ABSTRACT
Planned landscapes of the kind built in the Renaissance and the Baroque eras are thrilling. They enclose, delight, soothe, elevate, and resolve their own puzzles right before you. They have views, objects, arrays, are vast or small; they are thorough, and, even when they are left unfinished or unkept, they satisfy. While these gardens have predecessors in the Islamic and Medieval worlds, they do not really have the precedents we would expect if we found that Renaissance and Baroque gardens were only bigger and grander than those earlier or elsewhere. After you have seen Italy’s Boboli Gardens, the garden at the Villa Lante, or the Villa d’Este, you quickly realize that explanation does not lie in finding precedents. Renaissance gardens say and accomplish something different. They are bigger, more complete, and active. They work on you. They were designed to achieve an effect on the viewer, who may have thought he was a viewer but who was actually a participant.
