The Medici family had a suite of fourteen villas near Florence, of which the most important were situated in Careggi, Castello, Fiesole, and Poggio a Caiano; in the sixteenth century the family also acquired a villa in Rome.
The Villa Careggi, in what is now a northern suburb of Florence, is the creation of Cosimo de’Medici the Elder, who in 1457 commissioned Michelozzo di Bartolomeo to convert an old manor house that Cosimo’s brother Giovanni de’Bicci had bought in 1417. In rebuilding the fortified manor house as a contemporary villa, Michelozzo chose to leave much of the original exterior intact, but added a graceful double loggia which overlooked a garden. The garden was intended to revive the ancient Roman villa garden, and so was planted with bay, box, cypress, myrtle, pomegranates, quince, lavender, and scented herbs and flowers; the only post-classical plants were carnations from the Levant and orange and lemon trees from North Africa. One of the fountains added to the garden by Lorenzo de’Medici contained Verrocchio’s bronze Boy with a Dolphin (c.1480), which is now in the court of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.
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Fêtes and Triumphs, elaborate festivals organized by or for royalty, incorporated many forms of entertainment, including dance. The triumphs, named for the triumphal arches erected for the occasion by townspeople, welcomed the monarch to their city as the royal entourage traveled the realm to assert the monarch’s authority; the festivities were organized at court to demonstrate royal power, some were directed at impressing both rebellious lords and foreign rivals.
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The topic of the Reformation and art can claim a long history. The Protestant movement had scarcely got under way before observers noted implications for painting and sculpture. The Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer in 1525 uttered warnings concerning the futility of image destruction and the difficulty of reviving the arts once they were lost. The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus also alluded to some of these problems. In a 1526 letter of introduction provided for Hans Holbein the Younger to take with him to the Netherlands, Erasmus explained the painter’s departure from Reformation Basel by stating that “here the arts are cold.” The Wittenberg reformer Martin Luther seems to have felt sensitive to accusations of responsibility for causing this frigid atmosphere. He once protested that he was not “of the opinion that the gospel should destroy and blight all the arts.”
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Italian painter, sculptor, architect, designer, theorist, engineer and scientist. He was the founding father of what is called the High Renaissance style and exercised an enormous influence on contemporary and later artists. His writings on art helped establish the ideals of representation and expression that were to dominate European academies for the next 400 years. The standards he set in figure draughtsmanship, handling of space, depiction of light and shade, representation of landscape, evocation of character and techniques of narrative radically transformed the range of art. A number of his inventions in architecture and in various fields of decoration entered the general currency of 16th-century design.
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The Renaissance Garden in England
Gardens, City Life, and Culture: A World Tour (Dumbarton Oaks Studies in Garden and Landscape History)
The Renaissance garden was Italian in origin. It had two distinct phases, the first running through the Quattrocento and whose defining work was the great architect Leon Battista Alberti ’s De Re Aedificatoria ( 1451 ), the second signalled by the work of another major architect, Donato Bramante , in his orchestration of the papal Villa Belvedere in 1503 – 4 (see Vatican Gardens ). The garden in its Renaissance phase was over by c.1540 when one which can be categorized as mannerist was under way. The principles of the Renaissance garden revolution, however, were to take a century and more to cross Europe and reach its outer fringes like England and Scandinavia.
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The cultural, artistic and literary contributions accompanying the economic changes we have just mentioned cannot simply be considered as descriptive or celebratory refl ections of these
events. They signify, instead, a new social awareness, advancement, consolidation and, frequently, far-sightedness. Thus, on the one hand, these additional forms of expression were
of major importance in supporting the advancement of the
middle-classes and their view of the world, and, on the other,
they supplied the very soil which gave rise to the studies of the
specialist treatises, an attempt to produce the kind of building
that was relevant to their particular ways of life.
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Alberti, Leon Battista (1404–72), Italian humanist writer on the theory of art and architecture, designer of buildings, and, in varying degrees, athlete, lawyer, mathematician, moral philosopher, musician, painter, playwright, and satirist, born in Genoa, the illegitimate son of a Florentine exile. He was educated in Padua, where he was inducted into the humanist movement, and later studied law at Bologna.
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Fêtes and Triumphs, elaborate festivals organized by or for royalty, incorporated many forms of entertainment, including dance. The triumphs, named for the triumphal arches erected for the occasion by townspeople, welcomed the monarch to their city as the royal entourage traveled the realm to assert the monarch’s authority; the festivities were organized at court to demonstrate royal power, some were directed at impressing both rebellious lords and foreign rivals.
