The patron prince - The artist - The humanist

During the Renaissance, at least three people were needed to create a garden.

The first person was the owner, the patron. He had the social, political and financial power. The garden's grandeur, beauty, complexity and the marvels to be put into it depended on him.

The second person was what was then called the engineer.
Today, we would call him the designer -- landscaper. It was he who translated the patron's desires by adapting his budget to that of the patron. He had to do everything. Create or raze hills. He had to regrade the land so that it could bear gigantic statues and artificial grottos. He had to find the stone to sculpt the statues, find the stone to build the grottos. He was responsible for the actual work.
An engineer's work was terrifying. He could start his career working for a Roman cardinal. He could end it working for a Grand Duke of Tuscany; but, in any event, what he did for the Grand Duke of Tuscany must completely eclipse what he had done for the Roman cardinal. This "one upmanship" progressive push was very important to the Renaissance.
An extraordinary emulation to surprise, astound, delight and fill with wonder.

The third person was the key person: the humanist. This was the scientist, the erudite, the scholar, the technician who would design the garden. The humanist would create the garden's program, its scenery.

The garden creator was a position filled by extraordinary people. Politian, the most famous humanist and researcher of his time, did not find it beneath him to create gardens for the Medicis. Leonardo da Vinci created them. Andrea Mantegna did the same in Mantua.

This is a creation based on spiritual philosophy and forms, without which a garden could not exist in that era.

A garden was a valued place, in which three people had to be immortalized:

  1. The patron prince.
  2. The artist, whether he was an engineer, a city planner, an engraver, a painter, a sculptor or a draftsman, who had to transcend himself.
  3. The humanist who had to create a program, the coherency of which had to be absolute.

This was thus a tripartite arrangement. This tripartite arrangement can be illustrated as a type of city planning, of the formation of symbols in space, whose ultimate message must be apparent.

Botticelli, Politian, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino used to meet in the Medici villas, following their patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and share his meditations.
The itinerary laid out long ago in the "Dream Fight for the Love of Wisdom" varied according to the walk. In Lorenzo de' Medici's gardens, the ideas of "Poliphilus" were poetically illustrated.

You would enter a garden chaste, but you should leave as an initiate. Each garden had its own initiation. This was the goal of Renaissance gardens.

I have chosen two works of art to illustrate this text.

The last panel of The Hunt of the Unicorn, a tapestry woven in the beginning of Francis I's reign, now in the Cloisters Museum in New York.

My second example: Spring by Sandro Botticelli, in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.