https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/ 16th Italy Villa Lante https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590352 101590352 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590358 101590358 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590357 101590357 One of 100 shots of the gardens and sculptures https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=66830256 66830256 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590356 101590356 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590353 101590353 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98773486 98773486 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590351 101590351 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98773479 98773479 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590359 101590359 looking down from the 3rd level of this three-tiered garden https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98773487 98773487 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590355 101590355 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590354 101590354 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590714 101590714 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590724 101590724 Like the previous photo, one of four large frescoes in the casino at Villa Lante which depicts contemporary Italian villas. This shows the competition between villa owners who greatly increased the scope and complexity of villa and landscape architecture in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. This dynamic culminated in the later 17th century villa of Versailles which went from a "simple," 60-room hunting lodge to a giant complex housing 10,000 people. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98773485 98773485 Classical and Renaissance writers understood music as embedded in the cosmos, not just in the traditional sense of the "music of the spheres" but in Aristotle's sense as music as a metaphor for nature's all pervasive hierarchies of mind over body. The musical power of Orpheus over lower beasts, over savage Hades, and over inanimate matter (rocks) exemplified the innate rule of reason over body as well as the larger social hierarchy which placed the aristocracy at the top. Already princely rule had been explicitly depicted as Orpheus Taming the Beasts in a garden in the 1516 triumphal entry of Charles V into Bruges. As a garden theme, Orpheus Taming the Animals also allegorized the larger taming of nature in the garden itself. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590722 101590722 Music as princely rule of higher intellectual music over lower, rustic music became a common theme in Renaissance and Baroque court art . Apollo's victory over Pan and Marsyas and that of Orpheus over the animals represented the innate superiority of courtly human nature even while redefining noble in the more intellectual and cultural terms promoted heavily by Renaissance humanism as a "natural nobility". https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=66830259 66830259 This fresco reproduces a famous Roman garden statue now in the Naples museum and included in my Art Gallery on Roman art. Its frank eroticism balances off the more intellectual themes of Apollo and Marsyas seen in the same fresco cycle and shown in the previous photo. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=66830258 66830258 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590715 101590715 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590716 101590716 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590723 101590723 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590718 101590718 Hercules conquering the Garden of Hesperides and slaying the dragon was a common theme in court culture and especially in garden imagery, for example, at the Villa d'Este in Tivoli where the apples of Hesperides were one of the heraldic devices of the d'Este family. As a garden theme Hercules in the Garden of Hesperides combines traditional masculine power and warfare with the new courtly leisure of the Renaissance formal garden. Here Hercules was both invincible warrior and "gardener" of sorts. The theme has already been used in 15th-century Italian humanist literature (Pontano) to allegorize princely power, rule, and virtue. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=66830260 66830260 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590720 101590720 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590717 101590717 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590719 101590719 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101590721 101590721