Le jardin pastoral et merveilleux de Torquato Tasso - in english

Torquato Tasso (Le Tasse) (1544-1595) created the archetype of the love garden in his Jerusalem Delivered (1581), at the very heart of the Christian epic. In songs XV and XVI, the crusader knight Renaud is discovered by his companions Carlo and Ubaldo in the arms of the sorceress Armide. As an extension of the seductress's palace, the gardens, with their scents and freshness, the harmonious sound of flowing water and birdsong, exerted a considerable influence on literature and the arts. Voltaire, in his great epic poem La Henriade (1728), drew on it extensively, in Canto IX, where, caught in the arms of Gabrielle d'Estrées, Henri IV is reminded of his duty by Duplessis-Mornay. The exuberant nature described by Le Tasse, in a quest for harmony and diversity, also inspired Aminta, the pastoral he composed in the early 1570s for the court of Ferrara. His gardens and groves insinuate the marvellous into the demands for perfection and symmetry of Renaissance architecture, opening up a subtle dialectic of passions and virtue.

"The "glasses" of Giusto Utens

Between 1599 and 1602, commissioned by the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinand I, the painter Just (or Giusto) Utens painstakingly executed a series of views of Medicean villas. Fourteen of these seventeen "lunettes", which were to be placed between the spandrels of the vaulted ceiling of the main salon in the Villa d'Artimino, still survive today, a sign of the masters' hold over the area.
A Flemish artist living in Pisa and then Carrara, Utens was influenced both by the mural paintings of Medici palaces and residences and by the "bird's-eye" views of vast areas he mastered thanks to his mastery of cartographic techniques, following in the footsteps of Antonio Tempesta and his famous plan of Rome (1593).
The invention of the Italian garden from the 15th century onwards found a decisive stimulus in the system of Medici villas. Its celebratory function flourished at Boboli, Castello and Pratolino. The garden was the place where nature and artifice met, in the variety of species and the quest for pleasure, with a predilection for poetry and pastoral drama, which flourished at the Medici court around 1600.