Volume 49, Number 16 · October 24, 2002
How Smelly Was the Palladian Villa?
By James Fenton
The Perfect House: A Journey with the Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio
by Witold Rybczynski
Scribner, 266 pp., $25.00
Some things are older, some more modern, than one imagines. The hallowed English practice of polishing up old oak furniture, so that it is dark and gleaming, is relatively modern—something of an invention of the antiques trade. On the other hand topiary, the art of cutting box or yew hedges into animal shapes, is very old: Pliny the Younger mentions it in a famous letter discussing his Tuscan villa. When Wilhelmina Jashemski wanted to illustrate her book on Roman horticultural methods, she was able to make unforced comparisons between what she and her team had painstakingly uncovered around Pompeii and contemporary (1970s) practice in the same area. For instance, vines were trained on chestnut poles, to which they were tied with poplar or willow withes (that is, ties made of a length of young shoot), both in antiquity and at the time of writing.[1] A recent study of Byzantine gardens, the first book of its kind, offers telling photographic comparisons between archaeological sites in, for instance, Sinai, and the walled and terraced monastery gardens on Mount Athos, which are still very much in operation.[2]
Review, 3814 words
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