The Role of the Senses in the Early Modern Italian Garden

According to the Italian humanists gardens can be regarded as a third nature (John Dixon Hunt: Greater Perfections 2000, Claudia Lazzaro: The Italian Renaissance Garden 1990). Different from the first nature, wilderness, and the second nature, the cultural landscape (Cicero) gardens are a special combination of nature and culture, more sophisticated, more deliberate, more complex in the mixture of culture and nature. In the Italian renaissance garden this third nature reached an artificial and aesthetic level as a pleasure garden which made use of all the senses, and in doing so it played an important role in constructing new conceptions of the connection between man and nature. This presentation will examine how the gardens around Italian Renaissance villas in Tuscany and in the surroundings of Rome, with their use of geometrical lay-out, water, sounds, views, plants and buildings not only functioned as pleasure gardens, but also had a deeper philosophical level. How does’ the role of the senses and ‘fun’ in these gardens (water-chains, fountains, illusions, bird cages, orange trees etc.) intertwine with the intellectual humanistic level of presenting the order and deeper secrets of Nature? The theoretical platform will be Henri Lefebvre’s three levels of space (Production de l’espace 1974) which transferred to gardens can be explained as 1) Spatial practice or perceived space, a concrete level of interaction between Man and Nature (third nature) on the basis of certain natural conditions, 2) Representations of space or conceived space, a conceptual level, i.e. the fundamental principles in the structure of gardens, and 3) Representational spaces or lived space, a historical/cultural level, i.e. meanings and functions of gardens, meanings that also occur in the use of the garden in literature.