GRICE E COLLINI: L'IMPLICATURA CONVERSAZIONALE DEL NATURISMO -- NATURALISMO E NATURISMO -- FILOSOFIA ITALIANA -- LUIGI SPERANZA

 

Grice e Collini: l'implicatura conversazionale del naturalismo -- naturalismo e naturismo – filosofia italiana – Luigi Speranza (Firenze). Filosofo italiano. Grice: “If you love birds, you love Collini – he loved ‘pterodattili,’ though and made nice drawings of them, as they fought with ‘uomini’!” Discendente di una nobile famiglia, studia a Pisa. Si trasferì a Coira. Collini venne descritto come scontroso, spesso in litigio. A lui si deve la descrizione dello pterodactylus, un rettile volante, o pterosauro o pterodattilo. Denuncia il fanatismo durante le guerre rivoluzionarie francesi in Europa. Grice: “I often wondered why the conte would flee his family seat in lovely Tuscany for the darker landscapes of the North – till I found out the reason: he had helped one of his noble friends (Ottavio) to do some evil-act on a nobile gentildonna (Malspina): so he had no choice!”. Altro Italiano non ricordato dal Lucchesini, forse perchè assai più tardi aggregato all'Accademia, è Cosimo Alessandro Collini, nato a Firenze. Narra il Denina (1) che, mentre ea Pisa, aiuta a Domenico Eusebio Chelli, da famglia civile di Livorno, nel ratto della marchesa Gabbriella Malaspina, sicchè dovette fuggirsene (2). Dopo essersi fermato a Coira, va a Berlino raccomandato da una signora M. (egli stesso non ne dà che l’iniziale) abitante in Firenze, amica di famiglia e sorella della Barberina. Accolto da questa, ormai signora Coccei, con molta benevolenza, attesea studiare, e con baldanza, quando Voltaire venne a Berlino, si presenta a lui, che lo riceve amorevolmente dicendogli, la Toscana è stata una nuova Atene e i toscani sono stati i nostri maestri. Gli si raccomandò per trovare un'occupazione e n’ebbe lusinghiere promesse. Ma il tempo scorreva e il conte ha fretta, sicchè pensa di valersi, oltre che della ballerina, anche di una celebre cantante, l’Astrua, che gli ottenne il posto di segretario dello stesso Voltaire. Stette con lui copiando i suoi lavori e leggendogli la sera il Boccaccio e l'Ariosto – l’uno pienamente con tento dell'altro. “Mon secrétaire», scrive il Voltaire al Thiriot, “est un florentin, très-aimable, tres-bien né, et qui merite, mieux que moi, d'être de l'Académie della Crusca. Fu compagno al filosofo poeta anche nella sua fuga dalla Prussia e nelle sue pe regrinazioni e vicissitudini per la Germania, la Francia e la Svizzera. Ma nper una lettera nella quale scherzava su mad. Denis, si separa da Voltaire, che tuttavia continua a volergli bene e a corrisponder con lui; e sulle raccomandazioni del Voltaire passa al servizio dell'elettor palatino, che lo fece suo bibliotecario e segretario dell'Accademia di Mannheim. Scrive saggi sulla storia della Germania e su quella del Palatinato, ma più ch'altro di mineralogia. È lodato anche un suo volume di Lettres sur les Allemands, pubblicato anonimo a Mannheim nel 1784, cui un altro doveva seguirne sulla letteratura tedesca.E là dove aveva trovato una seconda patria e una onorevole residenza, mori nel 1806. All'Accademia,alla quale forse furono ascritti anche altri Ita liani oltre quelli ricordati qui e più addietro,e cui è da aggiun gere G. B. Morgagni (3), si riferisce questo brano di lettera del (2) Il COLLINI stesso nel suo libro Mon séjour auprès de Voltaire et Lettres inédites que m'écrivit cet homme célèbre,ecc.,Paris,Collin,1807, confessa (pag. 5) la fuga dalla patria e dalla famiglia, m a ne dà per m o tivo una giovanile vaghezza di conoscere il mondo e gli uomini. L'esemplare tipo dell'animale ora conosciuto come Pterodactylus antiquus è stato uno dei primi fossili di pterosauro scoperti e il primo ad essere identificato. Il primo esemplare di Pterodactylus fu descritto dallo scienziato italiano Cosimo Alessandro Collini, nel 1784, sulla base di un scheletro fossile, portato alla luce dai calcari di Solnhofen, di Baviera. Collini fu il curatore della "Naturalienkabinett", o "camera delle meraviglie" (l'antenato del moderno concetto di Museo di Storia Naturale), nel palazzo di Carlo Teodoro, elettore di Baviera, a Mannheim.[17] Il campione era stato affidato alla raccolta, dal conte Friedrich Ferdinand zu Pappenheim, probabilmente intorno al 1780, dopo essere stato recuperato da un calcare litografico nella cava di Eichstätt.[18] La data effettiva della scoperta e l'ingresso del campione nella collezione è sconosciuto. Non è stato menzionato in nessun catalogo della collezione, preso nel 1767 quindi deve essere stato acquistato tra il 1767 e il 1784, anno della descrizione di Collini. Ciò potrebbe rendere il fossile il primissimo pterosauro descritto; Nel 1779 fu descritto una seconda specie chiamata Pterodactylus micronyx (oggi conosciuto come Aurorazhdarcho micronyx) che però era stata inizialmente scambiata per un fossile di crostaceo.[19]   Ricostruzione di Wagler, del 1830, su uno stile di vita acquatico per Pterodactylus Collini, nella sua prima descrizione del campione di Mannheim, concluse che si trattava di un animale volante. In realtà, Collini non riusciva a capire di che tipo di animale si trattasse, ma lo accostò ad uccelli e pipistrelli, per via di alcun affinità anatomiche. Più avanti lo stesso Collini ipotizzò addirittura che potesse trattarsi di un animale acquatico. Tale ipotesi non venne avanzata su rigori scientifici ma su una supposizione di Collini che pensava che le profondità dell'oceano potevano ospitare animali stravaganti.[20][9] Nel 1830, l'idea che gli pterosauri fossero animali marini persisteva ancora in una minoranza di scienziati tra cui lo zoologo tedesco Johann Georg Wagler, che pubblicò nel suo testo intitolato "Anfibi", un articolo che vedeva gli pterosauri come animali marini con ali disegnate come pinne, ispirandosi ai moderni pinguini. Wagler si spinse fino a classificare lo Pterodactylus, insieme ad altri vertebrati acquatici (come plesiosauri, ittiosauri e monotremi), nella classe Gryphi, tra uccelli e mammiferi.[21]   Prima ricostruzione di uno pterosauro al mondo ad opera di Hermann, nel 1800 Fu lo scienziato francese/tedesco Johann Hermann che per primo dichiarò che il lungo quarto dito della mano dello Pterodactylus venisse usato per sostenere una membrana alare. Nel mese di marzo del 1800, Hermann fu allertato dallo scienziato francese George Cuvier dell'esistenza del fossile di Collini, che era stato catturato dagli eserciti di occupazione di Napoleone e inviato alle collezioni francesi a Parigi, come bottino di guerra; in seguito alcuni commissari politici francesi sequestrarono i tesori d'arte e gli oggetti di valore scientifico. Hermann in seguito inviò una lettera a Cuvier, dove vi era scritta la sua interpretazione del fossile (anche se lui non aveva esaminato personalmente), dichiarando che l'animale doveva trattarsi di un mammifero, e inviò anche una bozza di come doveva apparire in vita l'animale. Fu la prima ricostruzione artistica per uno pterosauro al mondo. Hermann disegnò l'animale con una membrana alare che si estendeva dalla fine del quarto dita fino alle caviglie e ricoperto da pelliccia,(all'epoca il fossile non presentava ne segni di membrana alare ne di pelliccia). Hermann nel suo schizzo aggiunse anche una membrana tra il collo ed il polso, come quella presente oggi nei pipistrelli. Cuvier d'accordo con questa interpretazione, e su suggerimento di Hermann, pubblicò questa nuova descrizione nel dicembre del 1800.[9] In uno scritto Cuvier dichiarò che, "Non è possibile mettere in dubbio che il lungo dito servisse a sostenere un membrana che, allungandosi all'estremità anteriore di questo animale, formava una buona ala."[22] Tuttavia, contrariamente a Hermann, Cuvier era convinto che l'animale fosse un rettile.  In realtà l'esemplare non era stato sequestrato dai francesi. Infatti, nel 1802, dopo la morte di Carlo Teodoro, il fossile fu portato a Monaco di Baviera, dove il barone Johann Paul von Carl Moll, aveva ottenuto un'esenzione generale della confisca per le collezioni bavaresi. Cuvier chiese a von Moll il permesso di studiare il fossile, ma fu informato che il pezzo non fu trovato. Nel 1809, Cuvier pubblicò una descrizione un po' più a lunga, in cui l'animale veniva chiamato "Ptero-dactyle" e confutava l'ipotesi di Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, che sosteneva che l'animale fosse un uccello marino.   Ricostruzione inesatta di P. brevirostris, da parte di Von Soemmerring, del 1817 Contrariamente a rapporto di von Moll, il fossile non è mancata; fu oggetto di studio da parte di Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, che tenne una conferenza pubblica sul fossile il 27 dicembre 1810. Nel mese di gennaio del 1811, von Sömmerring scrisse una lettera al Cuvier deplorando il fatto che era da poco stato informato della richiesta di Cuvier per informazioni. La sua conferenza fu pubblicata nel 1812, e in essa von Sömmerring diede alla creatura il nome di Ornithocephalus antiquus.[23] Qui l'animale fu descritto come un mammifero simile ad un pipistrello ma con caratteristiche da uccello. Cuvier in disaccordo con tale descrizione, lo stesso anno fornì una lunga descrizione nella quale ricordò che l'animale era in realtà un rettile.[24] Nel 1817 fu rinvenuto un secondo esemplare di Pterodactylus, ancora una volta a Solnhofen. Questo esemplare rappresentato da un giovane fu descritto nuovamente da von Soemmerring, come Ornithocephalus brevirostris, per via del muso corto, avendo tuttavia capito che si trattava di un esemplare più giovane (oggi si sa che questo fossile appartiene ad un altro genere di pterosauro, probabilmente un Ctenochasma[3]). Von Sommerring fornì anche uno schizzo dello scheletro[9] che in seguito si rivelò essere sbagliato e impreciso, in quanto von Soemmerring aveva scambiando il metacarpo per le ossa del braccio inferiore, il braccio inferiore per l'omero, il braccio superiore per lo sterno e lo sterno per una scapola.[25] Tuttavia Soemmerring rimase per sempre fedele alla sua idea dello Pterodactylus. Lo avrebbe sempre immaginato come un animale simile ad un pipistrello, anche se a seguito di alcune ricerche nel 1860 ammise che l'animale era un rettile. Tuttavia l'immaginario collettivo dell'animale rimaneva quello di una creatura quadrupede, goffa a terra, ricoperta di pelo, a sangue caldo e con una membrana alare che si attaccava alle caviglie.[26] In epoca moderno (2015) alcuni di questi elementi sono stati confermati, alcuni smentiti, mentre altri rimangono ancora oggi in discussione.  Paleobiologia Classi d'età  Esemplare giovane di P. antiquus Come molti altri pterosauri (in particolare il Rhamphorhynchus), l'aspetto degli esemplari di Pterodactylus varia a seconda dell'età e in base al livello di maturità. Le proporzioni di entrambe le ossa degli arti, le dimensioni e la forma del cranio e le dimensioni e il numero dei denti possono stabilire a quale classe di età appartiene l'animale. In passato queste differenze morfologiche hanno portato a credere che si trattassero di specie distinte con caratteristiche anatomiche differenti. Recenti studi più dettagliati e che utilizzano nuovi metodi per misurare le curve di crescita degli esemplari noti, hanno stabilito che in realtà vi è un'unica specie di Pterodactylus ritenuta valida ossia, P. antiquus.[6]  Il più giovane e immaturo campione di P. antiquus (da alcuni interpretato come facente parte di una seconda specie chiamata Pterodactylus kochi) possiede pochi denti e i pochi che possiede hanno una base relativamente ampia.[4] I denti di altri esemplari di P. antiquus hanno denti più stretti e numerosi (fino a 90).[6]  Tutti i campioni di Pterodactylus possono essere suddivisi in due diverse classi di età. Nella prima classe, rientrano gli esemplari i cui crani hanno una lunghezza complessiva che va dai 15 ai 45 millimetri di lunghezza. Nella seconda classe, invece, rientrano gli esemplari i cui crani hanno una lunghezza complessiva che va dai 55 ai 95 millimetri di lunghezza, ma sono ancora immaturi. Questi due primi gruppi di dimensione erano a loro volta classificati come giovani e adulti della specie P. kochi, fino a che un nuovo studio ha dimostrato che anche quelli che si credevano "adulti" erano comunque esemplari immaturi, e probabilmente appartengono ad un genere distinto. Una terza classe è rappresentata da esemplari specie tipo P. antiquus, così come un paio di grandi esemLplari isolati, una volta assegnati a P. kochi che si sovrappongono P. antiquus per dimensioni. Tuttavia, tutti i campioni di questa terza classe mostrano anche segni di immaturità. L'aspetto degli esemplari completamente maturi di Pterodactylus esemplari rimane tuttora sconosciuto, oppure potrebbero essere stati erroneamente classificati come un genere diverso.[4]  Crescita e riproduzione  Bacino fossile di un grande esemplare, riferito alla dubbia specie P. grandipelvis Le classi di crescita degli esemplari di P. antiquus mostrano che questa specie, come il contemporaneo Rhamphorhynchus muensteri, probabilmente allevava i piccoli in determinate stagioni e questi crescevano costantemente durante tutta la vita. Quindi la riproduzione e il conseguente allevamento dei cuccioli avveniva ad intervalli regolari e probabilmente in ogni stagione.[4][27] Molto probabilmente poco dopo la nascita i cuccioli erano già in grado di volare ma dipendevano ancora dai genitori per la nutrizione. Questo modello di crescita è molto simile a quello dei moderni coccodrilli, piuttosto che alla rapida crescita dei moderni uccelli.[4]  Stile di vita Dal confronto tra gli anelli sclerali di P. antiquus con quelli di moderni uccelli e rettili si è scoperto che lo Pterodactylus aveva uno stile di vita diurno. Questo coinciderebbe con la sua nicchia ecologica, che lo vedrebbe come un predatore simile all'odierno gabbiano, evitando inoltre la competizione con altri pterosauri suoi contemporanei che in base agli anelli sclerali sono stati giudicati notturni, come il Ctenochasma e il Rhamphorhynchus.[28]  Paleoecologia Durante la fine del Giurassico, l'Europa era un arcipelago asciutto e tropicale ai margini del mare Tetide. Il calcare fine, in cui gli scheletri di Pterodactylus sono stati ritrovati, è stato formato dalla calcite delle conchiglie e degli organismi marini. Le varie aeree tedesche dove sono stati ritrovati gli esemplari di Pterodactylus erano lagune situate tra le spiagge e le barriere coralline delle isole europee Giurassiche nel Mare Tetide. I contemporanei di Pterodactylus, includono l'avialae Archaeopteryx lithographica, il compsognatide Compsognathus, svariati pterosauri come Rhamphorhynchus muensteri, Aerodactylus, Ardeadactylus, Aurorazhdarcho, Ctenochasma e Gnathosaurus, il teleosauride Steneosaurus sp., l'ittiosauro Aegirosaurus, e i metriorhynchidi Dakosaurus e Geosaurus. Gli stessi sedimenti in cui sono stati ritrovati gli esemplari di Pterodactylus hanno riportato alla luce anche diversi fossili di animali marini quali pesci, crostacei, echinodermi e molluschi marini, confermando l'habitat costiero di questo pterosauro. L'enorme biodiversità di pterosauri presenti nei Calcari di Solnhofen, indica che quest'ultimi si erano differenziati tra di loro occupando ogni possibili nicchia ecologica disponibile.[29]  Note ^ Fischer von Waldheim, J. G. 1813. Zoognosia tabulis synopticus illustrata, in usum praelectionum Academiae Imperialis Medico-Chirurgicae Mosquenis edita. 3rd edition, volume 1. 466 pages. ^ Schweigert, G., Ammonite biostratigraphy as a tool for dating Upper Jurassic lithographic limestones from South Germany – first results and open questions, in Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie – Abhandlungen, vol. 245, n. 1, 2007, pp. 117–125, DOI:10.1127/0077-7749/2007/0245-0117.  Bennett, S. Christopher, New information on body size and cranial display structures of Pterodactylus antiquus, with a revision of the genus, in Paläontologische Zeitschrift, in press, 2013, DOI:10.1007/s12542-012-0159-8.  Bennett, S.C., Year-classes of pterosaurs from the Solnhofen Limestone of Germany: Taxonomic and Systematic Implications, in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 16, n. 3, 1996, pp. 432–444, DOI:10.1080/02724634.1996.10011332.  Bennett, S.C., [0043:STPOTC2.0.CO;2 Soft tissue preservation of the cranial crest of the pterosaur Germanodactylus from Solnhofen], in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 22, n. 1, 2002, pp. 43–48, DOI:10.1671/0272-4634(2002)022[0043:STPOTC]2.0.CO;2, JSTOR 4524192.  Jouve, S., [0542:DOTSOA2.0.CO;2 Description of the skull of a Ctenochasma (Pterosauria) from the latest Jurassic of eastern France, with a taxonomic revision of European Tithonian Pterodactyloidea], in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 24, n. 3, 2004, pp. 542–554, DOI:10.1671/0272-4634(2004)024[0542:DOTSOA]2.0.CO;2. ^ Frey, E., and Martill, D.M., Soft tissue preservation in a specimen of Pterodactylus kochi (Wagner) from the Upper Jurassic of Germany, in Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie, Abhandlungen, vol. 210, 1998, pp. 421–441. ^ Cuvier, G., Mémoire sur le squelette fossile d'un reptile volant des environs d'Aichstedt, que quelques naturalistes ont pris pour un oiseau, et dont nous formons un genre de Sauriens, sous le nom de Petro-Dactyle, in Annales du Muséum national d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, vol. 13, 1809, pp. 424–437.  Taquet, P., and Padian, K., The earliest known restoration of a pterosaur and the philosophical origins of Cuvier's Ossemens Fossiles, in Comptes Rendus Palevol, vol. 3, n. 2, 2004, pp. 157–175, DOI:10.1016/j.crpv.2004.02.002. ^ Cuvier, G., 1819, (Pterodactylus longirostris) in Isis von Oken, 1126 und 1788, Jena ^ Kellner, A.W.A. (2003). "Pterosaur phylogeny and comments on the evolutionary history of the group", pp. 105–137 in Buffetaut, E. and Mazin, J.-M., (eds.) (2003), Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs. Geological Society of London, Special Publications 217, London: 1–347. ^ DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.03.030  Unwin, D. M., (2003). "On the phylogeny and evolutionary history of pterosaurs", pp. 139–190. in Buffetaut, E. & Mazin, J.-M., (eds.) (2003). Evolution and Palaeobiology of Pterosaurs. Geological Society of London, Special Publications 217, London, 1–347.  S. Christopher Bennett, [872:JSOTPG2.0.CO;2 Juvenile specimens of the pterosaur Germanodactylus cristatus, with a review of the genus], in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, vol. 26, n. 4, 2006, pp. 872–878, DOI:10.1671/0272-4634(2006)26[872:JSOTPG]2.0.CO;2.  S. U. Vidovic e D. M. Martill, Pterodactylus scolopaciceps Meyer, 1860 (Pterosauria, Pterodactyloidea) from the Upper Jurassic of Bavaria, Germany: The Problem of Cryptic Pterosaur Taxa in Early Ontogeny, in PLoS ONE, vol. 9, n. 10, 2014, pp. e110646, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0110646. ^ Steven U. Vidovic e David M. Martill, The taxonomy and phylogeny of Diopecephalus kochi (Wagner, 1837) and ‘Germanodactylus rhamphastinus’ (Wagner, 1851), in Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 2017, pp. SP455.12, DOI:10.1144/SP455.12. ^ David M. Unwin, The Pterosaurs: From Deep Time, New York, Pi Press, 2006, pp. 246, ISBN 0-13-146308-X. ^ Brougham, H.P. (1844). Dialogues on instinct; with analytical view of the researches on fossil osteology. Volume 19 of Knight's weekly vol. ^ Ősi, A., Prondvai, E., & Géczy, B. (2010). The history of Late Jurassic pterosaurs housed in Hungarian collections and the revision of the holotype of Pterodactylus micronyx Meyer 1856 (a ‘Pester Exemplar’). Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 343(1), 277-286. ^ Collini, C A. (1784). "Sur quelques Zoolithes du Cabinet d'Histoire naturelle de S. A. S. E. Palatine & de Bavière, à Mannheim." Acta Theodoro-Palatinae Mannheim 5 Pars Physica, pp. 58–103 (1 plate). ^ Wagler, J. (1830). Natürliches System der Amphibien Munich, 1830: 1–354. ^ Cuvier, G., [Reptile volant]. In: Extrait d'un ouvrage sur les espèces de quadrupèdes dont on a trouvé les ossemens dans l'intérieur de la terre, in Journal de Physique, de Chimie et d'Histoire Naturelle, vol. 52, 1801, pp. 253–267. ^ von Sömmerring, S. T. (1812). "Über einen Ornithocephalus oder über das unbekannten Thier der Vorwelt, dessen Fossiles Gerippe Collini im 5. Bande der Actorum Academiae Theodoro-Palatinae nebst einer Abbildung in natürlicher Grösse im Jahre 1784 beschrieb, und welches Gerippe sich gegenwärtig in der Naturalien-Sammlung der königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München befindet", Denkschriften der königlichen bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, München: mathematisch-physikalische Classe 3: 89–158 ^ Cuvier, G. (1812). Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles. I ed. p. 24, tab. 31 ^ Sömmering, T. v., Über einen Ornithocephalus brevirostris der Vorwelt, in Denkschr. Kgl. Bayer Akad. Wiss., math.phys. Cl., vol. 6, 1817, pp. 89–104. ^ Padian, K. (1987). "The case of the bat-winged pterosaur. Typological taxonomy and the influence of pictorial representation on scientific perception", pp. 65–81 in: Czerkas, S. J. and Olson, E. C., eds. Dinosaurs past and present. An exhibition and symposium organized by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Volume 2. Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and University of Washington Press, Seattle and London ^ Wellnhofer, P. (1970). Die Pterodactyloidea (Pterosauria) der Oberjura-Plattenkalke Siiddeutschlands. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mathematisch-Wissenschaftlichen Klasse, Abhandlungen, 141: 133 pp. ^ Schmitz, L.; Motani, R., Nocturnality in Dinosaurs Inferred from Scleral Ring and Orbit Morphology, in Science, vol. 332, n. 6030, 2011, pp. 705–8, DOI:10.1126/science.1200043, PMID 21493820. ^ Weishampel, D.B., Dodson, P., Oslmolska, H. (2004). The Dinosauria (Second ed.). University of California Press. Biografia Steve Parcker John Malam, Dinosauri e altre creature preistoriche. Altri progetti Collabora a Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons contiene immagini o altri file su Pterodactylus Collabora a Wikispecies Wikispecies contiene informazioni su Pterodactylus Collegamenti esterni (EN) Pterodactylus, su Enciclopedia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Modifica su Wikidata (EN) Pterodactylus, su Fossilworks.org. Modifica su Wikidata Controllo di autorità. LCCN (EN) sh94002837 Biologia Portale Biologia Paleontologia Portale Paleontologia Rettili Portale Rettili Categoria: Pterosauri.  Syncretism and Style Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Italian Renaissance Garden. Most of the history of Western philosophy and theology from Parmenides through H^el has attempted to resolve the inherent contradictions between sensation and cognition, \Tsibih- ty and ideahrt'. However, the paradoxes, antinomies, and incon- gruities that arise in this quest f)erennially inform numerous paradigms that underUe the history of art and ideas. This study— promenade through the landscapes and gardens, paintings and poems that have inspired me—proposes a sketch of the implications of such poh'semic and equivocal conventions as the\- relate to the histor)' of landscape architectiu-e. The origin of modem European landscape architecture vs-as contemp>oraneous with the rediscover)' of the beaut)' of nature in the early Renaissance. In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Burckhardt describes this paradigm shift in the perception of the external world, the moment in which the distant Wew, the "land- scape" proper, was first valorized: But the unmistakable proob of a deepening effect of nature on tbe human spirit began with Dante. Not only does he awaken in us by a few \-igorous lines the sense of the morning airs and the trembling light on the distant ocean, or of the giandeur of the stoim-beaten torest, but he makes tbe ascent of k)fty peaks, with the only possible obfect of en^vying the view—the first man, peihaps, since the days of antiquity who did so.' This appreciation of natural beauty, couched in the poetry of the sublime, was further instantiated in the work of Francesco Petrarch (1304-74), often cited as the first humanist, indeed the first "mod- ern" man. His relation to the landscape was intense and manifold, poetic and practical, as he was a gardener whose favorite site of med- itation was his own gardens at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. He describes them in one of his letters: I made two gardens for myself: one in the shade, appropriate for my studies, which I called my transalpine Parnassus; it slopes down to the river Sorgue, ending on inaccessible rocks which can only be reached by birds. The other is closer to the house, less wild, and situated in the middle of a rapid river. I enter it by a litde bridge leading from a vaulted grotto, where the sun never penetrates; I believe that it resembles that small room where Cicero some- times went to recite; it is an invitation to study, to which I go at noon.^ Two gardens, one for each side of his temperament, inspired either reverie or melancholy; two gardens, one for each extreme of nature, extensive and picturesque or protective and chthonic; two gardens, one leading towards the empirical, the other towards the spiritual. For Petrarch, as for Cicero, his predecessor in literature and garden- ing, the landscape was a major source of inspiration, both literary and empirical; for while these gardens evoked the great sites of clas- sic culture, they also constituted a rudimentary botanical laboratory and collection, where Petrarch experimented with different varieties of plants according to meteorological and astrological conditions, geographic placement, seasonal growTih, and so forth. He also used these gardens to amass collections of rare plants. As Gaetane Lamarche-Vadel demonstrates in Jardins secrets de la Renaissance, such secret gardens, "appertain to the double register of the fictive and the real, the physical and the mystic; they echo with the adam- ic garden, the paradigmatic place and origin from which gardens draw their spiritual energy."^ It is precisely for this reason that the study of gardens necessitates formal, cultural, and psychological analyses: the symbolic significance of any garden is derived from, yet surpasses, its formal characteristics, and can only be grasped in relation to the artistic works that both inspired and were inspired by the site. Petrarch's most celebrated consideration of the landscape is the description of his ascent of Mont Ventoux, recounted in a letter to Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro, written in 1336. In this text, he explains the reason for this difficult ascent: "My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer."4 Though inspired by literary motives—specifically, the tale in Livy's History of Rome^zx recounts Philip of Macedon's ascent of Mount Haemus in Thessaly, with its attendant views—the experience shifted from the literary to the sensory, where revelation becomes visual. Indeed, the subsequent history of landscape architecture often reveals mythical tales, literary inspirations, and pictorial models behind the creation of gardens; here, Petrarch's visionis already predisposed to concep- tual density by being couched in myth and history. "At first, owing to the unaccustomed quality of the air and the effect of the great sweep ofviewspread out before me, I stood like one dazed. I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos and Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things from a mountain of less fame."^ The force of the poet's vision surpasses all previous literary descriptions. Is it the poet's unique, hyperbolic sensibility, or the inherent magnificence of nature, that is at work here? Or is there a third term that mediates the poetic imagination and the natural world? The letter continues with a detailed appreciation of the mul- tiplicity and uniqueness of the natural world Petrarch witnessed, until the moment he realizes, in a flash of intuition, that the ascent of the body must be accompanied by a concomitant ascent of the soul. Thus, opening a copy of Augustine's Confessions he had with him, he felicitously chanced upon the following passage: "And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of the rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not."^ This is the ironic moment of revelation, where experience becomes allegory and visibility becomes a metaphor for spirituality: I dosed the book, angry with myself that I should still be admiring earthly things who might long ago have learned from even the pagan philosophers that nothing is wonderftil but the soul, which, when great itself, finds noth- ing great outside itself. Then, in truth, I was satisfied that I had seen enough of the mountain; I turned my inward eye upon myself, and from that time not a syllable fell from my lips until we reached the bottom again. The three major realms that informed early humanist sensibility were thus interwoven in an allegory of spiritual revelation: inspira- tion from antiquity, sensitivity to nature, and salvation within Christianity. Certain technical, mathematical, and financial consider- ations would be added to these preconditions to localize and system- atize such apperceptions in the creation of the Italian Renaissance garden. The consequent transmigration and intercommunication of symbols and allegories would henceforth enrich all the arts, radical- ly impelling some of them towards their modern forms.^ Within these rubrics, the major influences on the Renaissance transformation of man's relation to nature could be schematized as follows. The theological revolution of Francis of Assisi redeemed nature's state of grace. His "Canticle of Creatures"—indeed, every act of his life—expressed a mystical rela- tion to a cosmos in which all nature was a reflection of God; thus nature itself was the foundation of spiritual values. As Ernst Cassirer explains in The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Phibsophy, a book that will serve as a metaphysical guide to the current study: With his new. Christian ideal of love, Francis of Assisi broke through and rose above that dogmatic and rigid barrier between "nature" and "spirit." Mystical sentiment tries to permeate the entirety of existence; before it, barriers of par- ticularity and individualization dissolve. Love no longer turns only to God, the source and the transcendent origin of being; nor does it remain confined to the relationship between man and man, as an immanent ethical relation- ship. It overflows to all creatures, to the animals and plants, to the sun and the moon, to the elements and the natural forces. In this unscholastic "nature mysticism" we find one of the origins of Western ecological and environmental thought. (Indeed, in 1979 Pope John Paul 11 proclaimed Francis the patron saint of ecologists.) Yet, more immediately, he not only redeemed the state of nature in a postlapsarian world, but praised nature—specifically the picturesque and fertile central Italian landscape of Umbria—with a glorious and beatific lyricism that has inspired those who would transform nature according to human desire and volition into a new form that would become the "humanist" garden. Yet the major paradigm at work in establishing new ways of experiencing and re-creating the landscape did not stem from theo- logical transformations; rather, they arose from the rediscovery of antiquity and the consequent valorization and appropriation of pagan mythology. This is especially the case insofar as such myths express a profound connection to the natural world, as evidenced most notably in Ovid's Metamorphosis, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, and the writings of Pliny, Cicero, and Horace, with the latter's crucial notion of ut pictura poesis. The rise of a new literary scenarization accounted for the expression of a spe- cific sense of place within nature such that the genius A?a would once again have a voice, as in Dante's Inferno, Boccaccio's Decameron (describing the Villa Palmieri near Florence), Erasmus's Convivium religiosum, and especially in Petrarch, for whom, as Cassirer notes: "The lyrical mood does not see in nature the opposite of physical reality; rather it feels everywhere in nature the traces and the echo of the soul. For Petrarch, landscape becomes the living mirror of the Ego."^° If one were to formulate this sensibility in relation to the his- tory of landscape architecture, it might be said that the new form of garden is no longer delimited by either cloister walls or restricted cosmological symbolism (the latter allegorically corresponding to the medieval hortus conclusus, or closed garden), but rather by the limits of the imagination responding to the very act of human per- ception. Rather than serving as a static allegorical form, the garden reveals the dynamic, creative relation between humanity and nature. The view shifts from the interior (the cloister, the soul) to the exte- rior, encompassing not only the ambient scene, but also distant views; space is no longer treated as metaphoric, but is revealed in its localized and particularized reality. Nature incarnate, in its vast mul- tiplicity, offers sites of pleasure and wonder, terror and awe—prefig- uring the fiiture aesthetic distinctions of the picturesque, the beau- tifiil, and the sublime. Coincident with this new sensibility was the development of a system of pictorial representation—the quattrocento rediscovery and refinement of linear perspective—that both drew upon and informed the multifarious Renaissance modes of appreciating the landscape." The intersection of mathematics, technology, and aes- thetics in perspectival representations constitutes a major structure that articulates the reciprocal influences between landscape, garden, literature, and painting, one that marlcs the subsequent history of landscape architecture. Here, the varied and often incompatible beauties (ancient and modern) of nature and painting interacted and enriched each other's iconographies. Specifically, three works of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) codified the intricate interrelations between perspective and vision, pictorial representation and landscape architecture: Delgoverno delta famiglia (c. 1430), a treatise on family life that celebrated the advan- tages of country living, thus instilling a taste for gardens and the landscape; Delia pittura (1436), which codified the system of linear perspective; and De re aedificatoria (1452), which, in establishing "rational" architectural rules based on ancient models (notably Vitruvius), necessarily dealt with the question of gardens and sites, with a particular attention to and fondness for the Italian land- scape.^^ For Alberti, the most important aspect of choosing a build- ing site was a sloping terrain with open perspectives from which the countryside could be seen. Though the view into the garden was protected by enclosures, the slope of the terrain established views of the distant landscape. Furthermore, the garden was conceived in direct relationship with the villa as a sort of prolongation of the architecture, thus bringing the outdoors in, all the while linking the cultivated garden with the wild spaces beyond to establish an archi- tectonic continuity between the natural and the human realms. Such strategies, both structural and narrative, offer a dynamic, com- plex synthesis linking the constructed, geometrized spaces of habita- tions with the non-geometric, organic realms of the natural world. Alberti's text proffers many of the characteristics of the humanist gardens of the Italian Renaissance:'^ the use of perspective in the deployment of objects and space, grottos and the "secret garden," symmetrical plantings, groves, clipped and sculpted plants (topiary and espalier), architectural details, and statues of mytho- logical figures as invocations of ancient culture, surprise effects caused by both perspectival and technical means, and especially the myriad uses of water—fountains, pools, canals, panerres, troughs, water staircases and theaters, hydraulic organs and automata, even artificial rain and water jokes {giochi d'acqua). It was through the use of water that both illusion and motion were introduced into land- scaf)e architecture, creating the sort of instability, surprise, and evanescence that would become central to the baroque sensibility, with its taste for motion, dematerialization, dissimulation, and contradiction.'** This irmiijdng of artifice, theatricality, and nature was well expressed in that epoch by the sixteenth-century philosopher JacofK) Bonfadio, influenced by Petrarch: "I have done much that nature, combined with an, has turned into artifice. From the two has emerged a 'third nature,' to which I can give no name."'' Such a "third nature" might well be a synonym of the garden itself, for how- ever "natural" a garden may be (as in the ideal of the eighteenth-cen- tury EngUsh garden, where the desire to dissimulate all artifice estab- hshed a simulacrum of wild nature), its forms always evince aesthetic, even painterly, paradigms (even true for the notion of "vir- gin" nanire in the North American landscape, as will be explored in a subsequent chapter). Yet this "third nature" is never a purely for- mal artifact: it is always enmeshed in both philosophical and narra- tive systems, as exemplified by Petrarch's appreciation of the land- scape. Henceforth, the history of landscape architecture will entail the intertwining and hybrid histories of poetry, literature, philoso- phy, painting, sculpnire, architecture, surveying, hydrauhcs, and botany. In order to grasp the conceptual and cultural systems that influenced the sensibilities, as well as the forms, that underlie the Italian Renaissance humanist garden, a synopsis of the philosophical trajectory of the Platonic ACCADEMIA of Florence, found- ed by FICINO under the auspices of the Medici, is in order. The principal foundational tenets of Renaissance ontology and epis- temology were expressed by Nicholas Cusanus in De docta ignorantia, the initial systematic philosophical study that began to modify the relatively rigid and often dogmatic closure and hairsplitting of medieval scholasticism. According to medieval thought, the closed, ordered, hierarchical universe, that "great chain of being" of ecclesiastic Aristotelianism, was one with a moral and religious systemof judgment and salvation in which the role of epis- temology was a ftmction of man's limited place in that system.'^ Though Cusanus's writings never called the theological foundation of this system into question, they did entail a radical epistemologi- cal shift, insofar as the relation between absolute divinity and finite humanity was no longer taken as dogmatically posited, but was rather analyzed according to human limitations. This revision of the ontological ratio between the absolute and the empirical implies an indeterminable conceptual relation to infinity. Cusanus's key princi- ple—expanding on certain nominalist analyses—is that there exists no possible proportion between the finite and the infinite, thus loos- ening the bond that had held together scholastic theology and logic within a homogeneous system. As a result of this separation of realms (human from divine, relative from absolute infinity), the syl- logistics of speculative theology and metaphysics would henceforth become disciplines distinct from logic and mathematics, prefiguring the materialistic quest for a universal systematization of knowledge that culminated in the ideal of the Cartesian mathesis universalis. The amor Dei intellecttmlis (the intellectual component of the love of God, prefiguring the notion of "Platonic love" that inspired the neoplatonism of the Florentine Academy) established a new mystical theology. Yet, by strictly delimiting such mysticism to its proper the- ological domain—the ultimately unknowable realm of the dens absconditus, the hidden god—the ftiture development of the worldly sciences would not be impeded. Theology and mathematics would henceforth proffer incompatible yet complementary worldviews. Central to this speculation is the principle of the docta ignorantia, a "learned ignorance" based not on passive mystical con- templation but on active mathematical thought, revealing the unknowable nature of divinity, which can only be expressed in con- tradiction and antithesis. This results from the unfathomable nature of God, such that the maximal ontological conditions of existence are constituted by a qualitative, not a quantitative, determination whence the cognitive paradoxes that result from all intellectual attempts to resolve the divine mysteries. All human thought oper- ates according to finite determinations, generating predicable and measurable differences; yet beyond any given determination, an absolute term can always be postulated, even if it is not deter- minable. However, between the finite and the infinite there is no common term, thus no possible predication. This is a metaphysics of maximal contradiction, of complicatio, not explicatio. The infini- ty of the godhead is unpredicable and inexpressible. Whence the necessity of differentiating between the infinite and the indefinite, wherein the mutually exclusive relation between the ideal, uncondi- tioned, indeterminable realm of the divine and the empirical, con- ditioned, determinable realm of the human. Where the axiomatic knowledge of mathematics fails, the limits of comprehensibility end, and the realm of negative theology begins. Knowledge, for Cusanus, was the progression of thought towards its incomprehensible limits, in the attempt to understand the fundamental ontological contradictions of existence. Whence the notion of the coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence of oppo- sites—the very form of such ignorance—which is the outcome of this new metaphysical speculation, revealing the limits of the ancient philosophical dichotomy of immanence and transcendence, thought and being. The infinity of the godhead is indeterminable yet appar- ent to human knowledge precisely in terms of our "learned igno- rance," which evolves an intuition of what surpasses the limits of human cognition. As Karl Jaspers explains: "Speculative thinking must remain the thinking of the unthinkable, it must preserve an unresolvable tension. The fundamental concept remains paradoxi- cal."'7 Thus the docta ignorantia establishes a worldly, human domain of knowledge, apart from theological speculation, differen- tiating the calculable and operable mathematical infinity from the impenetrable infinity of God. Here, knowledge becomes an active function of the dynamics of attempting to connect the impercepti- ble universal to the sensible particular, with its attendant concrete symbolizations. Not only did this system offer a foundation for modern science and mathematical speculation, but it also estab- lished the grounds for a new, "rationalized" aesthetics, as explained by Cassirer: The De docta ignorantia had begun with the proposition that all knowledge is definable as measurement. Accordingly, it had established as the medium of knowledge the concept of proportion, which contains within it, as a condi- tion, the possibility of measurement. Comparativa est omnis inquisitio, medio proportionis uteris. But proportion is not just a logical-mathematical concept: it is also a basic concept of aesthetics Thus, the speculative-philosophical, the technical-mathematical, and the artistic tendencies of the period converge in the concept of proportion. And this convergence makes the problem of form one of the central problems of Renaissance culture.'^ In the arts, this is most apparent in the relation between theory and practice in Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battista Alberti, the latter of whom had direct links with Cusanus, utilizing Cusanus's specula- tions in his own work. Yet while Cusanus was mainly preoccupied with mathematical and cosmological issues, the philosophers of the Platonic Academy of Florence were especially concerned with the role of beauty as a spiritual value and so extended his studies into other realms. Following Cusanus, beauty was deemed an objective value determined by measure, proportion, and harmony. Beauty might exist as an intelligible sign of God, but it is gauged according to human proportions, values, and limits. A year before his death, Cosimo de Medici wrote, in a letter to Ficino. "Yesterday I arrived at my Villa Carreggi, not to cultivate the fields, but my soul. "'9 This sentiment—where inner and outer nature exist in reciprocal symbolic resonance—was fully in accord with Ficinos philosophical temperament, as it was in the Medici's Villa Carreggi in Florence where Ficino founded his famed Academy. Here, the gardens provided a site of retreat. inspiration, meditation, and discourse, while the villa ofifered a ver- itable compendium of the arts, with its library, music room, and gal- leries of artworks. This would suggest not only that nature and its aesthetic simulacrum, the garden, played a major role in Ficino's philosophy, but also that a consideration of his philosophical system might bear upon our understanding of the landscape and develop- ments in landscape architecture of the period. On the basis of an expanded model of the principle of the coincidence of opposites, Ficino demonstrated the central place of man in the universe. In his cosmology, the soul is the privileged midpoint between the intellectual and the sensible world, mediating the higher and lower realms, dynamically embracing the universe through the process of knowing and self-determination. The soul is the means by which the universe reflects upon itself through a dynamic unity, as opposed to the static hierarchy posited by scholas- ticism. Whence the new status of the dignity of man, who is seen (following Plato's tripartite schematization of the soul) to share attributes with both the lower and the higher beings, midway between the cosmic mind and the cosmic soul above, and the realms of nature and of pure, formless matter below. As the terms of this hierarchy are emanations of God (following Plotinus's mystical read- ing of Plato, and hardly distant, either intellectually or geographi- cally, from Saint Francis's nature mysticism), all cosmic zones par- ticipate in, and somehow symbolize, divine creation. All realms of existence are therefore interconnected, and the cohesion of the cos- mos is reflected in the microcosm of human intelligence. As Cassirer writes of a Ficino dialogue between God and the soul: God says: "I fill and penetrate and contain heaven and earth; I fill and am not filled because I am fullness itself. I penetrate and am not penetrated, because I am the power of penetration. I contain and am not contained, because I myself am the faculty of containing." But all these predicates claimed by the divinity are now equally attributable to the human soul}° As such, fact becomes truth, and the world becomes meaningful, through the ^rf of cognition; symbols can be effectively derived from all facts, objects, and events; thought is liberated to become a cre- ative, and not merely reflective, activity. Inspired by the theory of love developed in Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus, Ficino places mystical love (in a manner very differ- ent from that of Saint Francis's more immediately sensual and intu- itive mysticism) at the center of his system, as a cosmological, and not a psychological, principle. Erwin Panofsky elaborates: Love is the motive power which causes God—or rather by which God caus- es Himself—to effuse His essence into the world, and which, inversely, caus- es His creatures to seek reunion with Him. According to Ficino, amor is only another name for that self-reverting current {circuitus spiritualise from God to the world and from the world to God. The loving individual inserts himself into this mystical circuit.^' Whence the much misunderstood notion of ;he highest form of love, "Platonic love," that "divine madness" which is the source of poetic inspiration and genius as introduced by Plato, enriched by Plotinus, Augustine, and the twelfth-century Neoplatonists, and transformed by Ficino. Such love entails a desire guided by cogni- tion, which seeks as its ultimate goal the beauty diffused throughout the universe. The contradictory and oppositional totality of love is symbolized by the two Venuses, celestial and natural, representing sacred and profane love: beauty as supercelestial, intelligible, and immaterial, and beauty as particularized and perceptible in the cor- poreal world.^^ Within this context, three sorts of love are possible: amor divinus (divine love, ruled by the intellect), amor humanus (human love, ruled by all the other faculties of the soul), and amor ferinus (bestial love, which is tantamount to insanity). Love is the factor that mediates the higher and lower worlds, transcendence and immanence, cognition and perception. Cassirer stresses the import of this theory for an incipient humanism: This contradictory nature of Eros constitutes the truly active moment of the Platonic cosmos. A dynamic motif penetrates the static complex of the uni- verse. The world of appearance and the world of love no longer stand simply opposed to each other; rather, the appearance itself "strives" for the idea.^' Love is both psychological and theological, human and divine, con- templative and active, intellectual and passional; it achieves a central epistemological status due to its vast, synthesizing function; it is ontologically all-encompassing precisely because of its profoundly paradoxical nature—a complex scenario that will be dramatized, in a manner crucial to the subsequent history of landscape architecture, in Francesco Colonnas Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, discussed later in this chapter. In this context, the entirety of creation is an emanation of God, therefore the realm of nature is no longer deemed evil, for only nonbeing is evil. Panofsky: Thus the Realm of Nature, so full of vigour and beauty as a manifestation of the "divine influence," when contrasted with the shapelessness and lifelessness of sheer matter, is, at the same time, a place of unending struggle, ugliness and distress, when contrasted with the celestial, let alone the super-celestial world.^ The human soul is the site of the reflection and expression, if not quite the resolution or synthesis, of these universal antinomies and oppositions. The spiritual is present in the natural world, such that, a fortiori, nature offers itself for human expression in terms of what Panofsky terms zpaysage moralise {moraliTjed landscape). As such, the- ological and cosmological symbolism is not at all obviated by the real- ism and perspectivalism of quattrocento art. Quite to the contrary, it offers a supplemental semiotic layer to imagery and allegory, adding the realm of "perspective as symbolic form," as Panofsky stated it, to previous symbolic systems. In fact, within this theological cosmology, all symbols and objects are simultaneously moralized and humanized. This transformation of vision and knowledge holds great promise for the arts, and especially for landscape architecture, insofar as the benevolence of the natural world is now theorized as a modality of divine love, and thus connected to what will later be subsumed under the rubric of the sublime through the human act of contemplation. In this theory of Platonic love, the artists of the Renaissance found a system that expressed their most profound aesthetic con- cerns, notably that the eternal values of beauty and harmony they sought need be expressed through material forms. Thus the artist is necessarily a mediator of the spiritual and the sensible realms. The very nature of artistic creativity, in all its complexity, paradox, and multiplicity, was expressed therein. Cassirer delineates what is aes- thetically at stake: The enigmatic double nature of the artist, his dedication to the world of sen- sible appearance and his constant reaching and striving beyond it, now seemed to be comprehended, and through this comprehension really justified for the first time. The theodicy of the world given by Ficino in his doctrine of Eros had, at the same time, become the true theodicy of art. For the task of the artist, precisely like that of Eros, is always to join things that are sepa- rate and opposed. He seeks the "invisible" in the "visible," the "intelligible" in the "sensible." Although his intuition and his art are determined by his vision of the pure form, he only truly possesses this pure form if he succeeds in realizing it in matter. The artist feels this tension, this polar opposition of the ^5 elements of being more deeply than anyone else. This new metaphysics of art was in great part based upon the notion of the representable order of nature. The subsequent imaging of the world became a function of the profound affinities between mathe- matical research and aesthetic production, insofar as they both share a sense of form, based on the newly representable order of the cos- mos. Cassirer: "For now, the mathematical idea, the a priori' of pro- portion and of harmony, constitutes the common principle of empirical reality and of artistic beauty. "^^ And as Cassirer insists, regarding the primacy of form in the Renaissance poetry of writers such as Dante and Petrarch, such lyricism does not express a preex- istent reality with a standard form, but creates a new inner reality by giving it a new form: "stylistics becomes the model and guide for the theory of categories."^'' This claim may be generalized for the textu- al arts (philosophy, rhetoric, and dialectics) and extrapolated for the visual arts. It was, indeed, a model for the new nature of thought, where style is not a formal effect bounded by the limitations of sheer representation, but rather where representation itself is a creative act. Within this context, the garden would no longer be conceived as merely a microcosmic or Edenic symbol, nor as a theological alle- gory of the body of the Virgin. In a sense, every theory of the micro- cosm is a theory of mimesis, of levels of representation. Henceforth, there would be a reciprocal relationship between the mimetic activ- ity of art and the perception of nature, such that, concurrently, art would attempt to represent nature, and nature would be seen according to the work of art. Consequently, mimesis would play a decreasing metaphysical role in the light of the new theories of human creativity and productivity. Mediating this reciprocity, the garden would be a "third nature," simultaneously patterned upon the idealizations of art and reinventing the way that the landscape was experienced. This aes- thetic was summed up by Giordano Bruno in Eroicifuroi: "Rules are not the source of poetry, but poetry is the source of rules, and there are as many rules as there are real poets. "^^ "Nature" had always been, and would always be, invented. But now, the verity of this perpetual reinvention, its cultural inexorability, was recognized and thematized as a function of artistic creativity. The ultimate extrapolation of this mode of philosophical specula- tion was achieved by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), a disciple of Ficino who joined the Florentine Academy a quarter of a century after its inception. ^9 Xhe radical aspect of Pico's thought was the reversal of the relation between being and becoming or acting in the cosmic hierarchy, aproblem predicated on the role of freedom. In the scholastic universe, every being, including the human being, had a fixed place in the cosmic hierarchy; the sphere of human voli- tion and cognition was strictly delimited and conditioned. For Ficino, to the contrary, though man's role in the universe was to rec- ognize and celebrate the entirety of creation, human difference and dignity consisted in man's role as a metaphysical mediator between the higher and lower realms. Pico radicalized and potentialized this mediative role by positing the entirety of the cosmic hierarchy as man's proper place. Thus man, endowed with no essential particu- larities, no longer had a fixed place in the cosmic hierarchy: the placement of each person within the cosmos was a function of indi- vidual activity, so that man could degenerate towards the beasts or ascend towards God, according to the value of his acts. Human nature consisted precisely in not having a predefined nature or form. In this proto-existentialist philosophy, man's being is defined as becoming; man's essence is constituted by the unique trajectory of each individual existence. In this system, where existence precedes essence, coincide the roots of both Pascalian anguish and existential optimism; the origins of both a theological anxiety at the eclipse of God and the joys of a radical liberation of the human soul. Though the system still operated within a Christian ethos, it established the preconditions for a secular realm of thought. This openness towards the world implied that human volition and knowledge must traverse the entire cosmos in order to achieve individual spiritual fiilfillment. As Pico wrote, concerning the creation of man, in his Oration on the Dignity ofMan, At last the best of artisans ordained that that creature to whom He had been able to give nothing proper to himself should have joint possession of what- ever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being. He therefore took man as a creature of indeterminate nature and, assigning him a place in the middle of the world, addressed him thus: "Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of the laws prescribed by Us. Thou, con- strained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the worlds center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul's judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which "'° This self-transforming, metamorphosing nature is ever-changing, establishing no fixed form. In the aesthetic realm, Pico's theory of total potentiality and mutability justified a renaissance of artistic cre- ativity, with a newfound juxtaposition and inmixing of forms, styles, and symbols. This metaphysics of action and creativity is at the ori- gin of an aesthetic lineage leading to the baroque and culminating in romanticism. It is interesting to note that Pico's philosophy was dramatized by the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492-540) in Fabula de homine (c. 1518), where the full mimetic powers of protean man are acted out on the stage of the Roman gods. After imitating the gamut of natural forms, man achieves a quasi-apotheosis: "The gods were not expecting to see him in more shapes when, behold, he was made into one of their own race, surpassing the nature of man and relying entirely upon a very wise mind Man, just as he had watched the plays with the highest gods, now reclined with them at the banquet."^' But this theatricality did not end with the allegori- cal staging of theology in a mythical setting; Vives also considered the implications of this apotheosis, entailing newfound powers of human creativity in relation to the observation of the natural world, claiming, all that is wanted is a certain power of observation. So he will observe the nature of things in the heavens in cloudy and clear weather, in the plains, in the mountains, in the woods. Hence he will seek out and get to know many things about those who inhabit such spots. Let him have recourse to garden- ers, husbandmen, shepherds and hunters ... for no man can possibly make all observations without help in such a multitude and variety of directions.'^ This protean ontology was not lost on the natural sciences. The specificity of landscape would be determined with increasing preci- sion following the development of the new sciences of geography, astronomy, meteorology, botany, zoology, etcetera; furthermore, the physical sciences would increasingly serve the arts, with all their the- ological and metaphysical symbolism, however archaic or obscure. Already in this epoch, the hortus conclusus, the enclosed clois- ter gardens of the medieval monasteries, gave way to the secret gar- dens of the Renaissance, and later to the more systematically orga- nized botanic gardens, initiated in Venice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with their increasingly open collections of in- digenous and exotic plants. When the first public botanic garden was created in Padua in 1545, the secret garden gave way to the pub- lic garden. As explained by Gaetane Lamarche-Vadel, The secret garden henceforth became a laboratory of minutious observations of all the states of plants' growth, of their reactions to the seasons, climates, and adoptive soils. Petrarch already gave himself over to such scrupulous experimentations and annotations in his gardens at Vaucluse, The attempts at transplanting pursued a century later accelerated and changed in scale: the '' exchanges were no longer local but intercontinental. Unknown roots from the New World arrived to be planted in the ancient earth of the Old World; new names of plants abounded; exotic herbs, spices, and produce transformed cuisine; old maladies found cures; the eye received novel pleasures. What arrived to incite mystery and wonder slowly gave way to knowledge and order: the notion of the world as a closed microcosm was replaced by the con- cept of an infinite universe, open to sensory observation and increas- ingly rational classification. Each new botanical discovery demand- ed a place on the cosmic great chain of being; as the examples became more and more numerous, and less and less coherent with the previously contrived system of botanic knowledge, the old cate- gories became insufficient to the task, forcing both a new system of classification and ultimately an entirely new conception of the cos- mos (coherent with analogous discoveries in the other sciences, notably those of the great Copernican and Galilean astronomical revolutions). Under the stress of an increasingly heterogeneous empirical field of objects collected, beginning in the fifteenth centu- ry, from the corners of the earth—including all the orders: animal, vegetable, mineral—the old system of classes was subverted and transformed. These objects decorated both cabinets of curiosity and gardens (living, outdoor cabinets of curiosity), radically transform- ing the order of nature—including the aestheticized reordering of nature that is the garden—in a scenario of hybridization beyond any adequately totalizing knowledge. Hybrid species gave rise to hybrid thoughts. However, as this process of demythification was a slow one (evolving over the centuries), each epoch bore a particular ratio of the inmixing of myth and science—a ratio that would remain crucial to all aesthetic representations and transformations of the landscape. Ficino's notion that all of creation is divine and beautiful opened the way for the historicizing of knowledge, which is one of the key tenets of humanist thought, no longer restricted to the Christian limitations of scholastic scholarship. For if all cosmologi- cal levels of the universe participate in divine goodness and beauty, then by extension all historical moments of thought participate, albeit partially, in universal truth. The result was a new syncretism, most immediately effected by Ficino in a reconciliation of Platonic and Aristotelian systems, but also extending to the positive recon- sideration of such thinkers as Plato, Moses, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistos, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Virgil, and Plotinus. Further- more, the implications of this intellectual openness and mobility were vast for both philosophical historicism and a theory of natural religion: the fact that consciousness must survey the entirety of the universe implied the necessity of discerning the truth value of every system of thought. Christian or otherwise, insofar as they all partake of a vaster universal truth. Pico's syncretism was even greater than that of Ficino, including not only Ficino's sources but also the Greek, Latin, and Arabic commentators of Aristotle, as well as the Jewish Cabalists. Furthermore, and crucial for modern hermeneu- tics, Pico went beyond the medieval scheme of interpreting scripture at four different levels—literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical according to a hermeneutic centered on the master narrative of the Bible. Rather, he argued for a multiplicity of meanings to scripture, as heterogeneous and polyvalent as the complexity of the universe to which they pertained. In Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, Edgar Wind discusses the implications of Pico's conceptual revolution for art and aesthetics. The notion of the deus absconditus, the hidden God, implies that no single symbolization of God can be adequate, for God is fundamen- tally nonrepresentable. Witness Cusanus's discussion, in De docta ignorantia, of the many names of the pagan gods: All these names are but the unfolding of the one ineffable name, and in so far as the name truly belonging to God is infinite, it embraces innumerable such names derived from particular perfections. Hence the unfolding of the divine name is multiple, and always capable of increase, and each single name is related to the true and ineffable name as the finite is related to the infinite.^'* As Wind suggests, "Poetic pluralism is the necessary corollary to the radical mysticism of the One."^^ This polytheistic, or at least poly- morphic, vision of the deity achieved the reconciliation of theologi- cal opposites in the hidden God, necessitating an application of the intellectual syncretisms of Ficino and Pico. Yet those irreconcilable opposites, w^hich previously could only have been united within God, could now be provisionally reconciled in human conscious- ness. But insofar as this central theological doctrine could only be stated in the form of a paradox, its manifold expressions, whether conceptual, symbolic, pictorial, or ornamental, needed to share the conceptual and ontologicaJ equivocation of its foundation. This would be the source of a new iconographic richness in the arts. Pico was intimately familiar with the ancient pagan mystery religions being rediscovered during his time, as well as with the role of initiation in the acquisition of knowledge; indeed, he had planned to write a book on the subject entitled Poetica theobgia. He discerned the various formal levels of these mysteries—ritualistic, figurative, and magical—all of which were continuously intermin- gled during the Renaissance. Within these systems, truth was always hidden, to be revealed only to the initiated through hieroglyphs, fables, and myths. The dissimulation of truth was a protection against profanation; revelation was thus a function of disguise, dis- simulation, concealment, equivocation, and ambiguity. Wind's analysis of the much-admired Renaissance maxim, ^^- tina lente (make haste slowly), which originated in Aulus Gellius's Nodes Atticae (Attic Nights), is a concrete case in point. This oxy- moron simultaneously sums up, at a poetic level of understanding, the metaphysical principle of divine totalization, the epistemological principle of the limits of human comprehension, and a certain eth- ical principle for regulating one's earthly existence. Here, the meta- physical is reduced to representable (and thus apparently compre- hensible) oxymoronic hieroglyphs or emblems—such as a dolphin around an anchor, a butterfly on a crab, an eagle and a lamb, and countless others—all intended, "to signify the rule of life that ripeness is achieved by a grovi^ih of strength in which quickness and "^*^ steadiness are equally developed. Metaphysics is thus expressed in the realm of popular imagery by reducing philosophy to the emblematic. The result of this reduction of the cognitive to imagery is that while aesthetics always implies a metaphysics, metaphysics is no longer the prime guarantor of aesthetics. This is apparent, for example, in a seminal^'' book in the his- tory of Western gardens, Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream). Here numerous versions oifestina lente are illustrated; each one provides a unique nuance to the idea, specifically attuned to the demands of the narrative. As Wind explains, these emblems in fact serve as part of the initiatory mechanism of the allegory. The plan of the novel, so often quoted and so little read, is to "initiate" the soul into its own secret destiny—the final union of Love and Death, for which Hypneros (the sleeping i,rosfuneraire) served as a poetic image. The way leads through a series of bitter-sweet progressions where the very first steps already foreshadow the ultimate mystery oi Adonia, which is the sacred mar- riage of Pleasure and Pain.^^ The coincidence of opposites is revealed through sundry conjunc- tions, such that not only the marvels and miracles of the world, but also its most commonplace objects, reveal human destiny. Needless to say, if basic imagery is thus manipulated, the most complex forms of expression—the arts, including landscape architecture—^will bear witness to similar metaphysical formations and deformations. These techniques lead to the realm ofwhat, as Cassirer reminds us, Goethe referred to as an "exact sensible fantasy,"^^ where science, nature, and art coalesce in an empirical realm that utilizes its own standards, paradigms, and forms; where abstraction and vision merge; and where fantasy and theory, literature and metaphysics, share a com- mon ground of expression. If poetry and images were but a veil upon the truth, they nev- ertheless offered an alternate entry into the theological system, a means of circumventing the obvious social restrictions of a more the- ological approach. This syncretism was reciprocal: "An element of doctrine was thus imparted to classical myths, and an element of poetry to canonical doctrines. "'^° Thus there obtained a hybridization of elements within imagery; theological connotations were granted to secular figures, and, conversely, sacred scenes evinced secular and contemporary truths. What Wind termed a "transference of types''"^' was in fact more than a stylistic feature of Renaissance art; it estab- lished an epistemological overture that indicated the metaphysical foundations of a major lineage of subsequent art and aesthetics. This syncretism was not lost on the arts. Though earlier hybrid works were evident in both pastoral dramas and mystery plays, the first Gesamtkunstwerk proper, in the contemporary sense of the term, was the opera, developed at the end of the sixteenth century, with the appearance of Peri's Euridice created in Florence in 1600, and Monteverdi's Orfeo created in Mantua in 1607. Monteverdi utilized all the resources of the art, ancient or new. This distinc- tion between old and new, most honored around 1600, held little value for him. Thus on every page one finds archaic connections of tunes, traditional procedures of writing and orchestration, as well as modulations, dissonances, enharmonics, and chromaticisms engendered by tonality, by Greek metrics, and by the rhythmics of declamation. But what pertained uniquely to Monteverdi was his knowledge of gauging, choosing, blending, and ordering all these elements to create a moving and animated work with great lyrical inspiration."*^ Beginning with Orfeo, Monteverdi established a musical synthesis of court airs, madrigals, recitative, canzone, and arioso; this entailed a corresponding scenographic synthesis of the varied arts. As the Cartesian mathesis universalis sought the synthesis of the sciences in a unified theory, so would the opera syncretize the arts on the spatially homogeneous, but stylistically heterogeneous, stage of baroque drama. And yet, structurally speaking, it might be argued that the humanist garden of the Italian Renaissance is the major precursor of the totalizing artwork, insofar as it already served as the ground, synthesis, and scenarization of all the other arts. “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” of Colonna was published in Venice in 1499."^^ The tale consists of the phantas- mic quest of Poliphilus, presented as an initiatory erotic drama couched in the form of a dream, recounting the protagonist's expe- riences and tribulations as he searches for his beloved Polia. Beginning in the anguishing soHtude of a wild, dark, labyrinthine forest, he finally emerges, by invoking divine guidance, into a beau- tiful, sunny landscape of absolute perfection. Here he discovers a world filled with gardens and palaces, containing enigmatic and emblematic monumental sculptures and ruins representing the arts of the ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, such as pyra- mids, obelisks, and temples, all evincing a perfection lost in the con- temporary epoch. The archaic is brought into the service of the arcane. The allegory then thickens as Poliphilus continues his Neoplatonic quest towards love and truth, encountering five girls representing the five senses, a queen symbolizing free will, and final- ly two young women symbolizing reason and volition. After visiting the palace, guided by the latter two women, he is taken to the three palace gardens, which are ultimate expressions of human artifice: gardens of glass, silk, and gold. This passage is worth quoting at length, as the descriptions of gardens in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili are of inestimable importance in the subsequent history, imaginary and practical, of landscape architecture. When we arrived at the enclosure of orange trees, Logistic said to me: "Poliphilus, you have already seen many singular things, but there are four more no less singular that you must see." Then she led me to the left of the palace, to a beautiful orchard as large in circumference as the entire dwelling where the queen made her residence. Around it, all along the walls, there were parterres planted in cases, intermixing box-trees and cypresses, that is to say a cypress between two box-trees, with trunks and branches of pure gold, and leaves of glass so perfectly imitated that they could have been taken for nat- ural. The box-trees were topped with spheres one foot high, and the cypress- es with points twice as high. There were also plants and flowers imitated in glass, in many colors, forms and types, all resembling natural ones. The planks of the cases were, as an enclosure, surrounded with slides of glass, gild- ed and painted with beautifiil scenes. The borders were two inches wide, trimmed with gold molding on top and bottom, and the corners were cov- ered with small bevels of golden leaves. The garden was enclosed with pro- truding columns made of glass imitating jasper, encircled by plants called bindweed or morning glory with white flowers similar to small bells, all in relief and of the same colored glass modeled after nature. These columns rested against squared and ribbed pillars of gold, sup- porting the arcs of the vaulting made of the same material. Underneath, it was trimmed with glass rhombuses or lozenges, placed between two moldings. Upon the capitals of the protruding columns were placed the architrave, the frieze, and the cornice in glass, figures in jasper, as well as the moldings around it, golden rhombuses with polished and hammered foliage, such that the rhombuses were a third as wide as the thickness of the vaulting. The ground plan and the parterre of the garden were made of compartments composed of knotwork and other graceftil figures, mottled with plants and flowers of glass with the luster of precious stones. For there was nothing nat- ural, yet there existed, nevertheless, an odor that was pleasant, fresh and fit- ting the nature of the plants that were represented, thanks to some compound with which they were rubbed. I long gazed upon this new sort of gardening, and found it to be very strange.^^ The brilliance and genius of this pure artifice invokes Poliphilus's admiration and wonder; the inherent artificiality of mimesis is revealed. While this garden was never imitated in its totality, it established a certain sensibility, and many of its elements have served as models for both details and major elements throughout the his- tory of landscape architecture—as well as in the subsidiary art of pastry making, with its parallel history. Poliphilus's discovery of these artificial wonders continued: "Let us go to the other garden, which is no less delectable than the one which we just showed him." This garden was on the other side of the palace, of the same style and size as the one made of glass, and similar in the disposition of its beds, except that the flowers, trees, and plants were made of silk, the col- ors imitating those of nature. The box-trees and the cypresses were arranged as in the preceding garden, with trunks and branches of gold, and underneath were several simple plants of all types, so truly crafted that nature would have taken them for her own. For the worker had artificially given them their odors, with I know not what suitable compounds, just as in the glass garden. The walls of this garden were made with singular skill, and at incredible cost. They were assembled with pearls of equal size and value, upon which was spread a stalk of ivy with leaves of silk, branches and small creeping runners of pure gold, and the corymbs or raisins of its fruit of precious stones. And, equidistant around the wall were squared pillars, with capitols, architraves, friezes and cornices of the same metal, resting upon it as ornaments. The planks that served as slides were made of silk embroidered with gold thread, depicting hunting and love scenes so surprisingly portrayed that the brush could not have done better. The parterre was covered with green velour resembling a beautiful field at the beginning of the month of April. 45 They then enter a third garden, in which is located a golden trian- gular obelisk, decorated on its three sides: Logistic turned towards me and said: "Celestial harmony consists of these three figures, square, round, and triangular. Know, Poliphilus, that these are ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have a perpetual affinity and conjunc- tion, signifying: 'the divine and infinite trinity, with a single essence.' The square figure is dedicated to the divinity, because it is produced from unity, and is unique and similar in all its parts. The round figure is without end or beginning, as is God. Around its circumference are contained these three hieroglyphs, whose property is attributed to the divine nature. The sun which, by its beautifiil light, creates, conserves, and illuminates all things. The helm or rudder which signifies the wise government of the universal through infi- nite sapience. The third, which is a vase full of fire, gives us to understand a "4° participation of love and charity communicated to us by divine goodness. The Neoplatonic resonances are worth noting. Continuing his quest, Poliphilus is confronted with three doors, representing the major paths of life, leading towards either the glory of God, the plea- sures and wonders of the world, or love. As Poliphilus chooses the last—justifying the text's extreme voluptuousness—he is led to the most perfect garden of all, Cythera, residence of the goddess of Love (and historic site of the Greek cult of Aphrodite): "That region was dedicated to merciful nature, intended for the habitation and dwelling of beatified gods and spirits."47 The description of the gar- dens of Cythera is so complex as to escape precise visualization and defy synopsis, yet it has inspired much of the Western imagination of landscape architecture. Here, the new Renaissance sense of nature combines with the contemporary exigencies of the arts: cosmic symbolism is reflected in architectural detail, the fecund sensuality of nature is circumscribed by the most rigorously geometricized geography, and the beauty of the landscape is accentuated, or even simulated, by the most refined artifice of the artisan's craft. Each aspect of this site inaugurates a type of perfection later to become stereotypical. The island is circular, with crystalline earth, beaches surrounded with ambergris, and its circumference is defined by ordered plantings of cypresses and bilberry bushes trimmed to perfection every day. The island's river has a shore adorned with sand mixed with gold and precious stones, and banks planted with flowers and citrus trees. The island's major divisions are mathemat- ically organized and separated by porphyry enclosures of artificial foliage and knotwork decorations interspersed with marble pilasters; each of these divisions delimits a different sort of planting: oak, fir, shrubs formed into figures representing the powers of Hercules, pine, laurel and small shrubs, apple and pear, cherry, heart-cherry and wild-cherry, plum, peach and apricot, mulberry, fig, pomegran- ate, chestnut, palm, cypress, walnut, hazelnut, almond and pista- chio, jujube, sorb, loquat, dogwood, service, cassia, carob, cedar, ebony, and aloes. In what appears as a prototypical version of Michel Foucault's "Chinese encyclopedia"—where the introduction of fantastic ele- ments shatters empirical taxonomy—the animals to be found there are no less diverse, so as to maintain the Utopian aspect of the site: satyrs, fauns, lions, panthers, snow leopards, giraffes, elephants, griffins, unicorns, stags, wolves, does, gazelles, bulls, horses, and an infinity of other species (excepting only those that are poisonous or ugly). Furthermore, the decorations within the sundry orchards, prairies, and parterres offer nearly the entire gamut of what shall become the standard features of Western landscape architecture: trellises, bowers, altars, decorative bridges, topiary, sculptural and architectural features, and fountains. There are herb gardens con- taining a variety of medicinal plants as vast as that of medieval clois- ter gardens, including absinthe, birthwort, mandragora, fiimitory, devil's milk, sumac, betony, calamint, lovage, St.-John's-wort, night- shade, peony; and also aromatic and edible plants such as lettuce, spinach, sorrel, rocket, caraway, artichokes, chervil, peas, broad beans, purpura, pimpernel, anise, melons, gourds, cucumbers. chicory, watercress, etcetera. The flowers in the prairies, whose description evokes the millefleurs backgrounds of medieval tapestries such as the unicorn cycles, are no less varied, and the parterres, plant- ed with extremely complex, interlaced, and varied patterns of flowers and other plants, have become classic models for subsequent gardens. Finally, there is the veritable "source" and destination of the quest, the mystical fountain ofVenus (which, most tellingly, remains unillustrated, but for a schematic ground plan), with columns made of precious stones, detailed carvings, and zodiacal and mythological symbols. The source of the water could itself be seen as an allegory for the "third nature" that characterizes the art of gardens: The cover of this marvelous fountain was made of a rounded vault like an overturned coupe without a foot, all of a single piece of crystal, whole and massive, without veins, flaws, hairs, kerfs, or any macula whatsoever, purer than the water spouting from the solid, artless, raw, unpolished rock, just as nature made it."** The Italian Renaissance produced copies, however flawed, of certain aspects of these gardens. Henceforth, mathematics and mythology would join within the art of landscape architecture. Yet, however imperfect the imitation, an entire worldview was evident in these gardens. As Gaetane Lamarche-Vadel remarks, The visions freed by the reveries are not always images of paradise lost; they also sometimes prefigure models of a perfection yet to come. The island where Poliphilus ends his journey is one of those: Venus, in concert with mathe- matical reason, conceived the plans for this garden. Fecundity is allied with order, measure, and proportion."*? The metaphysical allegory is always upheld by the most extreme sen- suality and preciosity. Indeed, one of the inscriptions on the foun- tain may serve as an epigraph for the entirety of the Hypneroto- machia Poliphili: "Delectation is like a sparkling dart."^° No synopsis of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili can satisfy, for it is precisely due to the eccentricity of its quasi-encyclopedic char- acter—through the heterogeneous allusions and evocations of each object, and the symbolic interrelations between these objects—that the nature of this synthesizing, moralizing, and aestheticizing sym- bolic system appears. The heterogeneous enumeration shatters the effects of mimesis, giving rise to art as an activity of the autonomous imagination. Such a pluraUstic mode of Usting and narrative para- taxis operates as a conceptual expansion of horizons, utihzing pre- vious symbols, forms, and taxonomic schemes retrospectively to recreate their classic origins; proleptically, they create a modern aes- thetic.^' Here, a vast syncretism rules the combination of botanic (Egyptian, Cypriot, Greek, Syrian, etc.), architectural (ancient Greek, Roman, Italian, Gothic, monastic, etc.), and textual (Pliny, Virgil, Dioscorides, Theophrastus, etc.) elements, establishing a totality imbued w^ith the most extreme, and fruitful, anachronisms. And yet, it is perfectly coherent with the Neoplatonic metaphysical speculation of the epoch; for all classicism is inherently revisionis- tic, transfiguring ancient forms according to contemporary motives. It is precisely here that we can appreciate the allegorical weight of ruins in landscape architecture: signs of an ideal and ide- alized past now disappeared, symbols of a creative consciousness that recuperates and transforms, indices of an aestheticization that combines and refines. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili thus offers not only specific details and general models—based on a synthesis of the contemporary arts—for the subsequent history of landscape architecture; it also proffers an aesthetic of complexity, contradiction, and paradox that will inspire, both consciously and unconsciously, the most profound garden creations. Its style, plot, and characterizations are complex and heterogeneous; ancient, medieval, and Renaissance objects are contemporaneously juxtaposed and overlaid with both sacred and profane symbols; multiple discourses interweave myth and rational- ism, erotic drama and mundane description, fantasy and utility, nature and geometry; varied, often contradictory, ideals of beauty are interwoven. Furthermore, the metaphoric dimension of artifacts is always apparent, revealing the landscape itself as an emblematic, symbolic, or allegorical space parallel to the mental state of Poliphilus, in 2i psychomachia that organizes the dynamic principle of the narrative, as Gilles Polizzi explains: "Such is the book of Colonna that—in the problematic conjunction of its books and its subjects, science and desire, the Apuleian weave of its mysteries and the experiment with natural hieroglyphs—it opens to a polysemy "^^ that makes it a world-book or a monster-book. Crucial for the present study is the fact that Hypnerotomachia Poliphili stresses the central importance of narrative in establishing the structure and significance of gardens in general. For not only is the garden a reflection of mental states, but its allegorical structure is based upon the active, and not merely mimetic, aspect of vision as a creative, dynamic, mutable process. This pertains to the garden's visible and mathematical forms as well as to its visionary and mytho- logical dimensions. Thus the "objective" geometry and sciences behind these inventions, the "third nature" realized from combining artifice and nature, are instantiated or activated, as it were, by the narrative phantasms of those who created the gardens, and subse- quently by the phantasms of those who enter them. In Hypneroto- machia Poliphili, the garden is literally a dream; the real gardens of the world, conversely, are sites that evoke reverie. The liberated plas- ticity of the imagination—a major consequence of the new meta- physical system elaborated by Cusanus, Ficino, and Pico—corre- sponds to the historic relativity and alterability of truth in its manifold and often contradictory manifestations. For the conditions of the possibility of any work of art include not only the material and spiritual traditions of the period, but also all the conceivable phantasms, misreadings, variants, and heresies—all the paradoxes and paralogisms—of the arcane and often unstated traditions that are foundational of an epoch. Contradiction, complexity, and paradox are fundamental principles in both the genesis and the structure ofWestern landscape architecture. The coherence, formalism, and stylistic closure all too often sought by historians of gardens in fact dissimulates the inco- herence, heterogeneity, and conceptual intricacies that underlie most great gardens. The organic, dynamic, chaotic space of nature is always at odds with the geometric, static, mathematical space of conceptual form. "Worked through by the Demon of Time whether in its human and historical manifestations as narrative, fan- tasy, and destiny, or in its natural manifestations as seasonal change, growth, decay and death—the garden is a fortiori a dynamic, syn- thetic, syncretic entity, escaping all formalist definition. Syncretism and Style 1 Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization ofthe Renaissance in Italy, vol. 2, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (i860; New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 294. 2 Francesco Petrarch, Lettres familihes et secrkes (Paris: Bechet, 1816), 99; cited in Gaetane Lamarche-Vadel, Jardins secrets de la Renaissance : Des astres, des simples, et desprodiges (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), 48. This book is an excellent study of the secret garden, from the medieval hortiis conclusus through the Italian Renaissance giardino segreto to the jardin hermetique. 3 Lamarche-Vadel,Jardinssecrets,11. 4 Francesco Petrarch, "The Ascent of Mount Ventoux," n.t., in Introduction to Con- temporary Civilization in the U^if (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 557. 5 Ibid., 560. 6 Cited in ibid., 562. 7 Petrarch, "Ascent," 562. 8 Twoclassictextsonthetrading,inmixing,andsyncretismofsymbolsare:Jurgis Baltru^aitis, Le moyen dge fantastique: Antiquites et exotismes dans I'art gothique (1955; Paris: Flammarion, 1981); and Rudolf Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). 9 Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (1927; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 52. 10 Ibid., 143. 11 Asthisisprobablythemostanalyzedtopicinarthistory,alonglistofreferences would here be both inadequate and superfluous. As an introductory note, consider several classic texts: John White, The Birth and Rebirth ofPictorial Space (London: Faber & Faber, 1957); Pierre Francastel, La figure et le lieu: L'ordre visuel du Quattrocento {?2ins: Gallimard, 1967); Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery ofLinear Perspective (New York: Harper & Row, 1975); and Hubert Damisch, L'origine de la perspective {Vaus: Flammarion, 1987). 12 The most recent translation is Leon Battista AJberti, On the Art ofBuilding in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, Robert Tavernow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 13 Forexample,theVillaLante(Bagnaia),theVillad'Este(Tivoli),theBoboli Gardens of the Palazzo Pitti (Florence), and the various Medici Villas (Rome, Castello, Poggio, Pratolino, and Fiesole), only to name some of the most typical and famous. 14 The literature on the Italian Renaissance garden is vast. For a fine introduction, see Catherine Laroze, Une histoire sensuelle des jardins (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1990), 323—32; Terry Comito, "The Humanist Garden," in Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot, eds. The Architecture ofWestern Gardens (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 37-45; and John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), especially 42-58 ("Ovid in the Garden") and 59-72 ("Garden and Theatre"). Among the many fine illustrated books and guides, very usefiil is Judith Chatfield, A Tour ofItalian Gardens (New York: Rizzoli, 1988). 15 Cited in Lionello Puppi,"Nature and Artifice in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Garden," in Mosser and Teyssot, Architecture ofWestern Gardens, 53. 16 This section on Cusanus is based on Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos. On the great chain of being, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain ofBeing {\9i6; New York: Harper & Row, i960). 17 KarlJaspers, Anselm and Nicholas of Cusa, trans. RalphMannheim(NewYork: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966), 35. Needless to say, the present essay presents only the broadest schematization of these complex philosophical issues—^just enough, it is hoped, to situate their interest in relation to the development of the Italian Renaissance garden, and thus to inspire the reader to further investigations. 18 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 51. On the extension of these issues as they relate to aesthetics in the seventeenth-century debates between the Cartesians and the Pascalians, see Allen S. Weiss, Mirrors ofInfinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th-century Metaphysics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), 53-77- 19 Cited in Raymond Marcel, Marsile Ficin (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1958), 273. 20 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 190-1; see also 69-141. On Ficino, see also Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 89-110, 163-227. 21 ErwinPanofsky,"TheNeoplatonicMovementinFlorenceandNorthItaly,"Studies in Iconology (1939; New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 141. 22 See Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 129-69. 23 Cassirer,IndividualandCosmos,132. 24 Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 134. 25 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 135. Panofsky rightly notes that the vast influence of the notion of Neoplatonic love was effected in both direct and indirect manners, much in the manner that psychoanalysis was influential for the history of mod- ernism in the arts, even when inadequately understood. This idea is useful in con- sidering the relations between theoretical systems and artistic production, where partial readings and misreadings in no way obviate the efficacy of "influence" or "affinities." Harold Bloom's The Anxiety ofInfluence {Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) remains the most subtle analysis of the role of misprision in artistic cre- ation. In relation to the experience of the Italian garden, John Dixon Hunt, in Garden and Grove {242, n.3), astutely makes a parallel claim, referring to a study by Claudia Lazzaro-Bruno of an allegory of art and nature in the Villa Lante: "Iconographical studies usually consider, as does this, only meanings inscribed in artworks, rarely how such meanings were read by later visitors." The great value of Hunt's book is that it accomplishes both feats. 26 Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, i65n. 27 Ibid., 160. 28 Cited in Arnold Hauser, The Social History ofArt, vol. 2, trans. Stanley Goodman (1951; New York: Vintage Books, n.d.), 129. 29 See Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 83-7, 115-9 and Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers ofthe Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 54-71. 30 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity ofMan (1486), trans. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes, in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., eds.. The Renaissance Philosophy ofMan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 224-5. Juan Luis Vives, Tabula de homine (c. 1518), trans. Nancy Lenkeith, in Cassirer, Kristeller, and Randall, Renaissance Phibsophy, 389. Juan Luis Vives, cited in John Hale, The Civilization ofEurope in the Renaissance (New York: Athenaeum, 1994), 510. Lamarche-Vadel, Jardins secrets, 94. On the transformations of epistemology, natural classes, and botanic knowledge, see 79—121 of this work. The locus classicus of the subject remains Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, n.t. (1966; New York: Vintage, 1973). Cited in Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958; New York: Norton, 1968), 2l8. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 218. Ibid., 99. Perhaps the most familiar contemporary example of this dictum is Mohammed Alls "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." The erotic poetics of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili speddcaWy justifies the use of this adjective. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 104. Cited in Cassirer, Individual and Cosmos, 158. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 21. Ibid., 25. Maurice Le Roux, cited in Maurice Roche, Monteverdi (Paris: Le Seuil/Solftges, i960), 70-1. Although the identity of the author of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is not absolutely certain, it is now almost always attributed to Francesco Colonna, a Dominican Friar of the monastery of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. There is one theory that the book was written by Alberti, which, whatever its veracity, reveals the profound affinities perceived between the two thinkers. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was pub- lished, with illustrations, in a mixture of Italian, Latin, and Greek, in Venice by Aldus Manutius in 1499. An abbreviated French translation by Jean Martin appeared in Paris in 1546, published by Kerver under the title Discours du songe de Poliphilr, the English translation, entitled The Strife ofLove in a Dreame, appeared in London in 1592; the contemporary Italian edition of Hypnerotomachia Polophili was edited by Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia A. Ciapponi (Padua, 1964). Translations in the current study are by the author, from the recent French edition (based on the 1546 Jean Martin translation), Le Songe de PoliphiU (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Editions, 1994), edited, prefaced, and transliterated into modern French by Gilles Polizzi. On the influence of this book in France, see Anthony Blunt, "The Hypnerotomachia Pobphili in lyth-Century France," Journal ofthe Warburg Institute 1 (1937): 117-37; this is an important early study flawed, however, by a less-than- rudimentary comprehension of Renaissance philosophies. The importance of the engravings in the Hypnerotomachia Polophili for considerations of the landscape are briefly discussed in a book that is, in its breadth and depth, a model of scholarship on gardens and landscape, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1995), 268-79. For an idiosyncratic and su^estive allegorical read- ing, see Alberto Perez-Gomez, Poliphilo, or The Dark Forest Revisited (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 44 Colonna, Songe de Poliphile, 120. 45 Ibid., 125. We find here the origins of Astroturf 46 Ibid., 128. 47 Ibid., 276. 48 Ibid., 325. 49 Lamarche-Vadel, Jardiru secrets, 31. 50 Colonna, Songe de Poliphile, 325. 51 Ontheepistemologicalproblemoflists,seeAllenS.Weiss,"TheErrantText,"in The Aesthetics ofExcess (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), 77-87. 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Polemica filosofica, Domenico Eusebio Chelli, marchesa Gabbriella Malaspina, Voltaire e la Toscana, “Firenze come una nuove Atene”, Collini su Ariosto e Boccaccio, Collini makes fun of Voltaire’s daughter. Refs.: Luigi Speranza, “Grice e Collini” – The Swimming-Pool Library.