Fountains, Statues, and Flowers: Studies in Italian Gardens of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

The essays contained in this volume celebrate Elisabeth MacDougall's contributions to garden history and her sixteen-year tenure as Director of the Center for the History of Gardens and Landscape at Dumbarton Oaks. The first section of this study, devoted to Roman sixteenth-century gardens, contains seven essays published between 1972 and 1989. Significantly, these essays are not published in chronological order; rather they are arranged thematically so that, aided by an introduction, they become a near-seamless succession of self-referencing chapters, as if planned as a book.

In her introductory remarks, Mac-Dougall defines the Renaissance gardens of Rome as unique due to special urban and social structures. Socially, Rome was non-dynastic and massively clerical. Provided they invested in the papal states, church officers could transfer the wealth garnered from their offices to their families. The urban topography was also special; the city population was squeezed into a bend on the fiver, denying garden space in the core of the city to all but the immensely wealthy. Conversely, this situation, combined with Rome's shrunken population, left peripheral land within the ancient walls available for villas and their attendant gardens (termed "intraurban" by MacDougall). These elaborated intra-urban gardens were, in a sense, a prelude to the even more extensive outlying ex-urban areas, where - in counter-distinction to the developments in most of Italy - even larger formal gardens, rather than agricultural plantations, were the norm.

Three of the most informative essays in part 1 of this book are Giardino all'Antico," "Ars Hortulorum," and "Imitation and Invention." In these sections we are treated to wonderfully enlightening observations. Of paramount importance among them is a change in sixteenth-century attitude, from referencing the classical world by placing fragments of antique sculpture in the garden to the imitation of that idealized civilization by reconstructing ancient sculptures and often carving their themes anew. As MacDougall notes: "At the beginning of the century the garden was the place where statues were displayed with little regard for any kinds of arrangements. . . chronological, geographical or topical. By the end of the century the garden and its design had become the focus of interest and the antiquities had become decorations" (25). But had they become mere "decorations?" In the same essay MacDougall posits a shift in the perception of the antique statue that is revealing: the antique piece - even if used as accent within the larger garden design - is desired to be seen as a reconstituted whole. The statues or their fragments were not left as found; rather they were restored and "parts were added to make a statue complete, an indication that mere antiquity was no longer satisfactory" (30). Clearly the intent was literally to restore the past - to relive it, not merely to recall it.

The second section of this book takes the reader to the seventeenth century, but not in ways directly related to the elegantly interlocking essays devoted to the previous century. Here, in brief, we move first to Turin to visit the richly documented but now virtually lost Villa Reale. This essay, like the second one in this section, is here published for the first time.

In her concluding essay MacDougall presents the reader with a special treat, both textual and visual. Entitled "A Cardinal's Bulb Garden: A Giardino Segreto at the Palazzo Barberini," this essay explores an inventory of Cardinal Antonio Barberini's (1607-71) bulb garden and two additional manuscripts, one devoted to horticultural practice and also dedicated to Cardinal Antonio, and another, a florilegium or flower painting album dedicated to his older brother, Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1679). A veritable bouquet of illustrations from the latter manuscript is reproduced in magnificent full color, and constitutes a fining tribute to the author of these essays.

MALCOLM CAMPBELL University of Pennsylvania