 Today, we're going to continue talking about mannerism and specifically mannerist gardens. But I just wanted to review some basic issues surrounding mannerism. And that is that it represents a continuation of the language of classical architecture. The language, the typology, but there's a different ambition. If classical architecture, high Renaissance architecture was all about stability and creating a system of proportions and order that reaffirmed your ability to think that reason is a good vehicle for accessing the world, then mannerism begins to pull apart that and deal with tensions and irreconcilable differences rather than these great unified systems. And we looked a little bit last time at mannerist painting, like this painting by Bronzino, the allegory of love, where we saw that many of the things that go on in Renaissance painting are held consistent. For example, it's an allegorical theme, something the Neoplatonists would have been very enthusiastic about, where you take figures from classical antiquity and you allow them to represent abstract notions. But one thing we noticed immediately is that the space is not the clear, carved out, parsed out, perspectival space of Renaissance architecture and Renaissance painting, but rather everything is just tangled and flattened right against the picture plane. It's also true that in Renaissance painting, there tends to be a unified time, a unified place, and a unified action. You know exactly what's going on and the geometry of the composition tends to reinforce that. Nice, clear pyramid, nice, clear centerline. And here it's really hard to know exactly who all these people are and how they're all implicated in the allegory of love. It's even hard to know what space they're acting and it seems as though there is no space at all for their actions to take place. And so the actions are ambiguous, the figures are ambiguous, their role is ambiguous. And so you look at this and you don't come away from it having any clear understanding of what's going on. We mentioned last time that one of the best vehicles for exploring mannerist themes is in fact garden architecture. And one of the reasons for that is that it automatically puts into action a juxtaposition between landscape and architecture. And so the task of landscape architecture is sorting out this difference between nature and culture. We saw that Viñola, Giacomo Barocsi Viñola over here has done a number of gardens and also written a treatise on architecture that for my money isn't that interesting. Another treatise that came out alive was written by Sebastiano Serlio and I think that one's a lot more interesting. And in Serlio's treatise he discusses rustication specifically as a tool that architects can use to negotiate this difference between nature and culture. Serlio specifically says that rustication is used to represent the hand of nature. If you have a building with a rusticated base that represents the forces of nature, the kind of wildness of nature, overcoming the craft, the polish, the architectural intervention of man and having its way. So every time you see rustication this argument is being set into play. Another thing that mannerists probably noticed and probably responded to was the idea that Rome was falling apart. It still is falling apart. If you walk around the Roman Forum you don't see complete buildings but you see ruins. This is a sketch from 1509 by a northern artist called Jan Gosart. And you can see that the Colosseum here is in ruins. It's falling apart. Keystones are sliding down. Columns are hung in the air. The kinds of tensions, the kinds of disequilibria that architects like Giulio Romano are playing with in the plato that we looked at last time, exist in the decrepitude of the Roman Forum and are of interest. And I think that that might be one source. We looked last time at the Villa Giulia in Rome, just on the outskirts of Rome. And we saw a number of themes. And these are themes that we first encountered when we looked at the Belvedere by Bramante in Rome at the Vatican. And we saw again at the Villa Giulia. And they are architecture as frame. That the role of architecture in these Manorist gardens tends not to be a pavilion or an object in the garden or a destination, but really a kind of frame that measures out the space that you move through and might act as a filter or a threshold or a boundary between different conditions. We also noticed that the theme of the ground plane was something that got manipulated. So that depending on where you are in the landscape, you discover different conditions of, let's say, order, architecture, clarity, geometry, or culture, or let's say, or nature, the irregularity, the roughness of the natural world. And you see things like grottoes, for example, these wet, damp, rock encrusted places that represent nature with rustication and wildness, overtaking culture. We began to see the idea of water coming into play, and we'll see a lot more of that. Some other themes we noticed were displaced centers. And a displaced center has to do with a path that doesn't stipulate simply one point, but varied points. And as you move from point to point to point along these gardens, you frequently find yourself encountering variations on a theme. That at one moment where a center is implied, you see one thing, you move to the next point, and the thing that you just saw gets presented to you in a different way. And some of the things that you keep seeing, for example, are the Paradise Garden. The idea of this ideal four-square centralized garden with the Occupiable Center that is pulled apart or fragmented or played with in different ways so that you're constantly trying to recover the center. And one of the themes of the Manorist Garden is to deny you that center. And so forth. So this is just the Villa Giulia that we looked at last time. And we noticed that immediately in the Villa Giulia, there was a juxtaposition being put into play by the way it sits in its ground plane. Here we have a road, the Via Flaminia taking you into the city. And we have one face of the Villa Giulia that's very hard edge, very architectural, and then a kind of dissolution of the building as it moves into its landscape. And it doesn't simply dissolve in plan, but it also dissolves in section. What we see here in this plan looks like a figure on a flat terrain. But in fact, it's carved in even the whole body of this building is sunk in the ground and the stuff on either side is higher up. You can kind of get a sense of it from this section, that these trees are starting over here. So not only is this grotto, this center that we looked at last time excavated and carved into the ground. But this becomes a special carved delimited moment within a more continuous or rural landscape of Villa Giulia. And this constant displacement of center. You see this facade, you see this ABA, this kind of perfect Renaissance construct. And you think you know what you're going to get, you think this will deliver a courtyard, and the courtyard will allow you to occupy the center. And you pop through. And it is as if the bottle has been uncorked, or the pickle to quote Doug Graff has been removed from the pickle jar. So there's this evacuation of space, and the suggestion of the thing that once filled it, even in the way this fairly bad drawing is done, you can begin to see different implications of where the center would be. This is half a circle. This must be the center. No, pay no attention to that. This is kind of a square. This must be the center. But these are not equal. There's a stretching. Pay no attention to that. And then you move on and you get to something that's half a circle must be the center. No, it's cut in half. And the whole game moves you back, moves you back, moves you back until you finally come to a point of reconciliation, at the very point that the architecture has given way to the natural construct at that moment, order in the in the form of the four square garden can take place. So it's kind of it's kind of great. It's kind of really well orchestrated, really well crafted. And it uses these thresholds, these variations on a theme. And in this case, one of the themes is the idea of the triumphal arch. You come here, you see a triumphal arch, a variation on it, a variation on it, variation on a variation on a variation on a variation on it. And even when you look at the grotto in plan, you begin to see the motif of the arch framed by a kind of trabeated pairing, except it's a plan diagram rather than an elevation diagram. So even the idea that something that properly exists as an elevation can be equally well deployed to organize plan is hilarious and highly mannerist. So here's the Villa Giulia on the exterior. And the facade really seems like you could find something like this in Rome, you could find something like this in Florence, it seems to be all about making edge all about making wall. And really, that's kind of funny given where it is, and where it is is in the middle of the countryside. So it has this kind of mask almost that you penetrate through, and you discover this other world. Maybe this illustration begins to show you how this is situated in the topography with these gardens on either side being elevated with respect to the center. Even the painting program, and this is the painting inside the hemicycle begins to suggest that there is this encroachment of nature into the space of architecture. So that where you think you're inside an architectural construct, in fact, nature or the forms of nature have been given dominance. Looks like a little trellis, for example. Here you can see some of the variations on the idea of the triumphal arch. And one thing that happens in a very deliberate way is it moves from a motif that's primarily about the wall to a motif that becomes more and more dematerialized, more and more columnar. By the way, this columnar variation of a triumphal arch has its own specific name. And that is serliana, like serlio, the architect, but Anna, because he draws this motif again and again. Let's look at another garden by Viñola. And this is the Villa Farnese in Caprarola. It's partway between Rome and Florence, let's say. This is the plan of the Villa Caprarola. On one level, you might be inclined to say, well, this is a great plan. It is an idealized geometry. It seems to adhere very well to the precepts of Renaissance architecture. Not only do we have a nice pentagon, but we also have nice little square towers, and we have this really, really nice circle. So it would suggest that all the deformations that we've come to expect from Manorist architecture probably will not be happening here. However, the Villa Farnese is a project for the Farnese, and we already have encountered a Farnese project, the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. This is not the Villa Farnese. The Palazzo Farnese in Rome is urban. It's a square donut. And it in many ways attains the ideal geometrical form for a Palazzo. It's a square donut. You stand in the square and you perceive this thing in a way that's kind of like this. You see this big facade, and because your vantage point is where it is, you don't really see the sides of it. You see this big facade, but your brain knows enough about architecture to say, probably a big rectilinear form. So when you encounter the Villa Farnese in Capriorola, you might be inclined to have the same reading. And in fact, when you see it, you see really just one facade. Your position doesn't allow you to see more than, let's say, two sides at once, and you correct it in your mind, perceptually you think what must be a big rectilinear volume. It's almost as if Viñola is playing with perspective, playing with the conventions of perspective to situate the building and its landscape in a particularly powerful way. This is Vitruvian man, whom we know very well, and this is the Albertian window with the grid and the graph paper down below, as drawn by a Northern Renaissance artist, Albrecht Dürer. And actually, this is a really interesting thing because it shows you how it works. He has this place to position his head, so his eye will always be at the same place so that when he draws the figure, he won't be moving his head around and getting the perspective out of whack. But what the perspective begins to show you is that there is something about converging lines. There's something about the pentagon or the trapezoid or the irregular form that can, in pictorial space, in the two-dimensional space of a representation, begin to look like it is orthogonal, Villa Caparola, and some sections. I just want to show you some aerial views of this. Here it is. There's a ridge, a little tiny town, one big road, which is named the Straight Road, that connects to a big plaza. And at the end of the plaza, we have this pentagonal villa with a round circle in the center. So it really almost looks like it's another one of these games of taking the pickle out of the pickle jar or taking an object out of a space, like we saw at the Villa Giulia. But now the thing that sets up the whole argument is not this artificial series of walls, but the construct of the entire city. There's this confined path, there's a kind of splaying trapezoidal space, and bang, out pops this thing. And when you see it, you think, well, it is, in fact, this flat facade, which is what you're confronted with all the way down the street. But notice what you get by having this pentagon instead of a square. You get two backs instead of one. In something like the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, you have a front urban facade and a back garden facade. You come in here and you get the garden, but you also get the secret garden. So there's a doubling of the garden. So two paradises for the price of one. Fabulous. When we were talking about diagramming and showing examples of how to use diagrams to understand the organization of a building, we looked at a couple of diagrams that had to do with this building. And I think these are pretty good ones. I think these were done by Angela Sutton years ago. You don't even know who that is. But if she ever listens to this, she'll know she got credit. A square and then the city peeling away. And as the city peels away, the space becomes this perspectival cone of vision and out shoots from that perspectival cone of vision a deformed trapezoid. But the trapezoid reorganizes itself now that it's free of the constraints of the city into a new idealized geometrical form, the pentagon. And as the pentagon, it begins to have the freedom to sponsor multiple gardens. So there's a kind of clever clarity about the way the organization avoids insolence within the site work. The courtyard is helpful. This is a round courtyard and you would say ideal figure, got it. But the round courtyard is also deranging, let's say, you walk into an orthogonal courtyard and you understand where you are. You're oriented because there are edges that are parallel or perpendicular to where you are. If you walk into a round courtyard, you're not as well oriented. And this whole task of disorienting you is aided by the fact that there's a big staircase here that is a circular staircase. So your procession through the space comes in here, you walk through this circular staircase and then you pop out into a round courtyard and you have no idea where you are. And so you could go that way and find one garden or that way and find another garden. I think it's instructive also to look at the way in this aerial view, it almost seems as though the ground plain is a series of trays or a series of drawers that have been pulled out. And as you pull out these different drawers, you get different conditions of the building. It's sort of like Saralio's idea about rustication, that you find one thing high up, you find another thing touching the ground. Notice there are these great, almost, I don't know, fortification walls that this thing sits on, bastions that the block of the building itself sits on that act as retaining walls to make possible these gardens behind it because the site's really sloping. But even in the front there's a ground plain, this is the line of the bastions, this is a big stair, here's another ground plain, here's another ground plain. And as you move through the space you constantly get different readings of the thing. Your view is bracketed away, like if you're standing here you begin to see this as the first part of the building that you read. This fairly ideal, fairly refined, fairly finished part of the building. You don't see this rough bastion from certain vantage points. But then as you come up here you begin to be able to read the entire thing. So ground plain plays an incredibly significant role here. Here's an example. Here's the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, which is our paradigm for an ideal Renaissance Palazzo. And this is what we see as we approach the Villa Farnese from that first level. We see something that looks, well, normative. Even though we can kind of see the sides canting out, we can't figure it out too well. And as we get higher up we begin to see yet a different scheme. By the way if you'll notice on these different photographs the building is different colors. And this to me is heartbreaking because all of Italy used to be this kind of rusty colored brownish orange. And then post-modernists got in control of the Fine Arts Commission. And so they began to have controls over how you could repaint buildings. And they would send kids around with pocket knives that, well kids, meaning employees, architecture students, who would cut through the levels of paint to find out what the original paint color was. And if they found something pink or peach colored they would stop and say let's go with that. So all of these kind of wonderful saturated earth tones that Italy used to be comprised of now are peach colored and pink. And I think that's heartbreaking because this to me looks way better. And I think one reason this looks way better is that it looks more geological. It really looks as though the earth itself has welled up and become a building. And this looks way much to me more like pastry. You know the chef has put an elaborate cake on the site. This is a detail of that round stair in the Villa Caparola that you come through. And I just want you to look at the painting on the walls here. The Villa Caparola, the painting program is an example where there were two volumes of instructions about what the iconological program should be. It's incredibly complicated. You don't care at all, quite frankly. What you're interested in are the spaces. But in the construction of this thing somebody cared a lot about this. Some learned cardinal provided all of these instructions. And so you get this kind of manorist density, this super abundance of ornament that has nothing to do with articulating and clarifying the space, but simply loading it up like a newspaper with information. And finally you pop out of that crazy stair into the courtyard and you feel oriented. But as we said before, in fact you're disoriented. Because instead of the straight path that you'd come to expect from a procession, you have this doubling of the garden experience. Fabulous. And in fact there's even a secret, a further secret that you can experience. You have the doubling of the garden experience here. You think you're done. But in fact from the secret garden, the uphill garden, there is a little path wandering off that takes you to this processional garden. This, the word is casino. It's spelled like casino, which opened yesterday in Columbus, Ohio. The biggest casino in Ohio. We should just leave right now. Go Friday morning at eight, gamble. You have some free time. Casino means little pleasure house. And you have to say that with the accent on the correct syllable. Because if you say casino, it means brothel. So if you go to a garden and you want to find the little pleasure house, the little pavilion casino, do not make a mistake. You will go to the wrong place otherwise. This becomes an elaboration on the theme of the Slippy Slidy Center as you move through here. But I think what's interesting about the Villa Farnese and Caprarola is how it sets up the same motifs that we identified done in a completely artificial construct in the Villa Giulia, but it does it against the ground of this existing village of Caprarola. Widely considered to be the best of all the Manorist gardens is the Villa Lante in Bagnia. And Bagnia is out in the same area near Viterbo, partway between Rome and Florence in that area. One thing that makes this so great is that it is very well preserved, but also so clever. The entire construct is this larger precinct where part of it is a basque. And basque simply means woodland or forest. Over by the Knowlton school we have this little area of trees between Knowlton and Hitchcock Hall and that's called the basque by the landscape architect Michael van Valkenburg who put it there. And the university keeps wanting to tear down the basque. And if you ever see them doing that you just camp out there because that's what the students did last year when they tried to tear down the basque and they didn't tear it down. And it's a nice thing. I don't know what they're thinking. Crazy. But anyhow look at the Villa Lante. One thing it immediately does is it sets up the basque and it's let's say wildness or at least manicured wildness against this extremely perfect garden at the at the first moment. This kind of super manicured geometrical garden is called a par terre. Par terre simply means on the ground. It's French for on the ground. And as a garden that's like a carpet it's ideally viewed from above where you can see the clarity of the geometry. And in this case the geometry is paradise garden. We'll see views of it later. In fact we can start looking at a view of it now. Here we are on top of the hill because the Villa Lante moves you up the hill. Here the town is at the base and you move up the hill through a series of experiences. In fact it's not the straight shot that we got at Caparola but a kind of bend. At one end we have this little tower in the main plaza of the city and at the other end we have this giant sized gate. So here from the square in the city we already know what we're coming up to and in fact it's possible to think that there's a relationship being set up between this bounded square and this bounded square. That these are variations on the theme of square place. One tangled up in the messiness of the city and the other one liberated to be free and ideal. But that's not the whole game. That's that's the initiation of the argument. And as the argument continues it moves forward against the ground of the bosque that we've discussed before and also against the hyper manicured ideality of the parterra garden on the ground and an increasingly rustic grotesque configuration of those themes. And when I say grotesque I don't mean Halloween styled grotesque. I mean like a grotto. Grotto is a cave. Grotto is this damp place encrusted with shells where architecture can barely form itself. The forces of nature are so strong. And so that's the theme. The dismantling of geometry and architecture into nature as you move up the hill. These are some of the vocabulary words that I spelled but now I'll let you see them written out. Bosque, we have the bosque right over here. We have the parterre right over here. Jocadelaqua. You probably could say that in English if you wanted to. And that simply means water folly or game of water. And in the Villa Lante the Jocadelaqua, the game of water is one of the themes that gets varied. If at the Villa Giulia we saw that the theme of the trample arch presented and represented in increasingly diverse ways. Here we see the theme of water presented and represented in increasingly diverse ways. In its most ideal construction we have here this central garden in the Paradise Garden and we will see different ways that it transforms. Here's the word casino. Not casino but casino. Please do not air in the accent. And that's a little pavilion, a little garden pavilion. And you might immediately notice that in the Villa Lante there isn't one garden pavilion but two garden pavilions. So this mannerist game of doubling or repetition or redundancy is already happening here. So that the garden pavilion instead of becoming a destination now becomes a frame and the path moves through that. Paradise Garden we know what that is. Nature versus culture. Shifting centers. And the Bramontesque Stair. When we looked at the Belvedere we saw this moment in the Belvedere where there was a stair that was organized around a circular landing but instead of allowing the circle to seem like a point of repose it was pulling in both directions. Concave moving down, convex moving up so that you felt a kind of tug of war on the space. This is a section showing you that you start low and you move high and we'll come back to this again. This I think shows you what you're looking at and also clarifies it. This is that Paradise Garden with the water in the middle. The two Cousineaux and the path moving up the hill. And these are drawings from a book by Charles Moore and collaborators called Poetics of Gardens where they try to do a series of diagrams of the gardens and what they're diagramming here are water on the top one and plantings on the bottom. They're taking apart the different systems that organize the garden so you can see them clearly. Water as ideal four square then we come up and we find water on a split. Sectionally splitting in two directions then we find water in various forms as a line. We'll look at these more carefully as we move up. So anyhow this is the Parterre. Fabulous and the Cousineaux and notice all about the axis all about the axis already established in the town but no sooner do you proceed in here through the giant gate then you're denied the opportunity to move on axis and you have to move around the axis. Back on axis thank God denied the opportunity to move on axis and that's constantly happening the axis is being stipulated and then you're being denied the opportunity to understand and move through the axis. As we move higher and higher up your sense of what this garden is changes depending on whether you're looking uphill or looking downhill. If you're looking downhill it's kind of a renaissance experience this path is clarified and things become clearer and clearer and clearer to you. Daylight is shining in on you. If you look uphill things become more and more and more obscured. You're looking into the side of the hill it's dark and you begin to find these amazing moments like this one this is right over here. This is a kind of linear fountain trough with water at the base and this water thing in the middle and apparently this was a place to have picnics because well you want to keep your wine cold you want to keep the melons cold you want to keep the grapes cold so you just fill this trough with floating wine bottles and fruit and you dangle your feet in the dampness in the hot sun of Italy and you and you are a cardinal or a bishop or a monsignor at the least having this great feast out here in the garden really spectacular. Here's another yeah another view of it and you see you get this kind of clear axial view this is a moment where you can kind of be on the axis. Further up you move through the Bromantesque stair and you find another linear garden or another linear fountain that you follow along. Another aspect that these fountains have that doesn't seem immediately architectural but of course it's architectural is that they have sound. So you think about architecture being all about space all about vision. You might think well architecture is also about material okay architecture is tactile and architecture is visual but in a garden like this architecture involves all your senses you're in a different climate you're in a micro climate and you're hearing the play of water and different rhythms of the play of water and it's really really kind of overwhelming. For example this is called a water chain and it one of its stated purposes is to make this kind of rhythmic twinkling sound of water as it as it moves through all these different little things and swirls. It's also interesting because the client is a cardinal called cardinal gambera and gambera in Italian means shrimp not shrimp like little runt guy but shrimp like the crustacean that you would enjoy eating and so the water chain seems to be made up of little shrimp tails so there's a homage to the client in the form of this thing but it's also this amazing way to move you through the landscape. This is one of the fountains and you can see how the section gets negotiated in these complex ways. These are river gods lulling about and there's a shear wall where the fountain begins to move you between these two different terrains and it's again one of these split center figures. Part of this clear figure is up above part of the clear figure is down below and you get an edge of truncated columns here that increasingly begin to pun with the tree trunks that you see. So something that you would expect to work architecturally to actually hold things up now simply become verticals just like the verticals of the trees. As you move higher and higher up you get to increasingly wild conditions where the columns get completely lost within the thicket of the trees these vertical columns and for a moment you have no idea whether you're in a garden or you're simply in the woods and this diagram shows you what your last moment is and that is suddenly you're contained by space. Your experience throughout this is being deflected around objects never being able to occupy the center for more than a split second and your terminus is your inner center and it's like being in a room and you think well this is great finally I've made it but what you are in is in a room that has fountains all along the upper edge and so cardinal gambera never one to not have a good joke at the expense of his clients could flip a switch and the fountains would pour water onto the guests and they would become the statues inside this complex arrangement of figures in a water folly. Cool. To reprise the themes your condition changes from terrain to terrain as you move up the ground plains from a very contained bounded geometrically defined condition to something that becomes wilder and wilder and you might say your role in this also changes from the rational objective viewer an appreciator of geometry to someone who's solely caught in nature and only able to react with all their senses as the water from the walls pours out on you. Good joke cardinal gambera here's another one this is a bit later let's say it was started at roughly the same time it was started at roughly 1550 but it was continued by an architect called Giacomo della Porta who was an assistant to Michelangelo and who completed a lot of the Michelangelo projects that were left incomplete at Michelangelo's death there's that kind of cleverness going on there or at least training at the hands of a master you look at this and you think this is horrible looking because it is I mean it's so disproportionate right you see something that stretches and almost becomes like a billboard you see this funny little top sitting on top of this big base and you don't quite know what to do with it it seems so so odd so yes Giacomo della Porta learned some things from Michelangelo let's look at a site plan to get a better sense of where it is and how we can understand this down here is the city square so like all these other gardens it's locked into an urban construct and the city is the town of Frascati and Frascati is not neutral Frascati is Roman Tusculum and Tusculum is where Pliny had one of his villas Pliny's literary descriptions of his villas were one of the sources of inspiration for all of these Renaissance and Manorist gardens so I think one task that Giacomo della Porta has for himself is to somehow re-avoke these Pliny qualities going on here but it's also to use in a landscape context these kind of extreme lessons learned at the hand of Michelangelo so you can see if this is the town square down here there is this promenade or let's say there are different ways to get here because you're moving uphill one way to move uphill is straight and the other way is obliquely and Frascati is not neutral Frascati is Roman Tusculum and Tusculum is where Pliny had one of his villas Pliny's literary descriptions of his villas were one of the sources of inspiration for all of these Renaissance and Manorist gardens so I think one task that Giacomo della Porta has for himself is to somehow re-avoke these Pliny qualities going on here but it's also to use in a landscape context these kind of extreme lessons learned at the hand of Michelangelo so you can see if this is the town square down here there is this promenade or let's say there are different ways to get here because you're moving uphill one way to move uphill is straight and the other way is obliquely and both of these ways are authorized by the architecture because straight will keep you on access although you can't actually get to it that way and oblique puts you on a path to arrive and it also lines you up to see these things which are little towers and the little towers to me look like they are stretching the villa this is the butterfly splayed out here these are the pins pulling these edges apart because look at this this is crazy what do you see what does this look like to you does anybody have any reading of how to understand the edge of this building yes I think that's really smart you look at the top here you look up on top of the corners there's something that looks like a temple so there's a weird positioning of a temple on top of a big flat billboard like building any idea of how to understand what that temple means in terms of the whole can we see any clues that begin to connect this to a larger set of relationships no well what are these things look over here this is kind of weird right or look at the fenestration fenestration means the system of putting windows in a wall so if we think about a normal fenestration system we might think of something like the palazzo farnaise where there's a nice even rhythm or if it's a syncopated rhythm it's a clear syncopated rhythm what is this fenestration system looking like yes I think it probably is showing the interior space in the divisions because we have these different bays here and so it's revealing something about the interior but what about the what about that rhythm what about the fenestration pattern what about the rhythm yeah hey good it kind of looks like the top of the temple has been cut and that these pieces in some way participate in this big triangle kind of looks like the thing has been cut and pulled or or or stretched in some way and when you look at the fenestration pattern here I think it authorizes that reading it looks like these things are like too far apart you would expect there to be a rhythm like this same same same and suddenly whoo stretch so there's this big triangle going on that organizes all of these elements that seem to be pulled and why are they pulled and one answer is they are pulled to make a relationship to the square which is down here as though this square is missing an edge because it is we have this fence here instead of the edge of the square and instead the fourth edge to the square has been removed and displaced up the hill so there's this kind of gesture to making a distant edge to removed space amazing here's a little diagram showing you a series of events you get and here we are starting down below moving up there's this kind of hemicyclical space described by Pliny in his description of his Tuscalum Villa and then this big hulking billboard of a wall and in fact this diagram kind of shows you how thin this this villa is because it is thin it is remarkably thin and then it also becomes transformed as you move to the other side because it's we'll see how that happens but I won't give it away yet but here's this thin stretched villa with these little pins holding it down moving you forward from the square up in there and you can see that the thinness of this as you approach also as you approach there are these various ground playing games that happen from the edge of the city you see this there's a topiary topiary is is trimmed bushes to create a figure so there is a path cut through this thicket of of of trees that you walk underneath and on one level it is a lovely shaded way to get up to the villa but on another level it almost establishes another ground plane this is the grass looking green and flat this is the top of the topiary looking green and flat and I don't think this was necessarily an original condition but it's incredibly effective at giving us a read on these different ground planes that we see peeled apart in the drawing here that as you move forward you get these different retaining walls that give you these different variations on the on the theme of the entry it also gives you the opportunity from certain propitious places if you're standing right over here against this you begin to see the top of the green and the temple it isolates the temple from all the mush and gives you this ideal figure in an ideal landscape instead of this incredibly contingent figure in an incredibly complex and compromised setting this is the temple floating above this topiary really cool so here we are moving on up and as we get to the top of it there's a different condition the condition becomes more about the center and much less about the edge from from the city side the thing wants to become as edge-like as possible from the garden side it wants to become as tower-like as possible so this figure pulls forward and the space of the garden contracts and it contracts to frame that figure and to bracket away the length of the edge clever and this is what the garden side looks like the variation on a theme theme of the triumphal arch theme of the triumphal arch that transforms itself from triumphal arch to Saraliana to temple as you move up and as you move through the different levels of the garden different aspects of this are framed to you in very clear ways so from ground level from up here you see this triumphal arch piece that seems to be more or less consistent with the wall and with the language of the villa and it individuates itself and becomes particularized the higher up you get from different ground planes you get the temple floating above the retaining wall and finally when you get to the back part of the garden into this narrow channel of space you begin to get representations of the temple within this natural frame and by the way this is just one of the events that you find as you wander through the garden it's a little place to sit and have a a moment's rest there's a bench inside it's it's a grotto but it's a grotto that's become anthropomorphic as it is though properties of the human being have been absorbed by nature or have revealed themselves to the human being because they were already present and this is what you get from walking up that narrow channel you see a tower so that which was emphatically horizontal now becomes emphatically vertical and the higher up you get here too the more situated you are I don't know if you can see this but here from the very top you have just the ideal temple organized at the top of the complex this photograph is only possible if you hurl yourself into the dirt because from eye level you don't really isolate the temple but it's a nice idea that you would and it gets drawn as though you would you would get this without hurling yourself into the dirt that's pretty good too probably the strangest of all these mannerist gardens is one in the town of Bomarzo also very close to the city of Viterbo in this area between Rome and Florence it's the Villa Orsini sometimes called the Sacrabosco the sacred forest or the Garden of the Monsters and the reason it's called the Garden of the Monsters is well this is there this is a little luncheon pavilion it takes the idea that we already saw in the Aldo Brandini and it really makes it even more architectural with light pouring in the eyes and the nose and the mouth as your door but one thing that's really strange about this villa is how it constellates itself in space it's really much less clear architecture is much less able to individuate a singular path and to give you a singular narrative when we looked at Villa Giulia when we looked at Aldo Brandini when we looked at Villalante and Farnese there was a path and you took that path and the events unfolded for you in a very very clear way here it's almost like a grid of events and you can reconstruct the path in lots of different ways because of that it is said that the client Count Orsini was deformed that he was a hunchback and I don't know if that had something to do with a resistance to the notion of ideal geometries that ideal figures but there's something really kind of strangely overwhelming about this place with all of these strange monsters all over the place like the pavilion that we saw the 50-foot woman the winged mermaid the double-tailed mermaid all these strange things that you find as you move through the garden to range your senses and in fact there there are a series of these play these kind of stone carvings bits of poetry that you find as you walk through there and one of them says which means simply to overwhelm your heart and I think that is key I think that is revealing an entirely different idea about why you would do anything than everything we've talked about so far everything we've talked about so far had some kind of external reference some kind of desire to mean something about the nature of the cosmos or the nature of the state or the nature of the client or the relationship of the individual to to nature but Hur Persvogar Il Cor simply to overwhelm the heart begins to suggest that it is about a subjective experience that this relationship with a garden doesn't have to have external reference anymore it can be about the individual and the subjective experience of the individual in that garden so there are all kinds of like crazy things going on like broken temples sunken temples and you find your own path through this garden one of the most interesting moments in the garden is this which is the lopsided tower you walk into the lopsided tower and it's like going into a fun house because the vector of your body remains consistent you know what it is to stand upright but the whole space is pulling you sideways so that you have a really hard time not falling down because you can't even organize your body in the spatial construct that you've been given and there are a lot of different spaces like that too not only the monster spaces but even things that seem somewhat ideal like the temple spaces are out of whack you know we know the pantheon is all about a temple and a rotunda and in the pantheon they more or less hang together in a coherent way in the Villa Orsini they are so miniaturized and so out of scale that all you can see is the irresolution of the two figures rather than the resolution of the figures a one more little one because we still have four minutes to go before the end of class this is the casino casino excuse me casino pious the fourth not pious the second pious the fourth and it's located right over here this all should look pretty familiar to you this is St. Peter's this is the Belvedere Bramante's great courtyard so this is out here in the back garden of the Vatican the Vatican gardens and what's interesting about it I think is that it plays with these various themes of ground plane it plays with these various themes of disequilibrium and it also plays with the theme of engaging distant objects and borrowing the distant objects or reframing them as a close interior because look at the way this thing is positioned in space this is a vacant ovalized space looking toward St. Peter's and something we'll talk about quite soon we haven't quite talked about yet is the fact that the ideal centralized church of St. Peter's that was desired and fought for by Julius and Bramante all of these people eventually got a nave slapped on it because you wanted to actually have it work like a Christian church and so it became impossible even to see Michelangelo's dome for St. Peter's because the nave put you too far away from it to get a good view of it so in many ways the Cusino of Pius is a perfect viewing place for the dome of St. Peter's from the Cusino of Pius this is what you see this is your presentation of St. Peter's it's not this big façade it's not this flat surface but rather it's an ideal centralized object in an ideal landscape very much like the condition of the Tempietto and this is what you see clustered around the edges of this exploding oval bits of architecture clipped to each side and they're simultaneously multiple types you look at this and you think well temple I know it's a temple it's got a pediment but you also look at it and you see the kind of ornamental program and the flatness and the thickness of this tablature and you think sarcophagus it's got to be a sarcophagus so this simultaneous presentation of multiple possibilities begins to cancel them all out and make it extra fabulous okidoki see you next time