La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio

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СКАЧАТЬ sensual and intellectual pleasure.¹³⁹

       The Idea of the Villa in the Renaissance

      As the Roman Empire disintegrated, the ideological as well as the practical need for villas waned. As urban populations shrank, much of the countryside of Italy was taken out of cultivation, and became economically and politically isolated from cities. Villas ceased to be centers of economic and administrative life, and many of their structures were either neglected or adapted for other uses. While people may have continued to live on country estates throughout the former empire, the construction of new villas and the production of writing on the idea of the villa both eventually stopped. The “process of disaggregation of the agricultural landscape and the separation of the city from the countryside” reached its peak between the eighth and eleventh centuries.¹⁴⁰ By the thirteenth century, following an increase in population, the elaboration of the agricultural landscape began to develop again under new conditions. At the beginning of the fourteenth century Crescenzi wrote his Liber ruralium commodorum using Cato, Varro, and Columella as sources.¹⁴¹ Crescenzi’s agricultural treatise does not deal with the idea of the villa. Rather, “it gives a complete picture by a cultured observer, of the medieval garden at its most expansive, before the onset of the Renaissance.”¹⁴² The buildings Crescenzi described in his text are essentially fortified castles, which were built all over Italy before the fifteenth century.

      Villas, as distinct from castles, farmhouses, and urban palazzi, began to be built again in Italy in the fifteenth century. The resurgence of Italian cities, which had begun in the thirteenth century, stimulated a demand for the agricultural produce that villas collected and distributed, and a related increase in the safety of the countryside led to positive reassessments of the value of country life relative to that of city life. Investment in agricultural real estate was a way for wealthy businessmen to buffer themselves financially from the shocks of fluctuating market economies in Florence in the middle of the fifteenth century, when banking and trading were more profitable than farming, as surely as it was in the Veneto in the late sixteenth century, in the context of the reformation of uncultivated land in the Terraferma, and in the state of Milan in Taegio’s day.

      A change in attitude toward the contemplative life stimulated new interest in the idea of the villa, which in turn prompted a revival of villa literature and a renewal of villa construction, beginning in Florence in the fifteenth century. This revival progressed in two phases: the rebirth of the ancient tradition of the “villa dialogue,” in the first half of the century; and, after 1450, the appearance of the first treatises to include the idea of the villa as a topic. Renewed interest in the idea of the villa as a site of otium was preceeded by writing on the contemplative life. Belief in the superiority of the contemplative life over the active life is expressed in the writings of fifteenth-century humanists, such as Cristoforo Landino, who wrote Disputationes Camaldulenses in 1475, and Pico, who wrote Oratio de hominis dignitate in 1486; but its roots are found in the previous century, in the writings of Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio.

      Petrarch based his argument for the superiority of the contemplative life over the active life, in De vita solitaria, on the authority of a variety of ancient writers, mostly Stoics, including Cicero, Scipio, and Seneca. The literary setting for Petrarch’s life of solitude was a locus amoenus in the countryside, “inter purpureos florum toros, autumno caducarum inter frondium … procul a malis, procul ab exemplis scelerum” (amid purple beds of flowers [and] heaps of fallen leaves … far from evil, far from examples of wickedness).¹⁴³ Petrarch began writing his treatise, as an apologia for his withdrawal from the urban world of activity, in his villetta at Vaucluse in 1346.¹⁴⁴ He was one of the first to view his own day as the beginning of a revival, which he conceived in terms of a return to the study of classical Greek and Latin texts and a reformation of writing in Latin. But it was Boccaccio who answered Petrarch’s call for a return to the classics with a call of his own for a return to nature.¹⁴⁵ Boccaccio’s Decameron is set during the Florentine plague of 1348, in a villa in the countryside midway “between sophisticated city life and the pastoral simplicity of the peasant’s world.” That villa is a locus amoenus, conceived as a place to which one can escape from the city without suffering the disorderliness of untamed wilderness.¹⁴⁶

      The revival of villa literature proper began with the rebirth of the “villa dialogue” in Florence in the century following Boccaccio’s. The earliest such work is the Dialogus ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, written by Lionardo Bruni in 1401. Two other villa dialogues, both from shortly before 1440, are Poggio Bracciolini’s De Nobilitate and Matteo Palmieri’s De Vita Civile. Not only is Palmieri’s dialogue, like Bruni’s and Bracciolini’s, set in a villa, it also focuses on villa life as a subject.¹⁴⁷ Palmieri has one of the interlocutors say, “La Villa è tutta buona, fertile, copiosa, dilettevole, onesta, naturale e degna d’ogni uomo da bene e libero” (The villa is a perfect good: fertile, abundant, delightful, honorable, and worthy of every free man of good class.)¹⁴⁸ When this statement is compared to comments on country life made in the previous century, the increase in value of the kind of retreat that a villa affords is evident. Paolo Da Certaldo, in his mid-fourteenth century Libro di buoni costumi, had written, ‘“La Villa fa buone bestie e cattivi uomini,’ e pero usala poco: sta a la città e favvi o arte o mercatantia, e capiterai bene” (“The villa makes good animals and bad men”; therefore make very little use of it. Stay in the city and foster your trade or business affairs, and you will prosper.)¹⁴⁹

      The second phase of the revival of villa literature began with the work of Leon Battista Alberti. Alberti was the first writer since antiquity known to have devoted a piece of writing exclusively to the idea of the villa. That piece is his short monograph, written probably around 1438, entitled simply Villa.¹⁵⁰ Alberti also took up the villa as a topic in two other, better known, works: his dialogue on the family, I Libri della Famiglia, written in 1438; and his treatise on the art of building, De re aedificatoria, written after 1450.

      The content of Alberti’s Villa is derived from the De agri cultura of Cato and the Works and Days of Hesiod, which also may have served as a model a century later for Taegio. Alberti could have been familiar with one of several manuscripts of Works and Days now in Florence, and Taegio with one now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.¹⁵¹ The moralizing tone of Alberti’s Villa can be traced to Cato and Hesiod. Alberti’s phrase “nulla più iusto a ricchire che la agricultura, e quelle ricchezze quali s’acumulano senza fraude sono uno bene divino” (there is no fairer way to get rich than agriculture, and riches that are acquired without fraud are a divine blessing),¹⁵² recalls the opening paragraph of Cato’s treatise, where he says that his ancestors praised farmers more than merchants,¹⁵³ as well as Hesiod’s exhortation to Perses to do “the work which the gods ordained for men.”¹⁵⁴ Alberti did not simply imitate his antique models, however; he built on them and went beyond them, reflecting on the purpose of a villa. The first line of Villa reads, “Compera La Villa per pascere la famiglia tua, non per darne diletto ad altri” (Buy a villa to nourish your family, not to give pleasure to others).¹⁵⁵

      Similar sentiments about the purpose of a villa can be found in the dialogue on the family Alberti wrote at about the same time as Villa. In I Libri della Famiglia he embellished his conception of the villa as a farm for the production of food and income for the family by adding, in a way that is reminiscent of Martial, that a villa is a refuge from the noise and dangers of city life. For Alberti, the villa not only offered “utile grandissimo, onestissimo e certissimo” (the greatest, the most honest, and the most certain profit); it was also a place “fuggire questi strepiti, questi tumulti, questa tempesta della terra” (to flee these uproars, these tumults, this tempest of the world) that is the city.¹⁵⁶ This felt need to withdraw from the city, which in Alberti is mixed with a sense of the private realm as a training ground for public life, recalls Petrarch’s De vita solitaria.¹⁵⁷

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