Literary and historical gardens in selected Renaissance poetry

The Renaissance integration of garden and villa into one unit led also to the integration of the garden into the intellectual and cultural life of the time. Garden design became as much a creative and self-conscious exercise as any cartoon by Raphael. Within the garden walls nature was freely moulded according to the principles of ut pictura poesis. The garden was designed to give pleasure, intellectual stimulation, and moral instruction in accordance with particular programmes. It incorporated the ideal of the philosopher's garden of the ancients with the Renaissance delight in the visual icon. The study of garden imagery in selected poetry of the period against this background of actual gardens gives the student another approach to the complex field of Renaissance iconography. It provides additional data in a field whose usefulness depends on precise-definition, and it has the further interest of providing an insight into the difficult relationship between art and nature. In the controlled space of the enclosed garden, art and nature met directly and not at one remove. The iconographical garden in its purest sense appears in Chapman's Ovids Banquet of Sence, while its rejection in Milton's Paradise Lost is in itself a statement with important implications. The study of individual features such as the garden labyrinth shows the vitality of the icon and the inter-relationship of a variety of mediums and sources. Spenser in Faerie Queene I.i. uses these parameters of the labyrinth to direct his reader's expectations. The plants of the garden in a period of rapid expansion of species nevertheless preserved much of their symbolism. The popularity of the flower catalogue attests to the utility of this symbolism and also warns against its use as a short-cut to understanding. Coronal symbolism is often used in conjunction with other schemes creating a new and more precise significance, perhaps for the work as a whole, as in Herbert's 'The Rose' and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The growing attention to realistic details and the interest in perspective led in England in the mid-century to a different attitude to nature and a profound change in garden design. This gradual process can be examined in the entertainments held in gardens and in the masques of Ben Jonson and Indigo Jones. The problems of this transitional period lie behind some of the difficulties of Marvell s 'Upon Appleton House. The iconography of the Renaissance garden provides the contemporary reader with a valuable tool for understanding the poetry of the period and a number of insights into the strategies of such poetic imagery