The Three Natures: Gardens and Landscapes of the Italian Renaissance

In the middle of the sixteenth century, humanist Jacopo Bonfadio referred to gardens as "a third nature," as distinct from the landscapes of agriculture and habitation or the primordial if notional wilderness. This idea, newly resonant today in the age of climate change, elevated the art of gardening to a model of collaboration between human and natural worlds. Having no precedent in the literature of antiquity, Bonfadio's metaphor was the most original Renaissance attempt to define the place of gardens within the order of nature as a unique symbiotic product of this ongoing dialogue. This book, focused on fifteenth- through seventeenth-century Italy, revives Bonfadio's emphasis on the collaborative ethics of environmental relationships as key to understanding the early modern modes of cultural appropriation of the natural world. At the center of this discussion are various ways in which gardens captured the variety of manifestations of nature, couched in the language and categories of contemporary experience. Written by an interdisciplinary team of scholars including some of the leading authorities in the field, this book shows how garden design and meaning were instrumentalized in such diverse contexts as elite collecting, natural philosophy, artistic practice, poetic discourse, medical theory, and religious imagination, laying out new theoretical frameworks for explaining the centrality of these green spaces in fashioning social, gender, and regional identities.