Classical Influence in 18th-Century Gardens

Introduction

By the 1730s, a highly ‘classicising’ landscape garden at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, was already fully configured (Fig. 1). It contained numerous copies of famous ancient statuary (Fig. 2), a full typological repertoire of classical buildings (Fig. 3), from tholoi and peripteral temples to exedrae and triumphal arches, a rostral column, a free landscaped interpretation of the Homeric Elysian fields, and a Grecian Valley, where naumachiae were celebrated. The gardens originating in the early years of the eighteenth century completely changed the physical and intellectual landscape of Britain by carefully cultivating, reimagining, and canalising the classical world. They directed taste towards the ancient world, foreshadowing (and actually embodying) the Neoclassical adulation of antiquity that permeated the West from the middle of the century onwards. However, as gardens are ‘less clearly bounded than other cultural objects, and more vividly intertwined with nature’, they are not usually thought to be serious enough to contemplate at length. The eighteenth-century landscape garden, in particular, is still considered a ‘frivolous aspect of the leisure societies of the past’, and as such, for many, a trifling subject for critical reflection. Consequently, whilst most scholars agree that the ancient world exerted a profound impact on the European Enlightenment, little has been written explicitly on the relationships between the landscape garden and classical antiquity. To this end, this dissertation attempts to reverse that trend in scholarship by recapitulating the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in British eighteenth-century landscape gardens, building disciplinary bridges between classical reception, and garden studies. Taking as case-studies two of the best surviving examples of their kind, the gardens at Stowe (1714-1740s) and Stourhead (1735), I will look at how the particular engagement of landscape gardens with the art, literature, and culture of ancient Greece and Rome is both similar and different to those in other contemporary media, particularly painting. The physicality and medial qualities inherent to gardens made them one of the most exciting forms of art during the British Enlightenment. First and foremost, they were liminal spaces constantly mediating between outside and inside, between the public and the private, and between the wild and the cultivated. This interstitiality encouraged the interplay between past and present: the garden provided a particular literal and metaphorical space for the fabrication of and engagement with worlds distant in time. From the early modern period onward, Greco-Roman antiquity emerged as an important part of the mental landscape of Western Europe, as gardens simultaneously became the favourite places, ‘for fantasy about the classical world’. A common education based on the classics and continental travels to classical lands fostered a taste for the antique among gentlemen and connoisserus that was translated into material possessions, such as paintings, sculptures, buildings, travel journals, or gardens. Given that correct taste could be cultivated and improved by direct exposure to ancient materials, the landscape garden afforded a unique way of displaying, experiencing, and experimenting with the classical world. The desirability of this sort of garden was further emphasised by its three-dimensional, extra-visual and all-encompassing environmental nature, which allowed the recreation of other worlds in real life scale: the visitor could have ‘stepped into Arcadia, or into the grounds of Hadrian’s, or Pliny’s villa’, but also into Mediaeval England or Imperial China. At the same time, they had strong two-dimensional qualities, for they were conceived and designed to resemble painted tableaux, which contained representations of idealised, classicising landscapes themselves inspired by the classical pastoral tradition. In this sense, the landscape garden was intended to be experienced ‘as a living art gallery of landscape paintings’. Although the displacement of time and space through literary and pictorial allusions was a common feature of earlier Renaissance gardens, the landscape garden demanded as no others before a total suspension of disbelief and a complete surrender to the powerful seduction of imagination on the viewer’s part. Equally, as works of nature they were highly malleable and fluid: on one hand, they depended upon the changing seasons and the lifespan of their plants. Therefore, their effects on the beholder’s were always different; on the other hand, as a landscape garden in the eighteenth century could be constructed in just one season, visitors and commentators’ impressions also influenced garden’s owners own taste, so these gardens were always changing. By bridging ‘experiential reality’ and the imagination – for the garden is both material reality and a ‘work of the mind’ – gardens are particularly effective artistic devices for triggering particular imaginative and associative responses. As a result, they are able to be in place and out of place (ambivalent spatiality), in-time and out-of-time (disruption of temporality); and, in so doing, they engage intensively with Greco-Roman visual culture, more than works of art in other media. Indeed the continual captivating power of gardens resides in their multivalence, ambiguity, and not least in their use of nature as material medium. In short, gardens constitute fascinating case-studies because in them the cultural and the natural order are simultaneously co-constructed: as a collider of visual and textual materials within a living environment in constant state of transformation. Indeed, gardens allow individuals to reflect upon and experiment with relations between the built and unbuilt environment, yielding a space where social relations to nature can be both forged and contemplated.

Despite their strongly embedded utopian character, gardens are primarily heterotopic spaces which contested meaning and categorisation, enabling the disruption of linear time and narrative through the beholder’s free flow of the imagination. As their etymology suggests, hétéropies, to borrow a term from Michel Foucault’s lexicon, are real spaces equipped with a ‘mythic dimension’, that is to say, spaces of otherness which connect reality and the imagination. Just as the landscape gardens cultivated by the British, the suburban villa gardens of Roman aristocrats were particularly malleable and theatrical spaces in their own right. In fact, their use of mythological and landscape paintings along with the use of garden statuary to create scenes allowed the viewer to experience potent and exhilarating temporal dissonances. Past and present were juxtaposed as the viewer could be included within a past narrative while being confronted with a present narrative in which perhaps a new, yet archetypal, mythic story was being set down within the garden. Despite the fact that heterotopic places may have a function or another depending on ‘the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs’, the very notion of landscape is hard to remove from European socio-historical frameworks. The connotative change of the term ‘landscape’ from a kind of ‘legal demarcation’ (literally ‘a tract of land’) to ‘an aesthetic tableau’ was informed by a series of interconnected processes that occurred approximately between 1650 and 1850, such as the technical possibilities for the transformation of formerly ‘natural’ landscape. More importantly, it went hand in hand with a change in Western approaches towards nature ‘as a focus of both control and pleasure’ and with ‘the emergence of new tastes for cultural artefacts or experiences’. In current Western industrialised countries the very idea of nature has been somehow set aside ‘as something pristine and free of the modern human touch’. It became the notion ‘through which we conceptualise what is other to ourselves’. This view of nature as that which is not artificial suggests a sharp opposition ‘between ourselves and the rest of creation’, when in fact nature, no less so than an artwork, is a human construction. Therefore, if ‘nature is not natural’, neither nature nor the natural can be separated from questions of power and politics: ‘the dominant refashions itself as nature’. In this sense, gardens, themselves representations of nature revised by culture, raise awareness not only on how we relate to the environment, but also about how we construct that which is natural. During the second half of the twentieth century, the debate about the relationship between nature and culture gained more interests by scholars, which revolved essentially around ‘the ideological roles that natural histories have played in society and art making’. For Mitchell, a landscape ‘is a particular historical formation associated with European imperialism’, and its underlying idea of ‘nature’ is a manifestation of ‘an ideology associated with the rise of modern science and the emergence of capitalist economies in Western Europe in the last four hundred years’. Frequently, the European Enlightenment has been held responsible for alienating humans from nature. In this connection, it has even been pictured as a ‘transformation from desert wilderness to cultivated garden’, that is to say: as the linear and irreversible aftermath of mechanical philosophy, where the human mind has power over the natural world. At least since the seventeenth century, moreover, an absolute faith in Nature sustained the whole Enlightenment project. Although widely acclaimed as the most innovative British material aesthetic phenomenon, the landscape garden was far from being an influential work of art with intellectual, social, and cultural power until recently. Most of the literature on gardens during the first half of the twentieth century was produced by art historians who focussed, perhaps unsurprisingly, on design styles, especially that of Renaissance gardens. Nonetheless their contributions helped in broadening the debate around the cultural meanings inscribed in garden architecture, statuary, and inscriptions. English landscape gardens have been studied, for the most part, from a strong textual-based approach during the second half of the last century. Prominent garden specialist John Dixon Hunt, among others, have extensively analysed gardens by treating them as ‘mute’ landscapes which ought to be culturally ‘voiced’ through poetry. Despite the fact that many eighteenth-century gardens were indeed designed after literary metaphors, such logocentric approaches often undermine their ‘performative potential’ and ‘their particularity and specificity as representations which are not purely visual nor simply two-dimensional and static’. Consequently, they reduce aesthetic experience to a strict act of reading. Notable exceptions are the work of Michel Conan at Dumbarton Oaks, who has rightly pointed out that gardens are multisensory environments and highlights motion as an essential feature of landscape design – for ‘through movement we engage and oblige ourselves with the world’. Likewise, blending social and cultural history with a materialist focus on the ‘relationships between cultural subjects and cultural objects’, Chandra Mukerji has treated the garden as an artistic form of material culture placed at the core of the major social and political changes of modernisation.

In addition to focusing intently on what is signified, my dissertation will explore how landscape gardens signify: how they have influenced eighteenth-century understandings of the ancient world, a period in which our own present-day thinking is deeply rooted. By taking into account the specifics of landscapes and gardens, such as their ‘diverse materialities, complex visualities, and composite dimensionalities’, which depends on a complex extra-visual relationship between landscape and viewer, garden studies offer a useful approach which can complement classical reception studies. According to Hans Robert Jauss, one of the foremost figures of reception theory, the ‘historical life of a literary work is unthinkable without the active participation of its addressees’, meanings are therefore determined by the readers’ experiences and by their reception of earlier interpretations. In a similar vein, classicist Charles Martindale embraced reception ‘as a dynamic activity in which the active role of readers is constantly generated and regenerated’ and ‘in which the present and past are in dialogue with each other’. Landscape and garden studies stress the viewer’s active participation in apprehending and interpreting a garden, along with the garden’s capacity to superimpose the past and the present onto each other. In the Anglophone world, such theories have had a remarkable influence on the field of classics, opening it up to comprise not only Greco-Roman materials but also adaptations of and responses to them, from any culture or any period and in any medium. In the last thirty years, some excellent studies of the reception of Greek and Roman art and architecture have been produced with a particular emphasis on the British eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, in comparison with their literary counterparts, the potential of reception theory for the interpretation of visual representations has still not been fully developed, nor have garden’s connection with the ancient world been sufficiently explored. As I hope to demonstrate, the garden is a highly sophisticated extra-visual medium which brings together different art forms along with their medial qualities, placing a strong emphasis on the beholder’s active participation in the construction of meaning. In this sense, I would argue that the landscape garden was a particularly effective artistic device in the western (re)construction of ancient visual and material culture that occurred during the course of the eighteenth century. A sort of ‘antichità vivente’, even before the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii (1738-1756) were unearthed and became the resuscitated ancient sites par excellence. To this end, my dissertation aims to expand the understanding of landscape gardens as a specific field of knowledge and research, while also developing a truly interdisciplinary landscape-oriented approach. This approach concerns itself with the critical problems tackled by visual culture studies – including ‘the fictive space, the picture plane, the position and nature of the beholder, and notions of realism and representation’ – and with classical reception studies’ emphasis on the active role of the beholder in the process of making meaning: a meaning which is not ‘fixed and stable but rather changeable, mediated, and contingent’. The first chapter traces the development of the landscape garden in the context of eighteenth-century Britain, exploring their medial qualities and the mechanics used for cultivating the classical, and using the landscape garden at Stowe as a case-study. The second examines the transmedial qualities of the landscape garden through the lens of eighteenth-century reception of the ancient trope of ut pictura poesis, along with contemporary theories of perception. Finally, the third chapter offers a close analysis of Stourhead’s garden, perhaps the finest example of its type, which provides a pictorial and allegorical landscaped circuit that tells the story of Aeneas’ founding of Rome. The concluding part of the dissertation assesses how the landscape garden, with their transmedial versatility, naturalised the classical, making this category the definitive standard of western beauty, especially in British territories which were strongly invested with the aurea aetas of Augustan Rome during the eighteenth century. At another level, landscape gardens functioned as proto-museums: they afforded individuals from different backgrounds access to the classical world, offering an alternative to the socially exclusive Grand Tour.

1. Surveying the landscape. The cultivation of Neoclassicism at Stowe

Neoclassicism in Britain is often considered as a late eighteenth-century phenomenon, but the landscape gardens erected throughout England in the beginning of the century demonstrate otherwise. Initiated by Lord Cobham in the early 1710s, the landscape garden at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, was a complex laboratory where new aesthetics were explored: it was a vast piece of land surrounding a country houses which was purportedly left unproductive in order to experiment, in an intellectual, material, and visual way with ancient Classical ideals (Fig. 4). As a historical construct, the landscape was perceived as a finished canvas upon which changes of nature are perceived. Yet a landscape transcends projections unto nature: ‘it is a multivalent frame – territorial, political, and aesthetic – determining how the environment is perceived and shaped’. Although landscape gardens were located in private properties, the British aristocrats who commissioned them made sure that other connoisseurs, and the general public, were informed about the new taste that they were cultivating in them. They did so by opening their gardens to visitors, belonging to different social strata, and by commissioning etchings and drawings with vistas of their gardens (Fig. 5), which were distributed across Britain and the continent. Indeed, the garden at Stowe was the first of its kind in having its own guidebook, which conducted the visitor throughout the different classical ‘highlights’ of the garden (Fig. 6). This ‘public’ dimension of the landscape garden was important because it was unusually compared to early formal gardens. Also, because it allowed garden owners to expose their taste, wealth, and power to a major number of individuals without having to open the doors of their Palladian country houses, where vast collections of ancient and classicising artefacts were amassed. In this way, landscape gardens rapidly shaped contemporary taste towards what was later codified as neoclassicism. As Viccy Coltman has stressed, the notion of Neoclassicism is more than a stylistic fabrication: it is a ‘style of thought’. Such ‘state of mind’ was cultivated through an educational system that was based on the classical tradition more than ever before. As a result, objects such as seventeenth-century classical paintings, marble busts, ancient coins, or sculptures started to be collected on a grand scale by educated individuals, particularly the aristocratic Whig landowners who filled the country with landscape gardens. Although highly sought after even from antiquity, demand for ancient or classicising objects increased exponentially by the Grand Tour, a distinctive social ritual undertaken by young British aristocrats in, particularly, Italian territories in order to polish their social and cultural skills in the quest to become ‘complete gentleman’. The tour, with its circulation of bodies, ideas and luxury goods, was fully established by 1700 and became a paramount phenomenon in the construction and interpretation of the landscape garden in a myriad of ways. Firstly and most evidently, the influence of the tour is explicitly manifested in the material artefacts that were placed in landscape gardens, many of them modern direct quotes of ancient buildings, often located in Rome itself, or sculptures held in the great Italian collections of the time. Sculptural interpretations of the Venus de’ Medici were particularly popular: at Stowe, a gilded version of the goddess features inside a contemporary Ionic tholos (Fig. 7). Secondly, the idea of the circuit-path adopted by most landscape gardens has a strong resonance with the configuration of the Grand Tour, itself a circuit. A canonical example is the great landscape garden at Stourhead (1735), which was designed around a circular turning path with views organised across a central body of water, enabling cross views between classical architectural features distributed in the different parts of the garden (Fig. 8). In this sense, the landscape garden is understood as a three-dimensional evocation of the travels undertaken by their owners. Indeed, circular formal walks and serpentine lines were conceived as the ultimate expression of naturalness. In contrast to the straight and regular lines that dominated Dutch and French formal gardens, beauty was now to be found in the waving or winding lines of hills, trees or sinuous paths that opened up vistas when rounding a corner. In his essay, The Analysis of Beauty (1753), artist and aesthete William Hogarth celebrated the (waving) ‘line of beauty’ and the (serpentine) ‘line of grace’ as ‘the base-figures for beauty and elegance’. As a plate from his essay illustrates (Fig. 9), the S-shaped curved line present in the most revered classical sculptures of his time – such as the Venus de’ Medici, Laocoön, Vatican Antinous, or Belvedere torso – provides exemplum for ‘every principle that hath hitherto advanced’. For Hogarth classical sculpture is the ultimate embodiment of the beautiful. The idea of the serpentine line and smoothly transitioned variety appears very prominently in the design of mid-eighteenth century landscape gardens, and Hogarth’s principles has been closely connected with landscape architect Lancelot Brown. Hogarth’s ideal praxitelean line appears more evidently in the Grecian Valley at Stowe, attributed to Brown (Fig. 10).

Similarly, Edmund Burke’s aesthetic principles of beauty (‘clearness’) and sublime (‘obscurity’) had a profound repercussion at a crucial moment in the maturation of the landscape garden. Reacting against the mathematical basis of beauty as exemplified by the likes of Pythagoras, Vitruvius, and Palladio, Burke set out to conduct an empirical investigation of the origins of beauty. In his Enquiry (1757), he stated that ‘the real cause of beauty’ is to be found in the qualities of smoothness and gentle transition, which appears in ‘the smooth streams in the landscape’ and in ‘fine women smooth skins’. Burke’s essay was published at a time when Brown’s career was reaching its apogee and, indeed, Burke’s himself admired Hogarth’s empirical contribution on the ‘line of beauty’. Furthermore, surrounding the central composition of Fig. 9, Hogarth applied the ‘line of beauty’ to ornaments and female corsets, and, as it has been noticed by many, the lines of a woman’s body were explicitly compared with those of Brown’s iconic landscapes by contemporary visitors. If the beautiful was characterised by gradual variation and smoothness, the sublime, on the other hand, was defined by rugged, masculine forms. From a formal point of view, the landscape garden stands between these aesthetic categories. At Stowe, transitions between smooth open fields and rough dense clusters of trees were encouraged throughout the garden. The upper area, nearer the country house, was much darker, rougher, and narrower than the lower. Here the stream was referred to as Styx, in homage to the great river of Hades. Conversely, the lower area, was bright, light, and open – with ‘smooth grassy lawns giving onto the banks of the gently curving river, widened into a serpentine’. Besides, the contrast between the two parts was further emphasised by the concept design behind this section, for it aimed to create an Elysium, a paradise for heroes (Fig. 11). At the same time, the appeal of curving paths and shapes, and pleasing variety between smoothness/roughness, light/shadow, encountered in the gardens of this period was informed by a close knowledge of Pliny, the Younger’s descriptions of the villa gardens at Tuscanum (Ep. 5.6) and, especially, the coastal one at Laurentum (Ep. 2.17). Robert Castell’s Villas of the Ancients, published in 1729, was a translation with commentary of Pliny’s letters dedicated to Lord Burlington. Commenting on Pliny’s Laurentine villa garden, Castell discussed the imitatio ruris, a ‘mean between regularity and roughness’, suggesting that these sections of Pliny’s garden ‘were possibly thrown into such an agreeable Disorder, as to have pleased the Eye from several Views, like so many beautiful Landskips’. Castell’s graphic interpretation of Pliny’s garden includes little meadows (‘pratulum’) as irregular sections framed by ‘almost circular formal walks bordered by low box hedges’, which would have enabled several views (Fig. 12). This sort of combination of rough and smooth parts, and the circulatory disposition, was codified ‘in the landscape-garden spirit of contrast, variety, and surprise’. More specifically, some scholars have suggested that Castell’s passage stands in direct connection with William Kent’s design for the Elysian Fields at Stowe, commissioned at the beginning of 1730. Pliny’s letters were widely read at this period, and Kent probably knew about Castell’s commentary on the imitatio ruris through the Burlington circle of which Kent was a member, deciding to implement it at Stowe. Eighteenth-century landscape gardens were also reinventing ancient culture by engaging with the modern visual forms of the Greco-Roman literary pastoral tradition. The notion that a landscape garden should look like a landscape painting was encouraged by contemporary aesthetes and writers, such as Joseph Addison, who proclaimed that ‘a Man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions’ (Spectator, 414). Certainly, Addison had in mind the sort of seventeenth-century landscape paintings popularised by Claude Lorrain and Gaspar Dughet, among many others. With their depictions of idealised Italian landscapes adorned with classical buildings, ruins, and small figurines taking part in stories from ancient history and myths, these paintings were promptly re-embodied in the new natural-looking gardens. Landscape gardener William Kent, previously an assiduous painter who had first-hand knowledge of the works of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain when he was in Italy, recreated at Stowe perhaps the most pictorialised temples of antiquity during the modern period: the first-century BC Temples of Vesta and of the Sibyl at Tivoli (Figs. 13 and 14). Located at the lower part of the Elysian Fields, Kent’s small tholos was actually a Temple of Ancient Virtue (Fig. 15), which contained sculptures of victims of state oppression (Socrates, Homer, Lycurgus, and Epaminondas) along with Latin inscriptions that inform the visitor about their importance as ‘paragons of civic virtue’ (Fig. 16).

The transfer of these scenes from a pictorial medium to the three-dimensionality of the garden provided visitors with new and more exciting ways of engaging with the classical world. Likewise, this transmediality also enhanced the visual experience of the viewer tout court, for landscape gardeners not only started experimenting with the pictorial qualities of the landscape – what has been defined as the picturesque – but also with the viewer’s emotions, cognition, and corporeality. In the following section, I will explore the relationship between these two media by focussing on the eighteenth-century reinterpretation of the ancient dictum of ut pictura poesis, which involves analysing the process of seeing a garden as a painting or a sculpture. It became the standard method of approaching art in this period, and presupposed a particular theory of perception that allows for the capacity to perceive real space as if projected on a two-dimensional surface. By perceiving works of art as both ‘the result and the embodiment of a creative process’, eighteenth-century aesthetic responses emphasised how that process is re-elaborated in the mind of viewers.

2. Ut hortus poesis, ut pictura hortus. Landscape gardening and the doctrine of the Sister Arts

Although nowadays landscapes and gardens are primarily correlated to architecture, during the Enlightenment it was far more common to equate gardening with painting and poetry. Indeed, aesthetic discussions about gardens in the eighteenth century revolved around the intellectual debates of the relationship between the arts and upon the ‘classically rooted’ concept of mimesis. In question was how to determine the imitative connection between nature and ‘the self-conscious composition’ of a designed garden. We shall observe how the eighteenth-century investment in ut pictura poesis – based on the idea that poetry, like painting, can bring scenes before the reader’s eyes – had a profound impact in the development and formal configuration of the landscape garden, and how that multi-sensory phenomenon was experienced by visitors. Playing upon the first-century BC Horatian trope (Hor. Ars 361) of ut pictura poesis (‘as is painting, so is poetry’), Horace Walpole famously proclaimed that ‘poetry, painting, and gardening (…) will forever by men of taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who dress and adorn nature’. Understood as a source and model of beauty and goodness, nature is here conceived as the ‘ultimate paradigm’ for imitation in literature and the visual arts. This is especially true in landscape gardens, where both the matter and appearance of nature are reproduced. Likewise, such paradigm concerned itself not just with ‘the external world but the subjective realm of the spirit’. Indeed subjective experience became crucial to interpretations of landscapes in this period as a result of the growing interest in taste. Since taste is variable and based on the interpretations of the beholder, the cultivation of the viewer’s memory became essential for making judgments about beauty: the more memories you could draw from, the richer would be your experience with art. Precisely, the greatest British landscape gardens of the period – Stowe, Stourhead, and Rousham – were praised for their capacity to conjure up the past for experience: for memory and the imagination (the ability to contemplate absent things and past experiences, be them real or fabricated) are visual experiences that can be cultivated. These gardens stimulated memories and associations not only by containing tangible artefacts which emulated past civilisations that could be directly seen, but also by evoking absent works of art in other media of the same themes. The poet Alexander Pope was one of the first to encourage the employment of pictorial techniques in garden design, especially perspective and composition, which he applied in his own landscape garden at Twickenham. ‘You may distance things’, he prescribed, ‘by darkening them and by narrowing the plantation more and more toward the end, in the same manner as they do in painting’ (Spence No. 610). As this view at Castle Howard’s garden shows (Fig. 17), one of the most re-created scenes in the British gardens of the period was the idyllic Arcadia depicted in the seventeenth-century landscape paintings of French painters, such as Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain (Fig. 18). In some gardens the impact of specific landscape paintings or artists is evident, but in others their connection rests merely on the general idea that ‘all gardening is landscape-painting. Just like a landscape hung up’ (No. 606) as Pope observed in 1734 when looking through the entrance arch into the Botanic Garden at Oxford. Pope also found concomitance between landscape gardening and the process of sculpting. When discussing his own garden, Pope commented on the idea of turning a hill into a sculpture: ‘The figure must be in a reclining posture (…) it should be a rude unequal hill, and might be helped with groves and trees for the eyebrows and a wood for the hair’ (No. 618). The series of essays on ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ (1712) by Joseph Addison, published in The Spectator, offer some theoretical keys for understanding how this associative process functioned. Drawing from Newtonian physics and Lockean epistemology, Addison emphasised how important it was to cultivate the imagination as an ‘internal sense that could add pleasure to perception’. More specifically, he brought gardening firmly into Enlightenment philosophy in his ‘Speculations on Nature’, where he states that the garden was designed for, among other things, the play of imagination. Echoing Hobbes’ notion that imagination is the reflection of visible objects – which rests in the ancient idea that visual faculty is the greatest of the senses – Addison argues that our imagination works in two ways. For him, our primary visual impressions of external realities, such as seeing nature and her works, ‘are more pleasant to the Imagination than those of Art’, because such impressions can conjure up secondary imaginative (mental) associations that produce other images, and these could in turn give rise to specific emotions. Indeed, Addison found the association of classical ideas, especially those sparked by Virgil’s Georgics, as a prominent source of pleasure to the eye. In his own words, this kind of poetry ‘addresses itself wholly to the imagination. It is altogether conversant among the fields and woods, and has the most delightful part of Nature for its provinces. It raises in the mind a pleasing variety of scenes and landscapes’. Just as a viewer of a scene in nature or a reader, say, of the Georgics, plays a part in re-creating the image of it in the mind’s eye, poetry could be evoked by the sight of the works of nature. In fact, many gardens in the period were revered by their ability to encapsulate poetic allusions through visual means, which, at the same time, could bring ‘before the eyes’ other mental images depending on the level of education (taste) of the beholder. Furthermore, the free-association between visual impressions and abstract emotions encouraged in visitors to landscape gardens created specific aesthetic experiences, which were not exclusively visual but also psychological. As a result, the power of bringing ‘real nature into view’ shifted from the thing seen – in a painting, sculpture, or verbal representation – to the process of seeing, that is to say, to the imagination itself. This shift had important consequences because it highlighted the paradox implied in the dialect between, in the idiom of philosopher Richard Wollheim, ‘seeing-as’ and ‘seeing-in’ (sight/insight), inherent to our perception of visual representations. Precisely, the following section will show how a landscape garden could be seen as a three-dimensional visual work, but also as a series of real two-dimensional tableaux which would unfold before the visitor’s eyes with his/her motion.

3. The landscape garden at Stourhead: a classicising pictorial tour

From these critical debates about the arts we see clearly that for eighteenth-century epistemology, the experience of the world is created between sense perception (particularly sight) and imagination, and that this became a key tenet in the interpretation of the landscape garden. Since the viewer was now an active participant in the construction of meaning – an educated individual ‘of taste’, rather than a passive receptor – interpreting a landscape garden in all its semantic complexity demanded from visitors a ‘two-foldedness’ where particular aspects of the garden were experienced simultaneously with the past to which it alluded. Above all, the aesthetic experience of these gardens was informed by the production and contemporary consumption of paintings: in fact, the ancient idea that sight is the greatest of the senses permeates the whole century. In this regard, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century visual representations of idyllic pastoral scenes are normally invoked for explaining the origins of the landscape garden and how to decode it. The visual repertoire of these paintings, which is comprised of idealised representations of the Roman campagna inspired especially by Virgil’s pastoral world, is undoubtedly present in many landscape gardens. The landscape garden at Stourhead, Wiltshire, offers a paradigm of transmediality. Initiated by banker Henry Hoare II in 1735 in a deep valley around a twenty-acre artificial lake (Figs. 19), constructed by damming the River Stour, the garden at Stourhead channelled the gaze inward to intimate views across the central mass of water (Fig. 20). Located three hundred metres west of a Palladian country house (1725), the garden was arranged according to a circuit route which leads visitors to a set of views and experiences relating to events from Virgil’s Aeneid ordered in a counter-clockwise direction (Fig. 9). At the same time, the mythical narration of the founder of Rome was intermingled with that of King Alfred, the founder of England. In 1785, the estate was inherited by Richard Colt Hoare, who increased the ‘palette of plant materials’ as new exotic species arrived to England (e.g. Rhododendros) and modified the main walk structure. Apart from these minimal changes, Stourhead has preserved its original composition. The central valley possesses a ‘double visual structure’, combining ‘axial and circuitous, serial views’ arranged around a lake which reflected the scenes. The axial emphasis is stationary, framing views of classical and gothic structures – which acted as strategic visual anchors staged in the circuit path across the mirroring pool, – and encouraging movement. Visitors would move through the circuit path, while being induced into a ‘slow-motion vision and tactile experience (going up and down)’ along a set of shifting vistas, proving ‘sequential and gradual discovery of the various features involved’. As Hunt comments, Stourhead was a location that incited both pleasure and reflection, which demanded ‘to be explored, its surprises, and unsuspected corners to be discovered on foot’. The tour begins at the front of the house, which in 1744 was presided over by a sculpture based on the Apollo Belvedere located towards a vista of the doomed temple dedicated to that same god, and ends at the village inn. At the western end of the east-west axis appears the main scene of the garden, which is constructed around the Temple of Hercules, a Palladian building inspired by the Pantheon in Rome (Fig. 21). The vista is a virtual embodiment of and response to Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Aeneas at Delos (Fig. 24), who painted it along with another five stories of Aeneas. In the painting, the main figures – presumably Apollo’s priest, Anchises, Aeneas, and Ascanius – are set up against a rustic landscape and framed by another architectural quote of the Pantheon and a structure in Tuscan order (Fig. 25). At the same time, Claude’s work is also responding to both Virgil’s description in book III of the Aeneid and, especially, Ovid’s narration of the hero’s flight from burning Troy (Met. XIII). In fact, at Stourhead the Temple of Apollo – which marks the end of the pictorial circuit – is quite different from the one depicted by Claude’s (Fig. 26). It is, in fact, a direct quote of the recently discovered Temple of Venus at Baalbek, engravings of which were already being distributed across Europe (Fig. 27). However, in the garden, the above-mentioned scene is just a possibility among many, as the Pantheon can be seen from multiple angles depending on the viewer’s position; not to mention that natural processes are constantly affecting the way the landscape looks in terms of lighting, shape, and colour. Hoare employed firs and beeches to obtain colour contrast and depth and followed Pope’s prescription to plant trees ‘in large masses as shades are in a painting’. Accordingly, various ‘picture-like’ compositions, with a foreground, middle ground and background, can be admired. The principal appeal of the above-mentioned artworks, including the garden, for British aristocrats was that of portable mementos, treasured souvenirs dotted with all sorts of visual and textual allusions of their travels through historical classical lands. Hoare’s himself undertook a tour through Italy, right before coming back to Britain and create his garden, which he designed without the assistance of landscape architects. Indeed, the cultural capital he acquired included antiquities, books, and paintings of mythological subjects in classical landscapes, all of which were duly embodied throughout Stourhead’s garden.

Leaving aside the long views obtained from the bridge, the winding path continued through an area of woodland, leading to a grotto at the edge of the lake with sculptures of a river god, the Stour, and a sleeping nymph. It included a series of caverns and bath-cisterns made by Joseph Lane of Tisbury and was covered by pieces of sponge stone, which imitated gnarled tufa limestone. The entrance is presided by a Latin inscription from Virgil’s Aeneid (I, 167-8): ‘Ictus acquae dulces vivoque sedilia saxo, Nympharum domus’, which was complemented with Pope’s English translation of Cardinal Bembo’s words which alluded to the nymph. The nymph was a white-leaded version, made in 1766 by John Cheere, of the famous Vatican Ariadne/Cleopatra, a Roman response of a Hellenistic Pergamene work of 200 BC, recently reclassified by Wincklemann as an Ariadne (Fig. 28). Ovid’s episode of Daphne and Peneus (Met. I, 574 ff) was also invoked in a wooden plaque located above the river god Stour, which no longer exists. Clearly this allusion would have set out the grotto as Peneus’ cave, bringing in the mind the moment when Daphne prayed her father to be transformed. Views across the lake to the Tuscan tetra-prostyle Temple of Flora could be seen through one of the three openings of the grotto wall, along with a sculpture of Neptune guiding his horses which was located in the lake itself. Elsewhere has been argued that the path is an evocation of Aeneas’ journey to the Underworld as narrated in Virgil’s poem, and indeed along the lake’s path there are several inscribed citations from the Aeneid. According to this, the idyllic garden’s lake would be the infernal Lake Avernus, and the grotto the entrance to Hades. However, just as there are several compositions dissolving into each other, the garden provides multiple, transmedial, and inexhaustible meanings and meetings with mythotypical views. The impressive tableau of Neptune’s rearing horses calming a body of water would have sparked in visitors Virgil’s famous interjection ‘quos ego’ (Aen. I, 135), uttered by the god in threat to Aeolus for raising a storm against Aeneas’ fleet. This sculpture, ‘full of spirit’, might have portrayed an active and violent Neptune brandishing his trident (Fig. 29), while the serene aqueous landscape in which it was set up alluded to the depicted episode’s aftermath: the god’s will has been followed and the winds have abated. Such scene would have connoted a sense of tranquillity similar to the one sculpted by Giambologna in Bologna, which presents the god in rest after having calmed the waves. The lake could be Avernus, evoking Aeneas’ visit to the Underworld, as shows this painting made in 1798 by Turner based on a view of this very lake (Fig. 30), but seen from a different section it might also embody Aeneas’ moment of horror before the tempest approaches as he sailed south of Sicily. Here we attend to the collapse of several storylines, which become physical and metaphorical constructions. Besides, the numerous circuitry walks around the lake were connected by boating itineraries, a usual way to enjoy landscapes in this period – which would offer a completely different experience of the shifting views of the episodes. In this sense, the garden at Stourhead is acting as a catalyst of textual and visual allusions to classical antiquity in manifold ways. Firstly, the whole park is an allegorised visual (re-)presentation of a verbal representation, which contains several others visual presentations of (painted and sculpted) visual representations. At the same time, the paintings to which the natural scenes of the garden respond to are modern visual interpretations of ancient literary passages. All the images allude to travels: imaginary and real, literary, and visual. This concatenation of visual and textual scenes required viewers to be informed of a wide array of ancient and modern materials. Such transmedial and extravisual references would rise from their own past experiences, through a direct contact with the classical world, and/or from their educational imaginational matrix. Although it is frequently assumed that the mechanics of viewing real gardens and landscape paintings operate in exactly the same ways, eighteenth-century garden theorists and architects were well aware that to see with the imagination did not merely involve visualising, but also bodily somatic experience. In Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld’s Theorie der Gardenkunst (1785), the most influential German language garden literature of the period, he draws attention to the beholder’s perception and stresses that ‘(extra)visual’ forms of experience, such as movement, are equally important. Indeed, the landscape garden’s design was anything but static. Buildings and sculptures were strategically placed in order to create vistas that incited viewers to move into the space, that is to say, to physically walk ‘into the picture and into the picturing’. Like many of his contemporaries, Hirschfeld valued the pictorial qualities of such scenes, their gradual unfolding and the mechanism by which we completely visualise them, usually comparing natural vistas with landscape paintings. That is, he regards landscape gardens as a series of framed images comparable to ‘static visual compositions viewed from specified vantage points’. But he judged landscape gardens to be superior to paintings due to their ‘potentially greater effect’, which was enhanced by the varied elements of motion. In this regard, the garden is also considered ‘in deambulatory space and peripatetic vision’, as a mobile and bodily experience. Paramount to the experience of the landscape garden was its three-dimensionality and its capacity to generate sceneries, made of several images, that changed constantly as the visitor’s ‘movement remade the garden’s own shifting perspectives’. Therefore, conversely to the relationship between beholder and landscape painting, which involves a visual relation and a single position for the viewer, the challenge in landscape gardens (as three-dimensional and extra-visual artworks) is to determine the visitor’s ‘changeable location and variable perceptual structures’. In brief, for Hirschfeld, a work of nature is not merely something to be read, or looked at, but, above all, a spatial creation to be moved through.

In the case of Stourhead, it is important to take into account how the various focal points that capture the viewer’s attention are related to the course of the circuit walk. On one hand, there are varying intervals between the principal viewpoints, each of them with a precise timing; on the other, there is a sense of ‘going upward and downward’: a descent to the grotto, an ascent to the Pantheon and steep climb to the Temple of Apollo. Here the ‘ambulatory experience’ of the garden’s depth is constantly undermining the illusory pictorialism inherent in the various axial viewpoints. Motion is constantly reduced to stasis, and vice versa, according to the free play of the visitor’s imagination. In so doing, the landscape garden is challenging dualities such as place and space, space and time, and object and process. By employing several media to create narrative and aesthetic experiences, the landscape garden offers the visitor multiple simultaneous perspectives of the same scene or concurrent scenes. Compared to a framed picture, the landscape garden is ‘choreographed for a wandering eye’ and a ‘moving body’. Formulated around the same time, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon offered a different example dependent on the position of the viewers. If landscape gardens framed territory by disguising the absence of boundaries – providing their perceived and celebrated sense of freedom – the panopticon afforded an enclosed surveillance device as a model of discipline. Whereas the former exploited ‘the moving’s body multiplicity and perspectival complexity’, the latter created ‘a diagram for total visibility with relatively fixed positions for observed and observer’ (Fig. 31). Modern paintings and formal gardens employed a similar set of visual conventions, based on a centralised viewpoint, in order to extend perception ‘beyond visible locals’ and reduce temporal relations to spatial relations. Conversely to the intersecting walks of the older formal garden, the landscape garden provided that ‘a single path only, ought to conduct the spectator to every scene’. As Hogarth remarks, serpentine lines excite more the attention of the viewer because they connote liveliness and movement, whereas parallel and straight lines imply stasis, death, or inanimate objects. The circuit walk enabled the creation of a truly sequenced experience, by which different, but ordered, images were carefully unfolded to the visitor as he/she moved in and through a routed walk. The landscape garden brought alive the classic tradition in a way never experienced before in Britain.

Beyond time and space – The classical as uncorrupted nature

As we have seen, the complex representational character of gardens, where the product and the medium are indistinguishable, made landscape gardens a fecund subject of philosophical debates, increasing their desirability as a visual and material artistic possession. The eighteenth-century project of defining beauty, especially in analysing its effects, provoked a dynamic shift from emphasizing a finished piece of art to focussing on the materialisation of the creative process, and how this process was received and reimagined by the beholder. In the landscape garden, the effects of beauty could be empirically tested, for what is represented is required to be admired visually and experientially. Most fundamentally of all, by blurring the distinction between artifice and nature, the landscape garden was a way of naturalising the cultural ideals of antiquity – embodied in their neoclassical structures and the garden general ethos as a celebration of ‘European rationality and moderation’ – and the power of their prosperous owners, whose social status and wealth were rooted in the natural resources of the territory. Although since the Renaissance the classical had become with confidence the standard of the beautiful, the landscape gardens of the first half of the eighteenth century contributed to make it the ultimate Idealtypus of western visual culture. Indeed, by the middle of the eighteenth-century, Britain’s engagement with the antique would have resounding effects on British and colonial imagery and architecture to the current day - as the capitals of Anglophone culture still march forward in their white marble clad augustness, providing their powerful allusions to classical tastes and political and legal values. To this regard, a study of the landscape garden, with its unique way of engaging with and re-elaborate the ancient world, contribute to confront ‘monolithic constructions of the classical’, a category which is often still invested with some timeless ‘aesthetic exemplarity’. Classical, and indeed Neoclassical, materials are considered ‘part of something bigger’ and as such, they are frequently examined without considering neither their origins and intended functions, nor their subsequent formal changes across time and interpretations in different socio-cultural contexts. In this sense, classical reception and garden studies’ emphasis on the beholder’s active role in apprehending and interpreting meanings, which are always shifting, can contribute to a better understanding of the complex and many classical revivals that took place during the eighteenth century. Reflecting upon a visit to a British landscape garden, Italian poet Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730-1808) stated that its ‘perpetual succession of scenes (…) speak to the eyes, to the imagination, and to the heart of the viewer, and arouse pleasant memories, revived sensations of unexpected wonder, or carry them in a delicious and almost ecstatic escape’. Such comments suggest that the reactions elicited by the classicism of landscape garden had a Romantic allure. Indeed, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the landscape garden not only embodied and collapsed idealised representations of the classical in the manner of Poussin or Claude, but also depicted a more romantic view of antiquity. This was reflected in the inclusion of ruins, such as decaying Greco-Roman buildings, lichen-covered Palladian bridges, or dark grottoes that triggered a nostalgic longing for a lost Golden Age. By the end of the century, Britain embodied a series of strange paradoxes, being the most urbanised and industrialised country in the world, ‘yet one where the yearning for the countryside and rural values was most developed’. Nostalgia for rural life in an age of change is hardly a novelty, but a recurrent topos that permeates Western intellectual history. Tempting as it might be to assume such a conceit, the relationship between city and countryside – which has been defined in very simple terms by considering the former as ‘man-made’ and the later as ‘more natural’ – is a more complex and porous one, tied to historical relations and to changing myths of the urban and the pastoral. The landscape garden came to embody the quintessential locus amoenus of the modern era: a utopian vision of what an ideal landscape might be ‘in impulse, design, and meaning’. An idyllic landscape that adjusts to an extraordinarily redolent notion of the innate relations between nature and culture, a primal Eden or Elysium in which untamed nature serves ‘as an object of aesthetic contemplation’. At the same time, as the landscape garden operates in relation to the other arts, especially landscape painting - which played a crucial role in the development of these gardens in the first place - it cannot be analysed as an isolated artistic phenomenon. It requires interpretation alongside ancient and modern poetry, painting, architecture, and sculpture. In other words, the transmediality of gardens requires an interdisciplinary approach that would consider how the medial qualities of the other arts relate to each other, one that would advocate for the mixed nature of all media. Despite the impact of landscape gardens on the propagation of Greco-Roman antiquity being less effective than that of paintings and texts due to the limitations of their medium (the natural world), which required more economic resources and time to build and visit them, landscape gardens did play a crucial role in disseminating ancient visual culture. In a time before public galleries and museums, it is important to consider the public dimension of landscape gardens, for they afforded members of the public, especially those from lower British social strata, to view the gardens and the works of art held in them. Since its creation, the garden at Stourhead featured an inn to provide visitors accommodation and remained open all year round. Among the visitors to the garden at Stourhead were painters, like Coplestone Warre Bampfylde or William Turner, who found inspiration in their combination of seventeenth-century classical pictorial tradition along with classicising buildings and ancient statuary. Likewise, Stourhead also attracted elite travel, widely influencing other European landscape gardens, like the gardens at Wörlitz in Germany and Hagaparken in Stockholm.

This new economic activity can be regarded justly as the innovation of Enlightenment pilgrimage: a tourism secularised yet sanctified to a humanist, aspirational, scholarly and cultural literatti, and clearly heralding the spirit of the dawning Romantic movements that would soon change the face of European arts, philosophy, and culture forever. Nowhere is this turn to the beholder clearer than the grounds at Stowe and especially Stourhead, where viewers are immersed participants. In the pictorial circuit at Stourhead, space unravels in crescendo as several focal points draw the beholder’s imagination and attention, creating a ‘cinematic experience’. By reformulating and renegotiating ancient visual and material culture, gardens make absent things present to viewers in a tangible way, but also in a figurative way, spurring the viewer’s imagination. Like in theatrical performances, contemplation is a kind of participation. Landscape gardens not only alluded to classical artefacts, ideals, and stories but encouraged visitors to reimagine them, co-creating, and re-creating meanings. At the same time, by underscoring bodily interactions and reactions, gardens enriched the aesthetic experience of viewers: this allowed the visitor to admire framed pictorial views as shifting, moving compositions. Moreover, they have an intense phenomenal character, for factors such as light, space, and time determine how, the visual and textual elements alluded in the garden are perceived by the viewer. Therefore, every time a viewer would visit a garden it would be a different experience. This is precisely the landscape garden’s power to transmit the classical world’s mystique - their unpredictability and lack of fixed meanings - providing them the ability to engage more deeply with the beholder than works of art in other media.