Hispanus, in which Pliny the Younger described a property that a friend wanted to buy; and another to Minicius Fundanus (which Taegio cited), concerning his Laurentine villa.

The qualities that Pliny the Younger counted among the attractions of his Laurentine villa are its moderate commodiousness, its proximity to the city, and the favorable disposition of its rooms with respect to exposure and vistas. He wrote to Gallus that “villa usibus capax, non sumptuosa tutela” (the house is large enough for my needs, but not expensive to keep up).¹²³ Extending this principle to an entire estate, he told Baebus Hispanus that he should buy a property with “mediocritas villae, modus ruris, qui avocet magis quam distringat” (a modest house, and sufficient land for him to enjoy without taking up too much of his time). Pliny the Younger expected his friend to enjoy strolling around his grounds inspecting vines and fruit trees. He recommended the same property because it was vicinitas urbis (not far from Rome).¹²⁴ He described for Gallus the arrangement of various rooms of his Laurentine villa in terms not only of solar orientation but also of vistas, especially the view from the dining room that “quasi tria maria prospectat” (looks out, as it were, on three seas).¹²⁵ Pliny the Younger also emphasized the beauty of the views from the house, and the restfulness of the place, in his description of the Tuscan villa. He wrote to Domitius Apollinaris, “Villa in colle imo sita prospicit quasi ex summo” (My house is on the lower slope of a hill but commands as good a view as if it were higher up).¹²⁶ He claimed that he enjoyed the best of health, both physical and mental, when he was at his villa, because “placida omnia et quiescentia, quod ipsum salubritati regionis ut purius caelum ut aer liquidior accedit” (everywhere there is peace and quiet, which adds as much to the healthfulness of the place as the clear sky and pure air).¹²⁷

Although none of the ancient sources says so (and Varro did not mention it in his etymology of vilicus), it is probable that villa, like many Latin words, is closely related to a Greek word. Modern etymologies indicate that villa is a derivative of the Latin word vicus, which is cognate with the Greek word oikos, meaning “estate” or “household.”¹²⁸ In Oeconomicus, Xenophon’s dialogue on the subject of estate management, the word oikos denotes an economic entity, the most basic unit of production and consumption throughout the Greek world. The oikos described by Xenophon was sustained by agricultural activity. It combined features of the family-run farm with the type of enterprise that exploited slave labor; profit was its chief goal. Neither the location of its land nor the character of its landscape setting was an important aspect of the oikos.¹²⁹ Many inhabitants of classical Athens had to travel miles from home to reach the plots of land they farmed, and while some of the wealthiest possessed enclosed, irrigated, and intensively cultivated kepoi (gardens) adjacent to their houses, this certainly was not the rule.¹³⁰

There are similarities between the Greek idea of the oikos and the Roman idea of the villa. Both depended to some extent on the cultivation of the land and agricultural production. Roman treatises on the management of villas reflect practical concerns identical to those treated by Xenophon in Oeconomicus. Cato may have used Xenophon’s Oeconomicus as a source for his own treatise, De agri cultura. In Cicero’s De senectute, Cato, the chief interlocutor in the dialogue, was represented as familiar with Xenophon’s writings in general, which he called “multas ad res perutiles” (very instructive on many subjects), and with the Oeconomicus in particular.¹³¹ It is Cicero’s, not Cato’s, regard for Xenophon that is evident in this passage. Cicero had produced a Latin paraphrase of the Oeconomicus in 85 B.C., and it was Cicero’s version, rather than the Greek, that Varro, Columella, and Pliny the Elder later quoted. Cicero himself was the real speaker in all of his dialogues. He even warned his readers, in the introductory section of De senectute, not to expect to find in his representation the historical Cato, who “eruditius videbitur disputare quam consuevit ipse in suis libris” (will seem to argue more learnedly than he was in the habit of doing in his own books).¹³²

The idea of the villa, especially as found in Cato and Varro, differs in several repects from the idea of the oikos found in Xenophon. By contrast to the Greek oikos, the Roman villa was always situated in a “countryside,” whether found or contrived. Cicero used the term villa to distinguish a house in the country from one in the city. While most ancient Roman villas had the agricultural capability to be self-sufficient, not all villas were associated with farming.¹³³ The villas of the rich, especially those of the emperors, were not always literally located in the countryside. The most obvious example is the Domus Aurea of Nero, who built his villa where the Colosseum now stands. Though it was located in the heart of Rome, because it was provided with a parklike setting, an imitation of rural landscape, such a residence could still be called a villa. The first-century A.D. Latin historian Tacitus described Nero’s villa as a palace the marvels of which “were not so much customary and commonplace luxuries like gold and jewels, but lawns and lakes and faked rusticity—woods here, open spaces and views there.”¹³⁴ Because the idea of the villa carries with it a notion of life in the country, a landscape setting that evokes or represents the countryside is essential to the Roman villa, while it is not essential to the Greek oichos.

A villa is distinguished from an oikos not only by its actual or represented situation but also by its purpose. The Roman villa was associated with the owner’s enjoyment and relaxation in a way that the Greek oikos was not. Evidence for the idea that the enjoyment of country life constituted a purpose for the villa is found in the works of Cato, Varro, and Pliny the Younger. The first indication in ancient literature that life in villa was associated with delight in the vita rustica appears as early as the first half of the second century B.C., in Cato’s De agri cultura. To Cato the villa represented primarily a sound investment, and only secondarily a source of pleasure because it served as a retreat. Varro’s view was more balanced. He said that “agricolae ad duas metas dirigere debent, ad utilitatem et voluptatem” (farmers ought to aim at two goals, profit and pleasure).¹³⁵ For Pliny the Younger, the main purpose of the villa was pleasure, particularly the pleasure that comes from “dulce otium honestumque” (sweet and honorable leisure) devoted to literary studies.¹³⁶ He called the retreat at Laurentum his “verum secretumque mouseion (true and private haunt of the muses), indicating that for him an important function of its setting was to inspire him to write.¹³⁷ Pliny the Younger counted himself among the “scholasticis porro dominis” (scholars-turned-landlords) of his day, who not only enjoyed villa life but also found it necessary for cultivating a life of scholarship, just as Taegio would, nearly fifteen hundred years later.¹³⁸

While life in villa was, from Cato’s day on, associated with enjoyment of the countryside, the “pleasure factor” became more remarkable at the height of the empire. The rustic farmhouses of Cato’s and Cicero’s days were overshadowed in later generations by the luxurious suburban villas described by Martial. This shift in the idea of the villa may have resulted in part from the increasing influence of Epicurean philosophy, which contrasted with the Stoicism of Cato. As the Roman Empire expanded, villas were increasingly devoted more to the owner’s pleasure than to farming. This development probably was stimulated by economic changes associated with the rise of slave-run estates known as latifundia. When Pliny the Elder wrote that “latifundia perdidere Italiam, iam vero et provincias” (large estates have been the ruin of Italy, and are now proving the ruin of the provinces too), he was not only putting latifundia at the center of debate about the aggregation of rural properties too large to farm according to the labor-intensive methods described by Cato and Varro, he was also signaling a change in the meaning and purpose of the villa, a new emphasis on its role as a locus amoenus, a place of sensual and intellectual pleasure.¹³⁹

The Idea of the Villa in the Renaissance

As the Roman Empire disintegrated, the ideological as well as the practical need for villas waned. As urban populations shrank, much of the countryside of Italy was taken out of cultivation, and became economically and politically isolated from cities. Villas ceased to be centers of economic and administrative life, and many of their structures were either neglected or adapted for other uses. While people may have continued to live on country estates throughout the former empire, the construction of new villas and the production of writing on the idea of the villa both eventually stopped. The “process of disaggregation of the agricultural landscape and the separation of the city from the countryside” reached its peak between the eighth and eleventh centuries.¹⁴⁰ By the thirteenth century, following an increase in population, the elaboration of the agricultural landscape began to develop again under new conditions. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Crescenzi wrote his Liber ruralium commodorum using Cato, Varro, and Columella as sources.¹⁴¹ Crescenzi’s agricultural treatise does not deal with the idea of the villa. Rather, “it gives a complete picture by a cultured observer, of the medieval garden at its most expansive, before the onset of the Renaissance.”¹⁴² The buildings Crescenzi described in his text are essentially fortified castles, which were built all over Italy before the fifteenth century.

Villas, as distinct from castles, farmhouses, and urban palazzi, began to be built again in Italy in the fifteenth century. The resurgence of Italian cities, which had begun in the thirteenth century, stimulated a demand for the agricultural produce that villas collected and distributed, and a related increase in the safety of the countryside led to positive reassessments of the value of country life relative to that of city life. Investment in agricultural real estate was a way for wealthy businessmen to buffer themselves financially from the shocks of fluctuating market economies in Florence in the middle of the fifteenth century, when banking and trading were more profitable than farming, as surely as it was in the Veneto in the late sixteenth century, in the context of the reformation of uncultivated land in the Terraferma, and in the state of Milan in Taegio’s day.

A change in attitude toward the contemplative life stimulated new interest in the idea of the villa, which in turn prompted a revival of villa literature and a renewal of villa construction, beginning in Florence in the fifteenth century. This revival progressed in two phases: the rebirth of the ancient tradition of the “villa dialogue,” in the first half of the century; and, after 1450, the appearance of the first treatises to include the idea of the villa as a topic. Renewed interest in the idea of the villa as a site of otium was preceeded by writing on the contemplative life. Belief in the superiority of the contemplative life over the active life is expressed in the writings of fifteenth-century humanists, such as Cristoforo Landino, who wrote Disputationes Camaldulenses in 1475, and Pico, who wrote Oratio de hominis dignitate in 1486; but its roots are found in the previous century, in the writings of Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio.

Petrarch based his argument for the superiority of the contemplative life over the active life, in De vita solitaria, on the authority of a variety of ancient writers, mostly Stoics, including Cicero, Scipio, and Seneca. The literary setting for Petrarch’s life of solitude was a locus amoenus in the countryside, “inter purpureos florum toros, autumno caducarum inter frondium … procul a malis, procul ab exemplis scelerum” (amid purple beds of flowers [and] heaps of fallen leaves … far from evil, far from examples of wickedness).¹⁴³ Petrarch began writing his treatise, as an apologia for his withdrawal from the urban world of activity, in his villetta at Vaucluse in 1346.¹⁴⁴ He was one of the first to view his own day as the beginning of a revival, which he conceived in terms of a return to the study of classical Greek and Latin texts and a reformation of writing in Latin. But it was Boccaccio who answered Petrarch’s call for a return to the classics with a call of his own for a return to nature.¹⁴⁵ Boccaccio’s Decameron is set during the Florentine plague of 1348, in a villa in the countryside midway “between sophisticated city life and the pastoral simplicity of the peasant’s world.” That villa is a locus amoenus, conceived as a place to which one can escape from the city without suffering the disorderliness of untamed wilderness.¹⁴⁶

The revival of villa literature proper began with the rebirth of the “villa dialogue” in Florence in the century following Boccaccio’s. The earliest such work is the Dialogus ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, written by Lionardo Bruni in 1401. Two other villa dialogues, both from shortly before 1440, are Poggio Bracciolini’s De Nobilitate and Matteo Palmieri’s De Vita Civile. Not only is Palmieri’s dialogue, like Bruni’s and Bracciolini’s, set in a villa, it also focuses on villa life as a subject.¹⁴⁷ Palmieri has one of the interlocutors say, “La Villa è tutta buona, fertile, copiosa, dilettevole, onesta, naturale e degna d’ogni uomo da bene e libero” (The villa is a perfect good: fertile, abundant, delightful, honorable, and worthy of every free man of good class.)¹⁴⁸ When this statement is compared to comments on country life made in the previous century, the increase in value of the kind of retreat that a villa affords is evident. Paolo Da Certaldo, in his mid-fourteenth century Libro di buoni costumi, had written, ‘“La Villa fa buone bestie e cattivi uomini,’ e pero usala poco: sta a la città e favvi o arte o mercatantia, e capiterai bene” (“The villa makes good animals and bad men”; therefore make very little use of it. Stay in the city and foster your trade or business affairs, and you will prosper.)¹⁴⁹

The second phase of the revival of villa literature began with the work of Leon Battista Alberti. Alberti was the first writer since antiquity known to have devoted a piece of writing exclusively to the idea of the villa. That piece is his short monograph, written probably around 1438, entitled simply Villa.¹⁵⁰ Alberti also took up the villa as a topic in two other, better known, works: his dialogue on the family, I Libri della Famiglia, written in 1438; and his treatise on the art of building, De re aedificatoria, written after 1450.

The content of Alberti’s Villa is derived from the De agri cultura of Cato and the Works and Days of Hesiod, which also may have served as a model a century later for Taegio. Alberti could have been familiar with one of several manuscripts of Works and Days now in Florence, and Taegio with one now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.¹⁵¹ The moralizing tone of Alberti’s Villa can be traced to Cato and Hesiod. Alberti’s phrase “nulla più iusto a ricchire che la agricultura, e quelle ricchezze quali s’acumulano senza fraude sono uno bene divino” (there is no fairer way to get rich than agriculture, and riches that are acquired without fraud are a divine blessing),¹⁵² recalls the opening paragraph of Cato’s treatise, where he says that his ancestors praised farmers more than merchants,¹⁵³ as well as Hesiod’s exhortation to Perses to do “the work which the gods ordained for men.”¹⁵⁴ Alberti did not simply imitate his antique models, however; he built on them and went beyond them, reflecting on the purpose of a villa. The first line of Villa reads, “Compera La Villa per pascere la famiglia tua, non per darne diletto ad altri” (Buy a villa to nourish your family, not to give pleasure to others).¹⁵⁵

Similar sentiments about the purpose of a villa can be found in the dialogue on the family Alberti wrote at about the same time as Villa. In I Libri della Famiglia he embellished his conception of the villa as a farm for the production of food and income for the family by adding, in a way that is reminiscent of Martial, that a villa is a refuge from the noise and dangers of city life. For Alberti, the villa not only offered “utile grandissimo, onestissimo e certissimo” (the greatest, the most honest, and the most certain profit); it was also a place “fuggire questi strepiti, questi tumulti, questa tempesta della terra” (to flee these uproars, these tumults, this tempest of the world) that is the city.¹⁵⁶ This felt need to withdraw from the city, which in Alberti is mixed with a sense of the private realm as a training ground for public life, recalls Petrarch’s De vita solitaria.¹⁵⁷

In De re aedificatoria Alberti made three statements about the design of villas that refer to attributes of the idea of the villa found in ancient sources.¹⁵⁸ In the first of these statements, Alberti reaffirmed the purpose of the villa implied by Martial and Pliny the Younger, saying that the kind of private house appropriate for a leading citizen of a republic is “a place to retreat with his household … well away from the common crowd,” and ideally “outside the city altogether.”¹⁵⁹ In a second passage, Alberti, like Cato before him, located the villa between the works of man and the works of nature, where it should enjoy the best of both worlds, urban and rural, by being situatied “right in the countryside, at the foot of mountains,” and “at no great distance from the city.”¹⁶⁰ Finally, Alberti defined the type of the suburban villa, intimated by Martial, as “that [which] combines the dignity of a city house with the delights of a villa.”¹⁶¹ Alberti called this type by that archaic term for a villa, hortus, which Martial had used. Its distinguishing feature is that it has a view of “meadows full of flowers, sunny lawns, cool and shady groves, limpid streams and pools.”¹⁶²

With Villa, I Libri della Famiglia, and De re aedificatoria, Alberti made an enormous contribution to the revival of villa literature, by drawing from Hesiod, Cato, Martial, and Pliny the Younger to reconstruct the idea of the villa in a new context. Alberti’s work and the “villa dialogues” by Bruni, Bracciolini, and Palmieri incorporated notions of the essential nature and purpose of a villa, and thereby embodied the idea of the villa in the Renaissance.

The Philosophical Context of La Villa

Bartolomeo Taegio was not a philosopher, but he was well versed in the studia humanitatis of his day, and the list of his published writings indicates the wide scope of interests typical of the homo universalis. Taegio was a humanist and a poet-scholar, and as such he belonged to a class of intellectuals that was in decline in the sixteenth century, even as the influence of humanistic learning in Italy was reaching its zenith.¹⁶³ The reasons for the decline are numerous and interrelated. After 1500, when printed editions of ancient texts, many accompanied by commentaries, became widespread, the humanists found themselves no longer “personally the possessors and diffusers of ancient culture.”¹⁶⁴ Having been for several decades practically indispensable to patrons eager for new knowledge of antiquity, a growing number of classically trained scholars now had to compete for fewer and less profitable posts. At the same time, with the Counter-Reformation gaining momentum, humanists more and more frequently had to defend themselves against charges of atheism and heresy. Suspicions of apostasy had occaisionally interrupted the careers of classical scholars in Italy as early as the middle of the fifteenth century. In general it became increasingly difficult for scholars in Italy to publicly maintain unorthodox views after 1542 when Paul III, the pope who was to summon the Council of Trent three years later, revived the Inquisition by establishing “a new centralized organization, the Holy Office, with its headquarters in Rome, to supervise and coordinate the activities of inquisitorial tribunals elsewhere in Italy.”¹⁶⁵

It is commonplace today to characterize the intellectual climate of the Renaissance in terms of a conflict between the two dominant systems of classical thought. A better sense of the kind of intellectual activity that produced La Villa is captured by the phrase some scholars have used to characterize the writings of the Florentine humanists: “an attempt at a syncretistic fusion of” Platonism and Aristotelianism.¹⁶⁶ As a writer, Taegio depended on sources aligned with both traditions. Traces in La Villa of the influences of the Platonists Ficino, Pico, and Carolus Bovillus, as well as the Aristotelian Pietro Pomponazzi, are unmistakable.

The main premise of Taegio’s argument for the superiority of villa life is that the villa is the ideal setting for contemplation, which should be valued because its purpose is the pursuit of knowledge, or, in Taegio’s words, “il fin dell’anima” (the spirit’s goal). Taegio’s emphasis on the value of contemplation recalls the philosophical thinking of Marsilio Ficino, the leader of the Platonic Academy in Florence and “the most influential exponent of Platonism in Italy during the fifteenth century.”¹⁶⁷ In his Theologica Platonica (1474) Ficino called contemplation the highest goal of human existence, and he argued that, because contemplation is never perfectly attained in this life, the human being must have an immortal soul.¹⁶⁸ The human soul occupied the central position in Ficino’s hierarchy of possible modes of existence, an unbroken scale of mediation between the sensible and the intelligible—that is, in Platonic terms, between appearances (phenomena) and ideas (noumena).¹⁶⁹ The theory of a graduated cosmos has its roots in the philosophy of that pseudonymous early sixth-century Neoplatonist author known to scholars in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as Dionysius the Areopagite, whose De divinis nominibus and De mystica theologica Ficino translated in 1492.¹⁷⁰

Taegio referred to Marsilio Ficino only once in La Villa, and then it was to identify him as the owner of a villa that is called by the original form of Taegio’s family name, Montevecchio. In fact, Ficino is the first villa owner mentioned in La Villa. The second is Ficino’s pupil Pico della Mirandola, the basic outline of whose teaching was undoubtedly familiar to Taegio, as the following passage from La Villa (p. 4) clearly indicates. In response to a question from Partenio about what the object of the contemplation fostered by the solitude of the villa should be, Vitauro replies, “You ought to know that the elements have only being, the plants have being in common with the elements and life as well, the beasts have being in common with the elements, life in common with the plants, and sense as well. And men have being in common with the elements, life in common with the plants, sense in common with the beasts, and intellect in common with the angels. Thus the immortality of our souls is proven.”

Taegio’s articulation of the concept of a graduated cosmos represents his synthesis of the speculative scheme of Bovillus and the philosophy of Pico. In his De sapiente (1509) Bovillus postulated a universe consisting of four different existential levels: being, living, sensing, and reasoning. The lowest of these levels is shared by everything that is, including minerals, plants, beasts, and humankind. The highest level is reserved for human beings. The passage in which this system is postulated can be found at the beginning of first chapter of De sapiente:

Homini omni insunt a natura Substantia, Vita, Sensus et Ratio. Est etenim, vivit, sentit et intelligit omnis homo. Ast alii hominum duntaxat ut simplicis substantie, alii ut Substantie et Vite, ali ut Substantie, Vite et Sensus, alii denique Substantie, Vite, Sensus et Rationis actu atque operatione funguntur.

(All men by nature consist of Substance, Life, Sense and Reason. For indeed every man exists, lives, senses and understands. Some men in their actions and works function with substance only; others not only with substance but also with life; others not only with substance and life but also with sense; and still others not only with substance, life and sense but also with reason.)¹⁷¹

Bovillus’s system is ethical as well as metaphysical; it describes not only the gradations of existence, which are supposed to reveal the hidden order of the microcosm and the macrocosm, but also the path along which a human being can pass from acedia (spiritual inertia) to self-knowledge and knowledge of the cosmos, which Bovillus associated with virtus (virtue). Bovillus acknowledged only the influences of Ramon Lull and Nicholas of Cusa on the development of these ideas, but his intellectual debt to Pico, though unacknowledged, is amply evident.¹⁷²

In Oratio de dignitate hominis, which was written probably in 1487 and published only after his death, Pico based his argument for the surpassing excellence of human nature on the human being’s God-given power to choose his place on the scale of created beings. Pico’s scale consists of four levels, like Bovillus’s, but it is marked by two important differences: it encompasses “ways of life” rather than modes of existence per se, omitting Bovillus’s first level; and it makes a distinction between two kinds of knowing. Pico’s levels are vegetative, sensual, rational and intellectual. The highest of these, which Pico associated with the contemplative life, is the way of life of the angels. The most concise statement of this theme is found in the following passage.

FIGURE 6. De quattuor hominum gradibus, woodcut illustration from Carolus Bovillus, Le Livre du Sage, p. 56.

Nascenti homini omnifaria semina et omnigenae vitae germina indidit Pater; quaequisque excoluerit illa adolescent, et fructus suos ferent in illo. Si vegetalia, planta fiet. Si sensualia, obrutescet. Si rationalia, caeleste evadet animal. Si intellectualia, angelus erit et Dei filius.

(The Father bestowed on man when he was born the seed of every kind and the germ of every way of life. Every one of these a man cultivates will mature and bear its fruit in him. If vegetative, he will be a plant. If sensual, he will become a brute. If rational, he will turn out to be a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.)¹⁷³

Taegio’s scheme, which is composed of being, life, sense, and intellect, combines the first three of Bovillus’s levels with Pico’s highest level, making the state of contemplation man’s chief end and his link with the divine. In La Villa (p. 4) Taegio called attention to his affinity with Pico by asking, rhetorically, “Don’t you know that the intellect is a divine thing, and that man is the link in the chain that binds mortal things with the divine?” The resemblance between Taegio’s “chain” and Bovillus’s shows that Taegio was familiar with the De sapiente. The fact that Taegio made the highest level of existence mankind’s link with the divine strongly suggests that he was influenced by Pico directly, through a reading of the Oratio de dignitate hominis, as well as indirectly, through Bovillus.

Taegio was also influenced by Pomponazzi, the great Aristotelian rival of Ficino. While most of the fifteenth-century humanists, including the Florentines of Ficino’s Academy, embraced Platonism, “the organized intellectual life of the universities remained loyal to the Aristotelian tradition.”¹⁷⁴ In northern Italy, the center of that life was the University of Padua, where Pomponazzi lectured from 1488 to 1509.¹⁷⁵ Pomponazzi compared the “whole human race to a single body composed of different members,” in which all parts, while specialized, have some things in common. Pomponazzi said, in De immortalitate animae, that “all men … must share in three intellects: the theoretical, the practical or operative, and the productive,” and that “the universal end of the human race is to participate relatively in the speculative and the productive intellects but perfectly in the practical.”¹⁷⁶ Taegio alluded to this passage of De immortalitate animae in La Villa (p. 13) where he said, speaking through Vitauro, “As long as that intellect you call practical inquires into what is truly just, honorable, and useful, it is speculative, but when one applies it to actions and to particular things, it becomes practical.” Later in his dialogue, Taegio made an oblique reference to another treatise by Pomponazzi. In De naturalium effectuum admirandorum causis, sive de incantationibus Pomponazzi sought to transform astrology into a rational science by explaining all so-called miraculous effects in terms of either ordinary natural causes, or natural forces not ordinarily experienced, or the influence of the observable motions of stars and planets. Pomponazzi’s phrase “Sed haec est consuetudo vulgi, ascribere daemonibus vel angelisquorum causas non cognoscunt” (But this is the custom of the common people: to ascribe to demons or to angels causes they don’t understand)¹⁷⁷ is echoed by Vitauro’s line in La Villa (p. 55) “There are many things held by common folk to be miracles which are nevertheless natural.” Pomponazzi completed De incantationibus in 1520, but it was not published until it was printed in Basel in 1556, three years before La Villa was published in Milan.

Taegio’s intellectual debts to Pomponazzi, Bovillus, Pico, and Ficino are apparent in his specific references to particular philosophical statements of theirs, and generally in his elevation of the contemplative life. Taegio’s endorsement of contemplation over action in La Villa is subordinated to his argument for the superiority of life in villa over city life.

The Relationship Between Leisure and Intellectual Activity: Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Petrarch

Taegio introduced his argument for the villa as the ideal setting for the life of a true gentleman with the following statement in the words of Vitauro (La Villa, p. 2): “I tell you that in villa I enjoy principally the honorable leisure of that literature that agrees with my nature.” A key to understanding Taegio’s notion of the purpose of the villa lies in the meaning of his expression honorato ocio (honorable leisure). Ocio is the sixteenth-century Italian equivalent of the Latin word otium, which was a translation of the Greek word skole. Otium is usually rendered in English as “leisure,” skole as “repose.” It is especially useful, in connection with a discussion of the idea of villa life, to look at otium in relation to its opposite, negotium, formed by prefixing the negative particle nec to otium. Negotium, which can be translated “business,” “occupation,” or “employment,” indicates a lack of otium, and therefore otium can be construed as something positive in itself. In Latin texts, otium was almost never used merely in the sense of time off from work, what we might call “spare time.”¹⁷⁸ Nor was otium generally considered something to be enjoyed passively. On the contrary, it was frequently associated with intellectual activity.

The history of “honorable leisure” encompasses changing attitudes toward the relationship between leisure and intellectual activity, and the relative merits of action and contemplation. In La Villa, Taegio cited four of the most important sources of our knowledge of these attitudes: Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Petrarch. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defined skole as both a characteristic of the contemplative life and a prerequisite for happiness. According to Aristotle, happiness “consists in” contemplation, which is the highest form of activity and the only activity desired for its own sake.¹⁷⁹ The activity of the intellect, which Aristotle said also “consists in” contemplation, is the stuff of which human happiness is made, partly because it is characterized by skole.¹⁸⁰

For Cicero and Seneca, otium was a means toward what was for them the noblest of ends, service to the state. By linking otium and statesmanship, Cicero and Seneca radically altered the meaning of Aristotle’s skole. For these ancient Roman philosopher-statesmen, otium conveyed not so much repose as retreat from negotium, and they found its justification in intellectual activity. In its Ciceronian sense, otium itself was an activity, and one that was always comprehended in the context of its complement, political activity. Where Cicero, in De officiis, quoted Cato saying that Scipio Africanus claimed to be “numquam se minus otiosum esse, quam cum otiosus, nec minus solum, quam cum solus esset” (never less idle than when he was at leisure, and never less lonely than when he was alone), he was associating otium with the work of thinking and writing. In his Tusculan Disputations, where he said he wanted to elevate Roman philosophy to the level set by the Greeks, so that “si occupati profuimus aliquid civibus nostris, prosimus etiam, si possumus, otiosi” (if I have been of service to my countrymen while actively engaged [in politics], I may also, if I can, be of service to them in my leisure), Cicero was justifying otium in terms of its value to the Republic as a complement to political activity.¹⁸¹ Cicero expressed his delight in so dignifying otium when he asked, “Quid est enim dulcius otio litterato?” (What is sweeter than leisure devoted to literature)?”¹⁸²

Otium litteratum was the only tolerable kind of leisure for Seneca, who said, in his Epistles, that “otium sine litteris mors est, et hominis vivi sepultura” (leisure without literature is death, and a tomb for the living man).¹⁸³ For Seneca, literary study justified leisure because contemplatio (contemplation) was the activity that made otium a form of service to the state. In De otio, Seneca wrote that “hoc nempe ab homine exigitur, ut prosit hominibus” (this of course is required of a man, that he benefit his fellow man), and he went on to describe the attitude that could enable one to serve society in his leisure.¹⁸⁴ He asked rhetorically, “Quo animo ad otium sapiens secedit? Ut sciat se tum quoque ea acturum, per quae posteris prosit. (With what spirit does the wise man enter into leisure? Indeed, he knows that there also he will be doing something that will benefit posterity.)¹⁸⁵ Seneca implied that the “something that will benefit posterity” was contemplation: “Natura autem utrumque facere me voluit, et agere et contemplationi vacare. Utrumque facio, quoniam ne contemplatio quidem sine actione est.” (But nature intended me to do both, to be active and to have leisure for contemplation, and I do both, because even contemplation is not devoid of action.)¹⁸⁶ For Seneca the highest good was to live according to nature.¹⁸⁷ Seneca’s “highest good” involved contemplation subordinated to action.

Like Seneca, Petrarch privileged contemplation and the solitude that he claimed makes it possible. In De Vita Solitaria 1.3, Petrarch reinterpreted leisure as solitude, where he quoted Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Seneca’s Epistles:

Equidem solitudo sine literis exilium est, carcer, eculeus; adhibe literas, patria est, libertas, delectatio. Nam de otio quidem illud Ciceronis notum: “Quid dulcius otio literato?” Contraque, non minus illud Senecae vulgatum: “Otium sine literis mors est, et hominis vivi sepultura.”

(Indeed, solitude without literature is exile, prison and torture; supply literature, and it becomes homeland, liberty and delight. For well known is that saying of Cicero’s about leisure: “What is sweeter than leisure devoted to literature?” No less familiar is Seneca’s “Leisure without literature is death, and a tomb for the living man.”)¹⁸⁸

Petrarch’s phrase “Solitude without literature is exile” is virtually identical to Seneca’s “Otium sine literis mors est,” except that Petrarch substituted the word solitudo for the word otium. The effect of this substitution is to transform the meaning of leisure. Solitudo is retreat, not only from business, but from society altogether. By implying that the leisure of Cicero and Seneca was solitude, Petrarch gave solitude the same relationship to intellectual activity that leisure had for those ancient Roman philosophers. The thought of a life of solitude deprived of literary and philosophical studies was as unbearable for Petrarch as the thought of otium without litterae was for Seneca. Petrarch interpreted the writings of Seneca and Cicero to mean that they could not engage in intellectual activity without solitude.

In Petrarch’s view, solitude was necessary for more than contemplation. By asserting that the infusion of solitude with intellectual activity produces “homeland, liberty and delight,” Petrarch made solitude necessary for happiness, just as Aristotle made skole necessary for happiness. In De Vita Solitaria, solitudo is described as productive of happiness because it is characterized by litteras. Although Petrarch’s solitudo had the same relationship to intellectual activity as Cicero’s and Seneca’s otium, it was not a means to an end. Solitude for Petrarch, like contemplation for Aristotle, was an end in itself.¹⁸⁹

Leisure and Villa Life: Alberti, Rinuccini, and Ficino

In the writings of Leon Battista Alberti on villa life, leisure plays a role in what he described as the dual purpose of the villa, which is not only to nourish one’s family, as he said in the essay he entitled Villa, but also to give pleasure. He suggested both purposes in the following passage from book 3 of I Libri della Famiglia:

Sempre si dice La Villa essere opera de’ veri buoni uomini e giusti massari, e conosce ogni uomo La Villa in prima essere di guadagno non piccolo, e, come tu dicevi, dilettoso e onesto.

(The villa is always said to be the work of truly good men and just stewards, and everyone knows the villa to be, in the first place, more than a little profitable, and, as you were saying, delightful and honorable.)¹⁹⁰

The pleasure Alberti found in villa life was not self-indulgent but self-defensive; miserable social conditions in the city warranted fleeing to the countryside, as he explained:

Agiugni qui che tu puoi ridurti in villa e viverti in riposo pascendo la famigliuola tua, procurando tu stessi a’ fatti tuoi, la festa sotto l’ombra ragionarti piacevole del bue, della lana, delle vigne o delle sementi, senza sentire romori, o relazioni, o alcuna altra di quelle furie quali dentro alla terra fra’ cittadini mai restano,—sospetti, paure, maledicenti, ingiustizie, risse, e l’altre molte bruttissime a ragionarne cose, e orribili a ricordarsene.

(Add to this that you can retire to your villa and live there in repose, nurturing your family, getting things done yourself, on holidays talking pleasantly in the shade about oxen, wool, vines or seeds, without hearing rumors, or tales, or some of those other rages that never stop in the land of city dwellers–suspicions, fears, slanders, injuries, feuds, and other things too ugly to mention and too horrible to remember.)¹⁹¹

Here riposo (repose) is one of the blessings of villa life, which Alberti, like Taegio after him, contrasted with the maladies of city life. Another blessing is delight in the countryside. Immediately following the passage quoted above, Alberti called the villa “uno proprio paradiso” (one’s own paradise), because

vi godete in villa quelli giorni aerosi e puri, aperti e lietissimi; avete leggiadrissimo spettacolo rimirando que’ colletti fronditi, e que’ piani verzosi, e quelli fonti e rivoli chiari, che seguono saltellando e perdendosi fra quelle chiome dell’erba.

(at the villa you enjoy clean and airy days, open and very delightful. You have a very lovely view, beholding those leafy hills and verdant plains, and those springs and clear streams, which go leaping through and losing themselves in the waving grass.)¹⁹²

In order to enjoy these blessings it was necessary, according to Alberti, to flee the maladies of the city, as he went on to say: “Puoi alla villa fuggire questi strepiti, questi tumulti, questa tempesta della terra, della piazza, del palagio” (At the villa you can flee these uproars, these tumults, this tempest of the land, piazza, and palace.)¹⁹³ The sense of leisure gained from Alberti’s I Libri della Famiglia involves the ideas of repose, flight from the city, and enjoyment of the countryside.

In the second half of the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino and Alamanno Rinuccini developed further the interpretation of leisure as fuggire (fleeing). Ficino embellished a wall of the villa given him by Cosimo de’ Medici with the following inscription: “A bono in bonum omnia diriguntur. Laetus in praesens. Neque censum existimes, neque appetas dignitatem; fuge excessum, fuge negotia, laetus in praesens.” (All things are directed from the good to the good. Be joyful in the present. You must not value property or desire dignity. Flee excess, flee business, be joyful in the present.)¹⁹⁴ The words “laetus in praesens” recall Horace’s verses:

laetus in praesens animus quod ultra est

oderit curare et amara lento temperet risu.

nihil est ab omni parte beatum.

(Let the soul be joyful in the present, let it disdain to be anxious for what the future has in store, and temper bitterness with a smile serene. Nothing is happy altogether.)¹⁹⁵

Ficino’s inscription is pregnant with meaning because of the associations it makes. Not only does it link the serenity of which Horace wrote with the ancient Roman sense of leisure, retreat from negotium; it also connects both serenity and leisure with the villa and intellectual activity, by virtue of the fact that the setting in which it appeared was a particular villa, which Ficino named Academia after Plato’s Academy.

Rinuccini also associated leisure with serenity in his Dialogus de Libertate (1479), and he used a word for “serenity” that appears frequently in Taegio’s La Villa: tranquillità. From the beginning of the preface to his dialogue, Rinuccini offered a justification for living in the country to those who did not approve of him devoting more care to the management of his villa than to his business in the city. Rinuccini wrote Dialogus de Libertate one year after the Pazzi conspiracy, while he was in forced retirement at his villa outside Florence, which he made the setting for his dialogue. There he said he led “ab urbana frequentia et, quae ab ea fluunt, innumeris avaritiae atque ambitionis curis semotam vitam” (a life dis sociated from urban congestion and the immeasurable greed and abition which flow from it).¹⁹⁶ Rinuccini’s description of the vices of city dwellers would be echoed nearly a century later by Taegio in La Villa (p. 2) where he wrote that he could not see anything in the city but “pride, ambition, greed, hatred, falsehood, and idolatry.” Rinuccini said that it was not his purpose to tell others how to live, only to explain why he chose his way of life, which was to attain “what the Greeks called euthemia, a word we might translate as spiritual well being, or simply tranquillity.”¹⁹⁷ Rinuccini defined “tranquillity” in terms of his interpretation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as follows:

Quod si Aristotelem sequi volumus qui non inhabitu sed in actu collocavit foelicitatem, hanc ipsam animi quietem et tranquillitatem carentiamque perturbationum fundamentum sedemque foelicitatis non immerito arbitramur, quod ita institutus animus facilime ad actionis aut contemplationis operationem sese conferet.

(If we agree with Aristotle’s conviction that happiness lies not in passivity but in action, we shall conclude that tranquillity is the essential foundation and basis of happiness because it allows us to devote ourselves properly to either action or contemplation.)¹⁹⁸

In the soliloquy that concludes the dialogue, Rinuccini made clear that he felt justified in retreating from the city only because political conditions there had become unbearable for him. In words that are reminiscent of Seneca’s statement in De Otio, that a man has good reason for retiring “si res publica corruptior est quam ut adiuvari posit” (if the state is so corrupt that it cannot be helped),¹⁹⁹ Rinuccini wrote,

Libertatis occupatoribus gratificer perpeti non possum. Propterea, hac, ut videtis, villula et hoc agello contentus, nullis anxius curis, nec quid agatur in civitate perquirens, quiete libereque vitam duco.

(I cannot peacefully tolerate the usurpers of our liberty. Therefore, as you see, I lead a quiet and free life, content with this little villa and farm, free from all anxiety, never inquiring into what goes on in the city.)²⁰⁰

For Rinuccini, as for Seneca, service to the state took priority over leisure. In fact, as soon as he was again offered a position in the government of the city, Rinuccini ended his retirement and returned to Florence. However, while it was possible, according to Rinuccini, to pursue a life of otium in either the city or the country, the setting he chose for his own “otium cum dignitate et sine interpellatione quietem” was “villula et hoc agello”; in other words, a villa.

In Taegio’s La Villa, ocio is leisure spent in the active pursuit of knowedge. It is associated with pleasure and tranquillity of mind, and it is made possible by villa life. Knowledge of the truth depends on leisure, a point Vitauro makes in La Villa (p. 12) by asking rhetorically, “How can [truth] be had except by means of discourse and leisure put to good use to acquire it?” By calling the leisure he associated with the pursuit of knowledge felice (happy) and productive of quiete d’animo (quiet of mind), Taegio was agreeing with Seneca, who “when in his Sabine [villa] … attended to his very honorable studies with happy leisure and great quiet of mind.” Taegio used the term tranquillità d’animo in connection with leisure as he described the the villa of Francesco Torniello: “He escapes to the sunny and very happy hill of Vergano, where with great tranquillity of mind he enjoys the freedoms and pleasures of the villa.” Taegio associated tranquillity of mind with the mythical golden age, as he penned these words (p. 16): “Hence if neither cities nor castles had ever been built, men living in the country with greatest concord and tranquillity of mind would pass their years in the manner in which the ancients did in the golden age.”²⁰¹

For Taegio, the study of literature and philosophy constituted learning, and learning led to the kind of knowledge, “la cognitione del vero” (knowledge of the truth), that he called both “il fin dell’anima” (the spirit’s goal) and the highest pleasure. In La Villa (p. 147), at the beginning of the discussion of the three kinds of pleasure, Partenio says, “I don’t know anything more pleasing than learning, and while I read some book that satisfies me with noble food, I feel it nourishing my mind.” Near the conclusion of the same section, Vitauro tells Partenio that natural philosophy is the “appointed food for your mind.” According to Taegio, the “ocio delle lettere” (scholarly leisure) that makes such mental nourishment possible can be found more readily in the villa than in the city. By calling the pursuit of knowledge a pleasure, and by defining pleasure and establishing its place in a system of human motivations, Taegio did more than expand the theme of villa as locus amoenus; he followed Aristotle, who said that the intellectual life is the perfect ideal of happiness, by grounding his argument for the superiority of villa life in a theory of happiness. By associating the pleasure of the pursuit of knowledge with the honorato ocio of the villa, Taegio recalled both Cicero and Petrarch, and with them argued for the surpassing suitability of the villa as a setting for the contemplative life of scholarly and philosophical pursuits.

The Function of La Villa’s Dialogue Form

La Villa is a polemical work that pretends to be a record of a conversation between two aristocratic Milanese gentlemen. In it Taegio juxtaposes two contradictory arguments, and resolves the tension between them by using one to overturn the other. The question debated in La Villa is whether a palace in the city or a villa in the country is the more suitable setting for the life of a true gentleman. At the outset Partenio, who represents the urban patriciate, condemns villa life and the contemplation it fosters. The common theme of Partenio’s various assertions early in the dialogue is that virtue and happiness are to be found in the active life and, by extension, life in the city. Vitauro, representing the feudal nobility, denounces cities while he extols the virtue and happiness he associates with contemplation and villa life.

As the conversation progresses, two issues arise. One is whether or not farming is a noble, useful, and necessary occupation. The other is whether the pursuit of philosophical studies is more easily accommodated in the city or in the villa. The latter issue provides Vitauro with the pretext for the roll call of villa owners, many of whom are described as dottissimo (very learned), that fills fifty pages in the first half of the book. The second half of La Villa is devoted to a contest between the respective pleasures of city life on the one hand and country life on the other.

At first the conflicting viewpoints of the interlocutors are explored through logical argumentation, giving the appearance of a sincere effort to discover whether one has more validity than the other. Eventually Vitauro emerges as the princeps sermonis, proving the author’s points by easily overturning each of Partenio’s weak objections. At the end of the dialogue, Partenio serves merely as a straw man, even assisting Vitauro as he contrasts the pleasures of the villa with the miseries of the city by setting him up with leading questions. It finally becomes evident that Vitauro has won the debate when Partenio admits that he knows his opponent is telling the truth. From that point on, there is no real conflict, and the conversation continues, not as a true dialogue, but rather as a monologue in disguise.

Taegio himself never said why he composed La Villa as a dialogue, but two better-known Italian writers of dialogues in the second half of the sixteenth century, Sperone Speroni and Torquato Tasso, did reflect on the capabilities of the dialogue form and explained in writing their reasons for using it. Speroni, who is among the villa owners Taegio praised in La Villa, wrote twenty-one dialogues, ten of which were published in seven editions printed in Venice between 1542 and 1558.²⁰² Taegio was probably familiar with some of them.²⁰³

Taegio had reason to prefer the dialogue form if one of his purposes for writing La Villa was to induce his readers to join him in a search for truth. The ancient practice of exchanging questions in dialogue for the purpose of discovering truth was exemplified, for writers in Renaissance Italy, by the dialectical method of Socrates as described by Plato. In the Meno, in a conversation that begins with the question of whether virtue can be taught and ends with a discussion of how knowledge is acquired, Socrates, having established that knowledge is essentially recollection, says that “knowledge will not come from learning but from questioning.”²⁰⁴ On the foundation of this practice of dialectic, fifteenth-century Italian humanists, with dialogues such as Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum (1401–1406) and Bracciolini’s De avaritia (1428) preferred disputation as a means of access to the truth.

The intention of inviting the reader to join the author in a search for truth was made explicit later in the sixteenth century by Speroni and Tasso. In his Apologia dei dialoghi, Speroni explained that he chose the form “si accorgesse il lettore, che io in tal caso non sapiente o maestro, ma disputante più tosto e condiscepolo seco insieme volessi essere riputato” (to make it apparent to the reader that I did not want to present myself as an authority or master, but rather as a disputant, a fellow student, learning alongside him).²⁰⁵ In the preface to his dialogue La Cavaletta overo de la poesia toscana, Torquato Tasso said that of all the modes of exposition, he considered “questo usato nel dialoghi il più dilettevole e ’l meno odioso: perch’ altri non v’insegna il vero con autorità di maestro, ma il ricerca a guisa di compagno” (this one used in the dialogue to be the most delightful and the least irksome, because it does not teach you the truth with the authority of a master, but [rather, it teaches you] inquiry, after the manner of a friend).²⁰⁶

The friendly manner of the dialogue would have been particularly appealing to writers in an age when “truth” was generally held to be something that was difficult, if not impossible, for an individual to discover on his own. Dialogue, in literature as in life, was seen as a safeguard against error. Such was the view articulated by Baldassare Castiglione in his dialogue Libro del Cortegiano (1528). Castiglione’s belief in the practice of social dialogue as a path to a collective, if not universal and absolute, “truth” is evident in his introductory letter of dedication to Don Michel de Silva, where, in words that are reminiscent of Plato’s in the Meno, he suggests that “la moltitudine, anchor che perfettamente non conosca, sente però per instinto di natura un certo odore del bene e del male” (the multitude, although it does not understand perfectly, does have, by natural instinct, a sense of right and wrong).²⁰⁷

Besides the seemingly altruistic goal of engaging his readers in a search for truth, there is another, more selfish, motive that Taegio might have had for writing La Villa as a dialogue. In sixteenth-century Italy, authors used the dialogue form with the stated intention of accomplishing what we might call “public relations,” by advertising themselves and others in whose projected image they had an interest. It is reasonable to assume that public relations would have been an important goal for writers at a time when they depended for their livelihood on professional, social, and political connections more than on income from book sales. While the dialogue certainly is not unique among literary genres in its capacity to be used as a means toward such an end, it was commonly expected to facilitate the performance of a variety of functions related to advertisement. Castiglione, Sperone, Tasso, and other Italian authors of the period declared their intentions of advertising both themselves and their acquaintances in dialogues. Using the dialogue form, writers propagated fictitious images of themselves and others that served a variety of purposes, and these purposes were furthered by the special characteristics of the genre.

Authors of dialogues in sixteenth-century Italy typically contrived their self-images for both self-promotion and self-effacement. By virtue of its pretended artlessness and spontaneity, the genre of the literary dialogue helped writers to present themselves as accomplished amateurs. At a time when the widespread circulation of printed books was still a fairly recent phenomenon, and works in the vernacular were addressed to a newly literate public, most readers were more receptive than audiences even a century later would be to arguments structured according to the apparently unstructured patterns of everyday speech. Although a dialogue, like a monological treatise, could be used simply to display an author’s erudition, the exceptional capacity of the literary dialogue to imitate the impromptu character of spoken conversation could be exploited to create the impression that the author had not given much thought in advance to the shape his argument would take, thus publicizing his improvisational skill. This is what Castiglione called sprezzatura.²⁰⁸

The dialogue form offered Taegio opportunities not only for self-promotion but also for self-effacement, which could benefit a writer like Taegio in three ways: by diminishing his authority, by disguising his personal opinions, and by giving him a semblance of modesty. Sixteenth-century Italian writers had an incentive to renounce their authorial role, because audiences accustomed to being dominated by foreign powers tended to resist the potential “tyranny” of the authors of printed books. The dialogue form enabled the writer to diminish his authority when he presented himself as one of two or more interlocutors, as Taegio did, by juxtaposing his own voice with the voices of others. Speroni alluded to the diminuation of his authority where he said, in his defense of dialogues, that he wanted to present himself as a “fellow student,” and so did Tasso, where he spoke of joining “companionably” with the reader.

When the author of a dialogue did not present himself as an interlocutor, the dialogue form facilitated the author’s concealment of his true opinions by allowing him to create the illusion that the work is a record of a conversation that the author merely transcribed, rather than one in which he himself participated, thereby suggesting that the ideas contained in the work originated with someone else. In the cornice (the narrative that “frames” the dialogue) of book 1 of Libro del Cortegiano, Castiglione explained that he was going to recount

alcuni ragionamenti, i quali già passarono tra omini singularissimi a tale proposito: e, benchè io non v’intervenissi presenzialmente … avendogli poco apresso il mio ritorno intesi da persona che fedelmente me gli narrò.

(a few discussions that took place among men singularly qualified for such a purpose. And, although I did not participate in them personally … they were faithfully reported to me soon after my return by someone who was present.)²⁰⁹

The author’s pretense that he had no part in the dialogue other than to record the conversation was a way achieving self-effacement without presenting himself as an interlocutor, and it had the advantage of protecting him from official censure, or worse, if his opinions were unorthodox. Although this strategy might have been particularly useful in an age that was marked by a revival of the Inquisition, it was not new in the sixteenth century. As David Marsh has noted, the fifteenth-century humanists “exploited the form of the dialogue in order to avoid recriminations and reprisals from contemporary authorities.”²¹⁰ Curiously, by identifying himself as Vitauro, Taegio declined to take advantage of an opportunity for self-concealment offered by the dialogue form.

Besides enabling the writer to diminish his authority and conceal his own opinions, the dialogue form helped instill in the sixteenth-century reader a false yet disarming sense of the author’s modesty, by making it possible for interlocutors to frame their speeches with elaborate protestations to the effect that they speak out of obligation or duty in spite of doubts about their competency to treat their subject. For example, in Libro del Cortegiano, when Emilia Pia asks Lodovico da Canossa to describe the perfect courtier, he replies,

Signora, molto volentier fuggirei questa fattica, parendomi troppo difficile e conoscendo … ch’ io non sappia quello che a bon cortegian si conveniene … Pur, essendo cosi che a voi piaccia ch’ io abbia questo carico, non posso né voglio rifiutarlo, per non contravenir all’ordine e giudicio vostro.

(Madam, I would very happily be excused from this labor, because it seems too difficult and because I know … that I do not know what befits a good courtier…. Still, since you want me to have this task, I neither can nor will refuse it, in order not to go against the rules and your judgement.)²¹¹

By comparison to those in Libro del Cortegiano and most sixteenth-century dialogues, Vitauro’s protestations in La Villa seem weak. Late in the dialogue (p. 159) Vitauro says, “But I am a farmer of little esteem, and I cannot satisfy your desire well.”

Taegio did not take full advantage of the opportunities presented by the dialogue form’s inclusion of multiple voices to diminish his authority or conceal his opinions, nor did he use a cornice to project an appearance of modesty, even though that device was a characteristic feature of sixteenth-century dialogues. Although modestà was a trait generally admired as much in gentlemen as in courtiers in Taegio’s day, it is possible that his esteem for it was not especially high; of the more than two hundred villa owners flattered by Taegio in La Villa, only two are praised for their modesty.

Taegio did capitalize on another capabilitiy of the dialogue form. The value of the opportunity afforded by the dialogue form to praise acquaintances, and to invent flattering portraits of those presented as interlocutors, was attested by several sixteenth-century Italian writers. Sforza Pallavicino, in his Trattato dello stile e del dialogo (1662) wrote,

[Il Dialogo] si col divisato colloquio di moderni Letterati, si col premesso racconto della lor condizione, apre un’ illustre campo ad onorar le memoria di quei defonti a cui dottrina onorò il secol nostro mentre fur vivi.

(As an imagined conversation between modern men of letters, prefaced by an account of their circumstances, the dialogue offers a splendid opportunity for honoring the memory of those men, now deceased, who honored the world with their learning while they were alive.)²¹²

Giovanni Fratta, in 1590, said that the dialogue is a way “ampliar la riputatione a gli amici” (to increase the fame of our friends).²¹³ In a letter to Curzio Ardizio dated 27 June 1584, where he described his project for a commemorative dialogue to be set in the court of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Torquato Tasso wrote that “il buon duca Guidobaldo … in guisa col suo testimonio m’onorò, ch’io al valor di lui non debbo alcun testimonio negare” (the good duke Guidobaldo so honored me with his testimony that I cannot grudge him any testimony I can give his valor).²¹⁴

The literary dialogue provided the cultural elite of a society that was in an almost continual state of political siege with a means of satisfying a deeply felt need for self-definition. In Italy generally and particularly in Milan, a series of foreign occupations and economic upheavals in the sixteenth century resulted in a loss of distinct identity for the old aristocratic orders of society, which was just as serious as the erosion of their political control. One reaction to this loss was an increased demand for the kinds of self-images that literary dialogues can supply. In response to this demand, authors of dialogues in the sixteenth century often presented acquaintances as interlocutors. In his dialogue on horsemanship, Il Cavallarizzo (1562), Claudio Corte stated that one of his reasons for using the dialogue form was “per nominare alcuni patroni, e amici” (to name a few patrons and friends).²¹⁵ Because positive self-images had commercial value, an author like Corte could expect to profit from their publication. In exchange for favorable publicity and perhaps a chance of gaining literary immortality, he might have received patronage, political protection, or even something more tangible. Pietro Aretino, in his Lettere, wrote that to be portrayed as an interlocutor in one of Sperone Speroni’s dialogues was “un tesoro che per sempre spenderlo mai non iscemerà” (a treasure that one can keep spending forever, without it ever running out).²¹⁶

The expectation of reward may have motivated Bartolomeo Taegio to honor villa owners who were contemporaries of his by mentioning them, and by praising them for their virtue and erudition, in La Villa.²¹⁷ Many of those Taegio mentioned were his “patrons,” thirteen were friends to whom he addressed Le Risposte, and one, Alessandro Castiglione, had been his schoolmate at the University of Pavia. The names of at least two members of the Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna, Giovanni Pietro Testa and Giovanni Iacopo Torniello, appear in La Villa. It is possible that other “shepherds” known only by their pseudonyms in the Academy are also named.

Taegio’s Dialogue with His Sources

La Villa can be read not only as a conversation between interlocutors but also as a dialogue between the author and his literary sources. The arguments on both sides in La Villa rely heavily on the accepted authority of sources cited, and they are supported almost exclusively with references to ancient and Renaissance philosophical writings. In this respect too Taegio departed from the tradition of Italian Renaissance dialogues based on the model of Cicero, who wrote, “Non enim tam auctores in disputando quam rationis momenta quaerenda sunt” (indeed, in discussion the weight of reason rather than authority is sought).²¹⁸ In La Villa, Vitauro’s proposition is demonstrated to have more validity than Partenio’s, not because it is reasoned better, but because it is represented as having more authority. Taegio argued from the authority of Greek writers such as Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and Hesiod, as well as Latin ones, including Cato, Varro, Columella, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Seneca, and both the elder and the younger Pliny. Taegio also drew from the works of the Italian authors Angelo Poliziano and Jacopo Sannazaro, as well as Petrarch and the Florentine humanists. Taegio did not, as a rule, identify his sources, and he usually referred to them indirectly, either by alluding to the author’s oeuvre in general, rather than to a specific work, or by simply mentioning the author’s name. Often he neglected to identify the authors whose words or ideas he clearly was borrowing. Not once in La Villa did Taegio provide the title of a literary source, although here and there he dropped a hint, such as “Virgil in his rustic poem” (meaning the Georgics). Nowhere did he quote a classical text in its original language or render a literal translation; rather, he consistently presented paraphrases of Greek and Latin works. There is no reason to doubt that Taegio could have composed the paraphrases of classical texts himself; his seventeenth-century biographers praised him for his scholarship, and his ability to write verse is evident from the fact that he published his own poetry in Italian. Wherever Taegio’s classical source is poetry, his paraphrase appears in his native Italian with a rhyme scheme and meter of its own. Taegio quoted verbatim some of his Italian sources, such as Sannazaro’s Arcadia, but where he quoted Petrarch’s Rime sparse he did so without mentioning the poet’s name or in any way giving him credit for his verses.

Taegio used literary sources to support virtually every point of his argument for the superiority of country life over city life. He put his argument in the mouth of Vitauro, whose literary references are both more numerous and more effective than Partenio’s. In the first thirty-three pages of the dialogue, Partenio makes four references to literary sources. First he alludes to Aristotle, whose “man is by nature a social being” from the Nichomachean Ethics Partenio recalls with the words “Man came into this world not for himself alone but also for others” (p. 10). Then Partenio’s summarizes the plot of Homer’s Odyssey, in which, he says, Ulysses is praised for action, not contemplation. The third reference, which is unattributed, is an expression that appears more than once in fourteenth-century Italian literature. Partenio’s phrase “Cities are made for men and villas for beasts” (p. 15) echoes the words of the raconteur Franco Sacchetti who, in the 1380s, wrote that “la citta buon’ uomini de’ fare, la villa buone bestie a notricare” (the city should produce good men, the villa good livestock).²¹⁹ Sacchetti was apparently retelling the same proverb quoted by Paolo da Certaldo in his Libro di buoni costumi. Finally Partenio makes a specific and attributed reference to Virgil’s Georgics, which he paraphrases to support his claim that men were happier in the age of iron, after cities were built, than in the golden age.

Responding to Partenio’s assertion that men in the country are less virtuous than those in the city, Vitauro replies, in words that bring to mind the ideas of Pico, Ficino, Bovillus, Petrarch, and Pomponazzi, that the vices of city dwellers outweigh their virtues because they neglect to apply the intellect to the purpose for which it was created; that is, contemplation. Vitauro answers Partenio’s objection, that the solitude of the villa is not conducive to knowledge of the world, with a logical proof that solitude is necessary for contemplation, which in turn leads to something far greater than knowledge of the world: knowledge of the truth.

Vitauro’s thesis, that villa life is naturally more agreeable to gentlemen than city life, consists of three points. The first point, that city life is not the way of life originally intended for humankind, is supported with refences to Latin sources, specifically Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the De architectura of Vitruvius. In making his second point, that life in the country is more pleasant than life in the city, Vitauro cites Virgil and Horace, and he misquotes Plato. Finally, Vitauro argues that country life is nobler than city life by enumerating the ancient kings and heroes who farmed.

In the middle of the dialogue, Partenio cites Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque Fortune and Virgil’s Georgics in an attempt to convince Vitauro that farming is not a suitable occupation for a scholar. In his rebuttal, Vitauro cites the same passage of the Georgics to prove that Partenio is misinterpreting Virgil. Then Partenio concedes the nobility of farming, and he refrains from citing literary sources for the remainder of the conversation. Vitauro makes more than fifteen references to literary sources as he argues that farming is a noble, useful, and necessary occupation, and that the villa accommodates philosophical studies more easily than the city. He cites a few lines each of Virgil’s Georgics, Varro’s Rerum rusticarum, and Petrarch’s Rime sparse, and he alludes briefly to Cato’s De agri cultura, where these sources concur in asserting that farming is the most honest way to earn a living. At greater length, he paraphrases the passage from Cicero’s dialogue De senectute, where Cato is depicted rejoicing in the delightfulness and usefulness of agriculture, and excerpts from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, in which Cyrus, king of Persia, is portrayed saying he was as concerned about cultivating the land as he was about defending it. To illustrate his point that philosophical studies are more easily accommodated in the villa than in the city, Vitauro alludes to Pliny the Younger’s letter “To Minicius Fundanus,” in which he described the secluson he enjoyed at his villa in Laurentum. Vitauro also quotes two poems from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse and three stanzas from book 1 of Poliziano’s Stanze, in which those poets described the sweetness of their scholarly seclusion in villa.

At the end of the dialogue, Partenio’s role as Vitauro’s opponent is diminished. The dialectical character of the conversation is preserved only where Partenio argues, unconvincingly and without citing authorities, that the products of culture are no less delightful than the effects of nature. Vitauro, citing Virgil in praise of rugged mountains and uncultivated fields, persuades Partenio that nature is more delightful than art because the thing imitated is superior to the imitation. Vitauro deduces from this that villa gardens are more delightful than gardens in the city because they are closer to, and offer views of, wild countryside, which, he implies, is what gardens imitate.

The bulk of Vitauro’s increasingly monological discourse toward the end of La Villa is given over to an elaboration of one of the points he made earlier, that life in villa is more pleasant than city life. Vitauro begins to develop this theme by describing a variety of sensual pleasures that arise from being in the country: seeing animals, hearing waterfalls and birds, and smelling flowers. The country he describes is neither wilderness nor agricultural land but something in between; something more like paradise. It is shaped, at least in part, by human hands. There are trees in groves, water is in fountains, and grapevines are “married to the elms.” Its fauna includes domesticated as well as wild animals, and it is a country inhabited by people. Among its pleasures are the sight of rugged peasants and the sounds of villagers singing and shepherds playing pipes. The verses of the Georgics paraphrased to complement this description express Virgil’s delight in the regimented orderliness of a regularly planted vineyard. Vitauro continues to argue for the pleasantness of country life by retelling the tale of “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” in which the advantages of city life over country life (symbolized by better food) are outweighed by its greater dangers. In the satire in which Horace originally set the story, excellent food and elevated conversation over dinner in a villa are presented as antidotes to the anxiety that comes from working in the city. Vitauro juxtaposes this tale with a story about a horse and a stag, which teaches that freedom is better than plenty, from one of Horace’s Epistles that also recommends the country as a site for a house. Although Taegio made no references to the original contexts of these stories beyond mentioning the author’s name, he might have expected an educated reader in the sixteenth-century to have been able to recall them. Taegio concluded his argument for the comparative pleasantness of country life by having Vitauro tell Partenio that what delights him most when he is in villa is catching birds, and by quoting Sannazaro’s Arcadia where that rural pastime, which had been a favorite of leisured aristocrats in Italy since the time of the Roman Empire, is described in detail.²²⁰

With the conclusion of the conversation about the respective pleasures of the city and the country, La Villa assumes the character of a monological treatise, as Vitauro alone continues to cite literary sources—Virgil’s Georgics, Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, and Xenophon’s Oeconomicus—to particularize the kinds of pleasure offered by life in villa. Vitauro speaks of three kinds of pleasure: sensual, intellectual, and aesthetic. He cites Virgil on speculating about natural causes, as he theorizes about what is the highest pleasure. He paraphrases Virgil and Pliny on reading the signs of the heavens, as he demonstrates the delightfulness and the usefulness of the kind of knowledge peasants possess. This beautiful and practical knowledge includes horticulture, which Vitauro discusses, and agriculture, which he declines to treat. In its final section, which is based on a conversation between Socrates and Ischomachus on the training of a villa steward in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, La Villa, having succeeded only partially as an imitation of a live conversation, becomes little more than an imitation of one of the literary dialogues that served as its models.

Taegio interpreted portions of the Oeconomicus, as well as Horace’s Epodes and Satires, to serve the purposes of his argument. In several instances Taegio used the word “villa” in his paraphrases where terms that cannot be translated literally as “villa” appeared in the classical texts he was citing. For example, where Vitauro paraphrases Horace’s Epodes 2.1–38, the Latin phrase “paterna rura” (ancestral farm) is interpreted as “villa.” Similarly, Vitauro uses the expression “topo del la villa” (mouse of the villa) in place of “rusticus mus” (country mouse) in his paraphrase of the tale of the country mouse and the city mouse from Horace’s Satires 2.6.78–117. Where he paraphrases Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, Vitauro calls the “work of supervision” the “cose della villa” (affairs of the villa), and he uses “villa” in place of both “kepos” (farm) and “ktema” (piece of property). Taegio also exercised freedom of interpretation where he paraphrased the description of agriculture in Oeconomicus 19.17. The practice that Xenophon called “philanthropos” (humane) becomes, in Vitauro’s words, a “scienza magnanima e generosa” (magnanimous and generous science); in effect, Taegio elevated what is essentially a humble activity to fit his argument that farming is a suitable occupation for an aristocrat.

The Origins of “Third Nature”

E i frutti sono tutti qui più saporiti che altrove, e tutte le cose che nascono dalla terra migliori. Per li giardini che qui sono e quei delle Esperide e quelli d’Alcinoo e d’Adoni, la industria de’ paesani ha fatto tanto, che la natura incorporata con l’arte è fatta artifice, e connaturale de l’arte, e d’amendue è fatta una terza natura, a cui non sarei dar nome.

(And the fruits are more flavorful here than elsewhere, and all things born of the earth are better. As for the gardens that are in this region, and those of the Hesperides and those of Alcinoüs and Adonis, the industry of the peasants has been such that nature incorporated with art is made an artificer, and the connatural of art; and from both of them is made a third nature, which I would not know how to name.)

—JACOPO BONFADIO²²¹

Quivi sono senza fine gl’ingeniosi innesti, che con si gran meraviglia al mondo mostrano, quanto sia l’industria d’un accorto giardiniero, che incorporando l’arte con la natura fà, che d’amendue ne riesce una terza natura, la qual causa, che i frutti sieno quivi piu saporiti, che altrove.

(Here are without end the ingenious grafts that show with great wonder to the world the industry of a wise gardener, who by incorporating art with nature brings forth from both a third nature, which causes the fruits to be more flavorful here than elsewhere.)

—BARTOLOMEO TAEGIO

Within two decades and two hundred miles of each other, around the middle of the sixteenth century in northern Italy, Jacopo Bonfadio, in a letter written from Gazano, near Salò on the western shore of Lake Garda, in August of 1541, and Bartolomeo Taegio, on page 66 of La Villa, published in Milan in 1559, penned these strikingly similar characterizations of the interaction between art and nature in horticulture. Bonfadio and Taegio applied the same term, terza natura, to gardens, in the context of statements about human industry and fruits “more flavorful here than elsewhere.”

Both Bonfadio’s letter and Taegio’s dialogue are replete with allusions to ancient literary sources. John Dixon Hunt has pointed out that Bonfadio was imitating the rhetorical style of Pliny the Younger’s letter to Domitius Apollinaris, in which he described his Tuscan villa, and that the intentionality of this conceit is apparent from the fact that the name of Bonfadio’s correspondent was Plinio Tomacelli.²²² In addition to this allusion, Bonfadio’s letter contains at least two specific literary references: one to Lucretius’s De rerum natura, where Flora is said to scatter flowers in springtime, in a passage to which Taegio also alluded in La Villa (p. 101), and another to Virgil’s Georgics.²²³ In the use of the phrase terza natura as well as in the placement of that phrase in context, Taegio’s articulation of an idea about the relationship between art and nature closely resembles Bonfadio’s earlier formulation, and until now its origins have not been elucidated. The most convincing of the possible explanations for the resemblance between the two characterizations is that Bonfadio’s letter was Taegio’s source, and the available facts support this hypothesis.

A careful comparison of the two texts suggests that Taegio had read Bonfadio’s letter to Plinio Tomacelli and derived his statement about “third nature” directly from it. There is another passage in La Villa, besides the one on third nature, that is virtually identical to one in Bonfadio’s letter. On page 63, where Taegio described the villa of Francesco Taverna, he wrote, “Such is the pleasantness of this very pleasant hill, that to those who come here it seems that they come to a place like the one they say our souls inhabit when, having departed from this life as from a tempestuous sea, they arrive where, rested, never again to reach beyond their desires, content, they enjoy an infinite tranquillity.” Bonfadio described the gardens in his region to his correspondent in very nearly the same words:

Voglio perder la vita, se giunto che sarete qua non vi parrà di esser venuto in luoco simile a quello ove dicono abitar gli animi nostri, quando partiti di qua come d’un tenebroso e tempestoso mare, arrivano in certe parti dove fermati, per non sapere che desiderar più oltre, contenti in sempiterna luce si godono una tranquillità infinita.

(I would wager my life that it would seem to you that you have come to a place like the one they say our souls inhabit when, having departed from this life as from a gloomy and tempestuous sea, they arrive where, rested, not knowing what more could be desired, content in eternal light, they enjoy an infinite tranquillity.)²²⁴

It is possible that in these comparisons of gardens to “a place like the one they say our souls inhabit” Bonfadio and Taegio were quoting the same source independently of each other. Bonfadio never identified any of the literary works to which he alluded in his letter, and Taegio did not always cite his sources. However, no earlier antecedent for this phrase has yet been found. Furthermore, the contexts, as well as the phrasing, of these passages are so similar that it seems highly unlikely that Taegio could have created virtually the same juxtaposition of words and literary setting as Bonfadio without having seen the letter. Finally, remembering the close similarity with respect to both phrasing and context of the passages on third nature, a double coincidence is even less plausible.

A body of evidence from outside the letter to Plinio Tomacelli bolsters the argument that Taegio relied on Bonfadio, by showing that he had ample opportunity to see the letter. Four of Bonfadio’s letters, including the one addressed to Plinio Tomacelli, were published in Venice by Aldus Manutius five times before the publication of La Villa, first in 1545 and then again in 1547, 1548, 1553, and 1556.²²⁵ The modern-day editor of Bonfadio’s letters has brought forward strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that when Bonfadio was in Rome in 1538, in the service of Cardinal Girolamo Ghinucci, he joined a literary society not unlike Bartolomeo Taegio’s Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna, called the the Accademia della Virtù, which had been founded by Claudio Tolomei, a humanist from Siena, in 1530.²²⁶ Bonfadio and Tolomei probably knew each other, and they certainly had mutual acquaintances. One of Bonfadio’s letters is addressed to Francesco della Torre, with whom Tolomei also corresponded.²²⁷ The addressee of another one of Bonfadio’s letters, Francesco Molza, and the addressor of a letter received by him, Annibal Carro, were members of Tolomei’s Academy of Virtue.²²⁸ The collected letters of Bonfadio also reveal that he and Tolomei had at least three acquaintances in common with Taegio. The names of Francesco della Torre and Annibal Carro appear in Taegio’s list of villa owners, and one of the letters received by Bonfadio is signed by Alessandro Piccolomini, whose garden in Siena Taegio praised.²²⁹

Claudio Tolomei’s own writings contain a suggestion that he was familiar with Bonfadio’s articulation of the idea of third nature, and this fact opens up the possibility that some of their mutual acquaintances, such as Taegio, might have been familiar with it as well. In a letter to Giambattista Grimaldi, dated July 26, 1543, Tolomei described a grotto in a garden near the Trevi Fountain in Rome, which was fed by the newly restored Acqua Vergine, where, he said, “mescolando l’arte con la natura, non si sa discernere s’elle è opera di questo o di quella; anzi or altrui pare un naturale artifizio ora una artifiziosa natura” (mingling art with nature, one does not know how to discern whether it is a work of the former or the latter; on the contrary, now it seems to be a natural artifice, then an artificial nature.)²³⁰ While the phrase terza natura does not appear in Tolomei’s letter, the idea conveyed by this excerpt is unmistakably the same. Tolomei had the opportunity to see Bonfadio’s letter, and he may have been a crucial link between Bonfadio and Taegio.

It is not impossible that both Taegio and Bonfadio derived their statements about third nature independently from earlier sources. However, it is much more likely that Bonfadio’s letter was Taegio’s source for both the phrase terza natura and the idea of third nature. It remains to be seen if Bonfadio’s use of the phrase terza natura was in turn dependent on earlier sources.

The question of whether phrases similar to terza natura, and anticipations of the idea, existed in the literature with which Bonfadio and Taegio were familiar is complicated by the fact that the word natura admits of some ambiguity. Natura comes from natus, the past participle of the Latin verb nascor, nasci, which means “to be born,” and it is the counterpart of the Greek word physis. Like physis, natura has, in Italian as well as in Latin, two different senses, although in ancient Latin texts these two senses are not always distinct. In one sense, natura is used, in Italian and Latin literature, to refer to the innate qualities of people and things. In the other sense, it is used in both languages to signify the order and constitution of the world.

It is in the latter sense that Bonfadio and Taegio employed natura in the phrase terza natura. The usage of the phrase by these authors is marked by three characteristics that are important to delineate for the purpose of comparison to similar expressions in earlier literature. The primary characteristic of third nature is that it is the result of something which both Bonfadio and Taegio describe as the in corporation of nature with art. Second, this “incorporation” is accomplished by human beings (gardeners in Taegio; peasants, or local people, in Bonfadio) who are engaged in making gardens. Finally, third nature in turn brings about a result; it causes the fruits that grow on trees, particularly trees that have been grafted, to taste better. In other words, third nature benefits humankind by producing something that neither human beings nor nature can produce without the help of the other. Claudia Lazzaro has read a great deal into the incorporation, or “conjunction,” as she has called it, of nature with art. She has found in Bonfadio’s terza natura a “symbiotic relationship” between nature and art, a participation of each “in the character of the other,” and a uniting of the two “into an indistinguishable whole.” She has also interpreted Bonfadio’s sentence “La natura incorporata con l’arte è fatta artifice, e connaturale de l’arte” to mean “Nature becomes the creator of art.”²³¹ At the core of this sentence is the formulation that, as a result of its incorporation with art, nature is made the connaturale of art. Although the English equivalent of the Italian noun connaturale (connatural) is archaic, the meaning of “connatural” is nevertheless clear enough: “a person or thing of the same or like nature.”²³²

Taegio did not use the word connaturale in his discussion of third nature. Rather, in La Villa (p. 103), where he described the garden of Scipione Simonetta in Milan, he referred to the incorporation of nature with art in terms of unity and reconciliation: “This man has a splendid, happy, and precious garden in Milan clothed in eternal springtime, where are seen things rare, marvelous, and novel; where art and nature, now in competition one with the other, demonstrate their latest trials, now both, incorporated, united and reconciled together, make amazing things.”

This passage is an elaboration of the idea that to produce gardens, nature and art work together in partnership. Anticipations of this idea, and phrases that are similar to terza natura, are to be found in the relevant literature.

The Latin equivalent of terza natura occurs in two of Taegio’s sources: the verse treatise on nature, De rerum natura, of Titus Lucretius Carus (95–52 B.C.), to which both Bonfadio and Taegio alluded, and Pliny the Elder’s encyclopedic Naturalis historia (A.D. 70). In neither of these works is third nature associated with gardens. Lucretius, in a discussion of the things that constitute the world, employed the term tertia natura to refer to something that cannot exist. After having specified that nature consists of only two kinds of things, bodies and void, Lucretius added, “Praeterea nil est quod possis dicere ab omni corpore seiunctum secretumque esse ab inani, quod quasi tertia sit numero natura reperta” (Besides, there is nothing which you can call wholly distinct from body and separate from void, to be discovered as a kind of third nature.)²³³ Like Bonfadio’s terza natura, Lucretius’s tertia natura refers to nature in the sense of the order and constitution of the world, although ambiguously, in a way that blurs the distinction between the two senses of the word natura. The impossibility of third nature for Lucretius provides an intriguing counterpoint to the novelty that Bonfadio and Taegio seem to ascribe to it. It is possible that the De rerum natura was a source for Bonfadio’s use of the phrase terza natura. Lucretius’s poem was printed in northern Italy at least five times between 1486 and 1515.

The Latin equivalent of terza natura occurs twice in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia, where it is applied to marine life. In both instances, the phrase tertiam naturam appears in the context of a description of aquatic species that share the characteristics (the nature) of both plants and animals. In book 1 of Naturalis historia, Pliny the Elder referred to “de ariete pisce de is quae tertiam naturam habent animalium et fructum” (species intermediate between animal and vegetable)²³⁴ In book 9, he wrote, “Equidem et iis inesse sensum arbitror quae neque animalium neque fruticum sed tertiam quandam ex utroque naturam habent, urticis dico et spongeis” (For my own part I hold the view that even those creatures which have not got the nature of either animals or plants, but some third nature derived from both, possess sense-perception—I mean jelly-fish and sponges.)²³⁵ In both of these passages, the word natura signifies the innate qualities of living creatures, not the order and constitution of the world. In this respect, Pliny the Elder’s tertiam naturam differs from Bonfadio’s and Taegio’s terza natura. However, in other respects, the phrases are quite similar. Pliny the Elder, like Bonfadio, was attempting to name something that did not belong in either of two established categories. Both of these authors were referring to something which had never been classified, and in which the characteristics proper to existing classifications were seen to be united. Pliny the Elder’s hesitation in calling this thing by a new name, tertiam naturam, is evident in his interjection of the qualifier quandam (some), just as Bonfadio’s tentativeness is apparent in his appendage of the phrase “a cui non sarei dar nome” (which I would not know how to name) to terza natura. These similarities are significant enough to warrant asking whether Bonfadio, who, as we have already seen, was imitating Pliny the Younger in the style of his letter, could also have been imitating Pliny the Elder, even in the way he qualified the name for third nature. In fact, he had ample opportunity to become familiar with Pliny’s use of the term tertiam naturam. More than thirty printed editions of Naturalis historia appeared in Italy between 1469 and 1540. In Venice alone, the Latin text of Naturalis historia was published on at least twenty occasions within that time frame, and a translation by Cristoforo Landino was published in five separate editions between 1476 and 1516. Latin versions also came out of Treviso, Parma, Rome, Brescia, and Ferrara between 1493 and 1509. There is no reason to think that Bonfadio relied on Italian translations, since several of his letters attest to the fact that he was a competent Latinist. From the evidence of stylistic similarity between Pliny the Elder’s and Bonfadio’s statements about some kind of third nature, and of the availability of numerous printed editions of the Latin treatise, it is reasonable to deduce that Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia could have been a source for Bonfadio’s phrase terza natura. However, an earlier work, written by a contemporary of Lucretius around 55 B.C., and also available in numerous printed editions in the early sixteenth century, appears to be another possible source.

As Hunt has shown, terza natura resembles, and builds upon, the phrase alteram naturam (second nature), in Marcus Tullius Cicero’s dialogue De natura deorum, where the Stoic philosopher had one of the interlocutors, Quintus Lucilius Balbus, make the following statement.

Nos campis, nos montibus fruimur, nostri sunt amnes, nostri lacus, nos fruges serimus, nos arbores, nos aquarum inductionibus terris fecunditatem damus, nos flumina arcemus, derigimus, avertimus, nostris denique manibus in rerum natura quasi alteram naturam efficere conamur.

(We delight in the fields and the mountains. Ours are the rivers, the lakes. We bring forth the fruits of the earth and the trees. We give fecundity to the land by bringing in water. We dam, direct, and divert the rivers. In short, with our hands we undertake to produce as it were a second nature within the natural world.)²³⁶

Cicero’s “second nature” is what Hunt calls “cultural landscape: agriculture, urban developments, roads, bridges, ports and other infrastructures.” By postulating the existence of second nature Cicero implied that rerum natura (“the nature of things,” or “the natural world”) preexisted as an unmediated realm, or “first nature,” which in the Renaissance was associated with what today commonly goes by the name of “wilderness.” By calling gardens a third nature, Bonfadio put them at the top of a triad of conceptual zones in the landscape, ordered hierarchically according to the degree to which each represents natura, in the sense of the constitution of the world, controlled or changed by human intervention.²³⁷

Phrases similar to terza natura, then, have been found in the De rerum natura of Lucretius, Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia, and Cicero’s De natura deorum. Anticipations of the idea that art and nature can work in partnership with each other can also be found in the writings of these authors, although not where they deal in general with the idea of natura. It is in the sections of Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia in which they discuss propagation techniques, and, somewhat surprisingly, in Cicero’s De oratore, where he treats the art of public speaking, that depictions of natura can be found that make the partnership, or cooperative interaction, between nature and art conceivable.

Cicero developed the attributes of natura in the second book of De natura deorum. Cicero’s natura is divine (and female), nurturing and rational. She is “quae contineat mundum omnem eumque tueatur, et ea quidem non sine sensu atque ratione” (that which holds the whole universe together and guards it, and indeed she is not without sense and reason.)²³⁸ Cicero equated natura with both mundus (the universe) and deus (God), as the following excerpt makes clear.

Quocira sapientem esse mundum necesse est, naturamque eam, quae res omnes complexa teneat, perfectione rationis excellere, eoque deum esse mundum, omnemque vim mundi natura divina contineri.

(So the universe must be wise, and the Nature that embraces all things must be distinguished by perfection of reason. And so God must be the universe, and all the life of the universe must be contained within Divine Nature.)²³⁹

In both of the passages quoted above, Cicero described natura as nurturing and rational. He went on to explain the wisdom of natura in terms of sollertia (skillfulness). Cicero said that no human operation, such as the navigation of fleets or the deployment of troops, “tantam naturae sollertiam significat, quantam ipse mundus” (shows the skillfulness of nature so much as the universe itself).²⁴⁰ Cicero’s characterization of natura as divine, nurturing, and rational was not uniquely his own. Rather, the view of nature that Cicero articulated in the second book of De natura deorum has its essential elements in common with what Mary Beagon has called a “mainstream tradition,” which was “derived from the cosmological theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.”²⁴¹ More than a century after Cicero, the most eloquent spokesman for that tradition was Pliny the Elder.

The salient features of Pliny the Elder’s cosmology, like Cicero’s, are the divinity of natural mundus, her providence, and her skillfulness. Pliny the Elder’s very first statement about natura in Naturalis historia is that “numen esse credi par est” (she is rightly believed to be divine).²⁴² Like the divinity of natura, the idea of her providence toward humankind, which Pliny the Elder expressed in terms of providentia (providence), naturae benignitas (the benevolence of nature) and naturae maiestas (nature’s majesty), is a recurring theme in the treatise.²⁴³ Pliny the Elder used the phrase ars naturae (the skill of nature) to refer to what we call symbiosis.²⁴⁴