| Sculpture, ruins and gardens |
For garden sculpture, as with the renaissance passion for ruins, we find only isolated instances among Italians at this time. Yet the mighty statues erected by their forefathers in Rome excited their imagination. A longing to possess as their own some real antique statues and ruins not only led them to construct gardens round genuine ruins, but also round “ faked “ ones. Vasari speaks of a sham ruin in a barchetto (small park), which the prince put in the old restored castle of Pesaro. Inside it there was a handsome staircase like the one at the Belvedere in Rome. Polifilo also, in his Hypnerotomachia, gives a most romantic account of a ruin of this kind. But these seem to have been exceptional, for in Italy there was such an immense quantity of genuine remains of the past that the disguise seemed too poor and thin. |
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