Maniera Etrusca: Gardens, Vernacular Landscape, and Regional Identity in Sixteenth Century Tuscia

Abstract

Tuscia, a volcanic region of central Italy between Florence and Rome, is home to a veritable cohort of interrelated designed landscapes, which until now had never received their own regional study. Three of these sites are well known to scholars of art history and landscape architecture—Villa Lante in Bagnaia, Villa Farnese in Caprarola, and the Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo—and figure prominently in studies of central Italian villeggiatura during the late Renaissance. However, our understanding of these sites has ultimately remained divorced from their surrounding cultural and topographical landscape. This dissertation is a recontextualization of these designed landscapes through a specifically regional lens, and I frame these sites as products of a lively and ongoing dialogue between their patrons concerning gardens, villa culture, and the distinctive nature of Tuscian landscape. As the patrons’ conversations about art, nature, and local identity evolved, so too did their gardens, and across the chapters of my dissertation I demonstrate how these sites appear to have responded to each other throughout the mid- to late sixteenth century. These chapters approach the patrons’ designed landscapes from a material and experiential perspective, shifting the dialogue away from what is represented within the gardens and onto the matter of how landscape was organized and how its constituent elements were utilized. This dissertation intervenes against iconographic, programmatic readings of the sites that focus on discourses of pastoralism, epic literature, and Roman antiquarianism, and proposes a new perspective which privileges the gardens’ relationships with the surrounding territory over emblematic meaning. Through this lens, the present study ultimately reveals what I have termed the maniera etrusca, a uniquely regional school of art which emerged in sixteenth century Tuscia, celebrating local vernacular culture and Etruscan heritage.