What is a renaissance garden? Garden historians use the terms 'renaissance', 'mannerist' and baroque' freely—and often interchangeably, Tim Richardson argues that such art-historical classifications fail to distinguish between the many traditions of garden making in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—traditions that were often strongly regional, and overlapped in time

Garden history is still a relatively young subject--it got into its stride sole in the 1960s--and there are many gaps in scholarship and research. on the contrary even well-trodden subjects are recumbent to confusions and contradictions, and nowhere more thus than in the case of Italian gardens of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The question is, do the categories used by means of art historians to classify the visual arts of the period apply to gardens? Can any garden accurately be described as renaissance, mannerist or baroque? In the case of Villa Lante and Villa d'Este--the gardens of this period that have been greatest in quantity celebrated during the past century--the three limits appear to be interchangeable, with the prefixes Early, High or Late regularly added, and individual writers tending to state their categorisations as self-evident fact.

Garden historians have not been plenteous affected by the recent questioning by means of art historians of the validity of these stylistic labels. Although the labels' usefulness is undeniable, greatest in quantity recent art history has wait oned to subordinate stylistic classification to discussion of similar issues as patronage, function and other aspects of social history. These are topics that have been eagerly embraced by dint of garden historians, but the fundamental question of categorisation cannot be ignored while confines such as 'renaissance garden' are still in for the use of all use. This brief survey of the period 1450 to 1600 is intended to tease without some of the major strands in garden design during these years, and upon that basis to suggest a surer--and simpler--system of categorisation, based upon what I would argue are the seven important strands in garden design in Italy that can be discerned during this period. These strands overlap greatly, one as well as the other chronologically and geographically.

1 The Tuscan villa gardens of the Medici, c 1445-62

Michelozzi Michelozzo (1396-1472) was busyed by Cosimo de Medici in the 1440 and 1450 to remodel or rebuild several medieval fortified villas or fattorias in the vicinity of Florence. This was achieved in a spirit of villegiatura, or the cultural ideal of rural living, which had become desirable through the fourteenth century, as evinced by dint of Boccaccio's setting of The Decameron in a villa outside the city, (1) and Petrarch's Vita Solitaria, begun in 1346 The fourteen celebrated lunette of Medici villas painted by dint of Giusto Utens for alcoves in the banqueting hall of the Villa Artimino at Monte Albano--now in the Museo di Firenze Com'era--are dated to 1598/99 which shows a lapse of some 150 years since Michelozzo's work at the villas of Trebbio, Careggi and Cafaggiolo. (2) Nevertheless, it is quite possible that the basic layout of these gardens remained unchanged during this period.

As depicted by the agency of Utens, the garden at Cafaggiolo (Fig. 2) where Michelozzo worked in about 1450 is an enclos space with six grassy compartments bordered by low fences wreathed in what could be flowering bushs herbs or roses (all were used at this time). A pair of vine overlayed pergolas or arbours are contained within this symmetrical design, which is in many ways reminiscent of the medieval hortus conclusus: a small garden of herbs and flowers in hedged compartments, usually nearest to or near a house in town.

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A rural, productive enclos garden upon this theme was known as an orto in medieval agricultural literature. (3) During the course of the fifteenth hundred private spaces such as these evolv into the more formally, ornamentally and geometrically ordered giardino segreto, or unknown garden--an intimate space that was oftentimes retained in some form in plane the grandest or most innovative sixteenth- and seventeenth-century gardens. These medieval gardens of grassy compartments enclos by dint of trellis can also be seen as the precursors of the parterre gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through which time the pretence of productivity in of the like kind a garden had diminished considerably. It is likely that Islamic antecedent absorbed via Sicily and then southern Italy, was more influential upon such gardens than has been realised, specifically in confines of the central placement of fountains in garden courts, the introduction of citrus woodlands the cross-axis plan and the use of rills and pavilions. (4)

In more agrarian and utilitarian situations where there was no formalised hortus conclusus or giardino segreto, the enclos productive gardens near the house, which were also laid on the outside in hedged compartments or as grids of orchard tree fulfilled a dual ornamental productive character The lesser-known lunettes in the Uten series illustrate the resilience of this older mode of expression of garden layout even into the seventeenth century: Villa Collesalvetti (Fig. 4) for example, is unostentatious and agricultural in tone, with three fenc enclosings of diminishing size aligned laterally against the house, each containing fenc grass plats and tree at the corners. (5) The gardens are not associated with the villa in any meaningful way; the difference at Cafaggiolo is that Michelozzo organised the ornamental-productive garden upon an axis with the house, and in scale with it. Garden and building are inseparably linked; the distinction between agriculture and ornament is blurred