Garden and Grove
The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 16-175

John Dixon Hunt (Author)

9780812216042

Paperback / softback, published 29 July 1996

288 pages, 113 illus.
25.1 x 18.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.566 kg

"This is a major work and, I think, Hunt's best. . . . Once picked up, the book cannot be put down, for it is an exciting exegesis of the continuing Italian influence upon English garden art." (Country Life)

Garden and Grove is a pioneering study of the English fascination with Italian Renaissance gardens. John Dixon Hunt studies reactions of English visitors in their journals and travel books to the exciting world of Italian gardens: its links with classical villas, with Virgil and farming, with Ovid and metamorphosis, its association with theater, its variety, its staged debates between art and nature. Then he looks at what English visitors made of these Italian garden experiences upon their return home and at how they created Italianate gardens on their estates, on their stages, and in their poems.
With a wealth of literary and visual materials previously untapped, Hunt provides a new history of an intriguing and vital phase of English garden history. Not only does he suggest the centrality of the garden as a focus for many social, aesthetic, political, and philosophical ideas but he argues that the so-called English landscape garden before "Capability" Brown, in the late eighteenth century, owed much to a long and continuing emulation of Italian Renaissance models.

The Franklin Jasper Walls Lectures
List of Illustrations
Preface to the 1996 Edition
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE. ITALY THE GARDEN OF THE WORLD
1 The Garden on the Grand Tour
2 Classical Ground and Classical Gardens
3 Villa and Vigna
4 Ovid in the Garden
5 Garden and Theatre
6 Cabinets of Curiosity
7 Variety
8 Art and Nature
PART TWO. ENGLAND THE WORLD OF THE GARDEN
9 'My Patterne For A Countrey Seat'
10 'The Way of Italian Gardens'
11 'Palladian' Gardening
Notes
Index