The blossoming of classical topomythopoiesis

Abstract

A cursory glance at Italian Renaissance gardens reveals that they are populated by the beings of classical mythology. Venus, Apollo, Pegasus, Hercules, … are frozen figures in stone that have come to characterise the iconography of the verdant villas they inhabit. Were they included as devices to narrate myths? Or, did they serve as intricate symbolic ensembles to be decoded like the garden artefacts of the Hypnerotomachi poliphili? I visit these questions in this article (as part of a series on the history of gardens that evoke Greco-Roman myths) by investigating the expression and reception of Renaissance topomythopoeic gardens through the eyes of a contemporary chronicler of gardens, Bartholomeo Taegio (1520–1573). Extracts from his dialogue, La Villa (1559), are used throughout to frame a general discussion of Renaissance topomythopoiesis: the rhetoric of the locus amoenus and Parnassus, the appropriation of statues, and Neoplatonic reception and conception. Whereas the gods survived the Christian Middle Ages as beings that animated the ekphrastic language of landscape (and seldom adorned emblematic fountains) there emerged in sixteenth-century Italy a trend to concretise their presence. Yet, as Taegio’s account shows, not everyone encountered these as stories to be read or hidden codes to be deciphered.