Perhaps no other garden in the countryside of Rome best embodies the power of the Renaissance ideals of nature and landscape other than the Villa d'Este. The gardens of the Villa d’Este embody the notion of art perfecting and creating a new nature that is ordered perfectly to convey notions of allegory and illusion, play and spectacle. Classical groves and bosco are filled with illusionistic fountains and allegorical themes. They are composed of boschetti and compartmentalized beds with a strong use of architectonic space. Nature is ordered, classical symbolism is everywhere, Mannerist sculpture abounds, and the pure geometry of circles and squares rules. The villa takes the notions of Bramante’s Belvedere but utilizes a more complex ordering of spatial relationships. The importance of the water is key—it is the main symbolic medium of the gardens, fountains, and indeed the villa itself. Nature here is transformed by art and human imagination between sightlines and views out, organized around a series of terraces on a hillside, with a central axis and series of cross axes that open up counter views and imply above all, a new way of seeing the world—as landscape, as a Virgilian dream. These notions form the backdrop of the deeply encoded symbols and allegorical messages that link the gardens to the legacy of ancient Rome and to its site-specific location in a place traditionally associated with classical villas. Both direct and indirect devices blend into a garden landscape that functions as a sophisticated amalgamation of sources that create a new garden language, in which programmatic themes, articulated through geometry and art, encode the villa with a powerful association of the legacy and humanist status of ancient Rome.
