ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the garden as topos—political, religious, and literary—worked with the garden as designed topography in Renaissance Italy. It shows how inherited topological significance from classical literature and theology was transformed as the garden became a setting for cultural renovation, materialized in recovered antique remains and enlivened by theatricals. It charts the development of the garden as a scene from a fluid, allusive topos to a more conceptual scheme where the visitor’s movement and responses are pre-scripted. The garden thus is a key site for exploring the role of theatre as paradigm in pre-modern culture which both holds metaphoric richness and carries instrumental, generalizing tendencies. Moving through innovative readings of the great Roman Renaissance gardens, the chapter examines the organizing role of nymph figures and themes, the developing conception of the garden visitor as an anonymous public, the accommodations and tensions between poetic, political, and devotional aspects of planned topographies, and the relation between garden and city. Underpinning and linking these themes are the questions of how nature is conceived and revealed within the garden and of what we become within it.
