5
Augustan and Arcadian
Prosperity reigned, the classics were learned and used, and landscape design “lept the fence.”
Early eighteenth century
By 1700 peace had at last settled over England. The passions of the previous century gave way to reason and balance. Extreme convictions were eschewed; moderation was lauded. Although the Test Act made life miserable for those who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Church of England, the theological base of the established church was broad enough to include most. Witch burnings were a thing of the past. The horrors of the Civil War, the beheading of King Charles I, and the harsh rule of Oliver Cromwell were, with political compromise, left behind. With the restoration of the monarchy, William and Mary now shared power with Parliament. People at all levels of society could now turn their attention to their homes, houses, gardens, and landscapes.
But within the tranquility and domesticity another kind of revolution was taking place. The new peace would transform accepted practice and enshrined convention in garden-making. By the end of the eighteenth century designed landscapes looked radically different, carrying a new message in England and Europe. The older geometric and symmetrical gardens were fewer, replaced by asymmetric designs. The enclosing walls were gone. Now incorporated were views of neighboring woods, fields, and water. Instead of gardens in which man clearly was in control, the new ideal would be “planned natural” or “designed natural,” meant to seem as if nature herself were the designer.
Prosperity crowned the new peace. The empire was growing, thanks to the East India Company. The Dutch Empire was losing ground and now it was the British exploring the South Seas. India was paying handsome profits; the Americas showed potential. There was no doubt that now Britain ruled the seas. Many boldly imagined a British Empire as extensive as was that of Rome and they invested substantially in its promise.
Prospect, animated prospect, is the theater that will always be the most frequented.
—Horace Walpole
The eighteenth-century English upper classes easily imagined a new Roman Empire because they were steeped in Roman history. The classics had always been central to secular education as it emerged in the sixteenth century, but now they became the mark of a new aristocratic and would-be aristocratic class. Formal and informal education focused on the Augustan Age of Latin literature. The curriculum of school, private tutor, and university demanded mastery of Latin and Greek, acquired by translating and memorizing passages from Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, Livy, and Homer among others. All who could afford to do so traveled to Italy to study the ancient sites for themselves, some staying for years.
At home, classical references were everywhere. Contemporary writers used metaphors drawn from classical stories. Frescoes painted on the walls and ceilings of the great houses told of the heroes of antiquity, especially and repeatedly the journey of Aeneas across the Mediterranean from Troy to what would be Rome. Friezes on the pediments of public buildings depicted the great battles of Roman myth and legend. Quotations from the Latin authors were incised in stone. Designed landscapes became a place to reinforce this shared body of knowledge so that the briefest reference in sculpture or garden-building called to mind whole epics and their meaning. So strong was the influence of classical history on the writers of eighteenth-century England that literature of the time was again called Augustan, evoking the analogy between the empire of ancient Rome and that of eighteenth-century Britain. All of this was to find its way into eighteenth-century gardens, a number now judged to be among England’s greatest.
Artists and writers of the early eighteenth century also looked back to Greek history and to an idealistic bucolic vision. Begun in England a century or more earlier, it was called Arcadian after Arcady, the Greek province that continued a peaceful, rural existence while war raged between the great cities of Athens and Sparta. In England there was, for the most part, still concord on estates and in villages, concord that had its parallel in the accepted understanding of nature. The dangers of the countryside had disappeared with the felling of the medieval forests. Now people could look with pleasure over the tranquil hills with their clumps of majestic oak and beech, the gentle rivers, grazing sheep, placid cattle, neatly cultivated fields, sturdy farmers with ox and cart, pointed spire or square tower of parish church, and thatched or slate roofs of village houses. Obtaining a position at court was no longer the object of ambition, nor the city the place to be. It was the country that lured the powerful and wealthy.
Although as a Catholic, Poet Laureate John Dryden was unable to inherit property, in his writings he reinforced the value of country life. His translations into English not only of the Aeneid but also the Eclogues and Georgics, which describe and praise rural life, made these works of Virgil accessible to all. Dryden’s translations inspired Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole, and many other poets and essayists of the eighteenth century to choose nature, gardening, and agriculture as their subjects. In many gardens the pastoral scene was “borrowed” and incorporated in designed landscapes.
Two greatly admired painters were Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Both born in France at the end of the sixteenth century, they spent most of their careers in Italy where they studied classical mythology. The subjects of their paintings were Christian and classical, their settings often large pastoral landscapes with classical structures. Characterized by strong lines, their works bespeak order, logic, and clarity. Garden and landscape creators of early eighteenth-century England would use their paintings for inspiration and as models.
Literature, landscape design, and painting would be called Romantic by later critics and historians for idealizing and romanticizing nature, but the designed landscapes of early eighteenth-century Britain, reflecting as they do both classical antiquity and idyllic rural life, are best identified as Augustan and Arcadian.
Tivoli, Italy
As early eighteenth-century English boys and young men were studying Latin, they also were learning about Roman history, especially the century before and the two centuries after the birth of Christ. As they read their Cicero, Virgil, and Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, they learned about the Roman emperors. In the reign of Hadrian, the third of the five “good” emperors, they must have seen the similarities and contrasts to their own country’s history. Hadrian’s reign was an era of peace that, like their own time, followed a century of violence. It was, like theirs, a time of law and at least relative justice.
But unlike eighteenth-century England where religious peace had been more or less achieved, the Roman Empire was in religious turmoil. The old Roman gods were dying. People no longer appealed to the oracles in the way they had in the past. Hundreds of cults arose, each promoting a new faith. Christianity in its early years was yet only one sect among many. Hadrian himself studied the stars and sought answers to the question of immortality in the Mysteries of Eleusis, which centered on the story of Persephone’s spring return from Hades, spurring the renewal of her mother Demeter’s earth. As emperor, Hadrian would himself be deified and become the object of worship for yet another cult.
Hadrian’s vast villa in Tivoli (Villa Adriana in Italian) reflects his interests and his times and exhibits design features that would predominate in early eighteenth-century England as well. As the eighteenth-century English had embraced the Augustan Age of Latin literature, so landscape designers used principles and features of Roman villas.
First as military commander and then as emperor, Hadrian traveled the length and breadth of the Roman Empire. A first-rate administrator, he understood the need to stabilize and strengthen the empire and so took with him on his travels an army not only of soldiers but also of architects, engineers, and masons. They rebuilt London after a great fire and constructed Hadrian’s Wall close to what is now the border between England and Scotland to mark the northernmost extent of the Roman Empire.
Hadrian chose for his own estate the valley below Tibur, now known as Tivoli, about twenty miles from Rome. It was to serve as his retreat from the pressures of the city. Strategically placed around his eight-square-mile Arcadian landscape were temples, pavilions, a belvedere, and shrines, all located to take advantage of views of the landscape and the night skies. His architects and engineers, using concrete and bricks, made domes, arches, exedra, and colonnades with Greek columns topped by Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian capitals. The Pantheon in Rome, rebuilt in Hadrian’s reign, boasts the largest unsupported concrete dome in the world. Hadrian had the form repeated at his villa in the High Baths with a large circular opening in the top to let in light, just as in the Pantheon in Rome. In the seventeenth century Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain were to capture such buildings in their paintings of the Italian landscape, buildings later replicated or adapted in the great estate landscapes of early eighteenth-century England.
The Maritime Theater in Hadrian’s time may have featured a planetarium-like ceiling for the emperor to study the movement of the stars.
Mosaics adorn later Moorish, Renaissance, and English landscape design, but none more finely wrought than those of ancient Rome, seen here at Hadrian’s villa.
For Hadrian’s villa, the key to comfort in the hot valley was cooling water brought by aqueducts and then piped underground to the villa from the River Aniene. In addition to the baths, there were numerous nymphaea—grottoes, caves, fountains, pools, cascades, and other landscape features centering on water—named after the legendary Greek maidens who inhabited springs and streams.
Perhaps the most famous feature of Hadrian’s villa is the Maritime Theater with a center island surrounded by a moat. Only a small wooden drawbridge provided passage to the island rooms surrounding the small courtyard. Interrupting the emperor at leisure within the walls was not to be easy. Archaeologist Salvatore Aurigemma wrote in 1962:
The Maritime Theater is also called the Theater of the Universe, the Royal Hall for the worship of the Emperor, island of Earthly Paradise. There were plant groups so as to form a thicket, fish in the water and sparrows in the sky. There were elements of trabeation [beams and lintels] above the fluted columns with friezes adorned with sea monsters, tritons, nereids, and chariots driven by various birds and animals led by genii.
World traveler that he was, Hadrian brought mementos from his journeys to his villa, the last encampment of his nomadic life. Sculpture from the reaches of the empire adorned his views; marbles and stones from Africa and the Orient found their way into decoration at his villa. He was sometimes criticized for his admiration of the Barbarians, but like garden designers in the eighteenth century and ever since, he insisted on incorporating his souvenirs from far-off lands into his villa buildings and landscape.
Classical sculpture placed throughout the grounds was a design feature that would characterize early eighteenth-century English landscapes. Many of the pieces at Hadrian’s villa were, during the Renaissance, purloined by designer Pirro Ligorio and owner Cardinal Ippolito for the Villa d’Este built on the nearby mountain. Other pieces have found their way to museums and private collections around the world, leaving little at Hadrian’s villa today.
The Canopus stirs poignancy, as it recalls the great sadness of Hadrian’s life. The original is a canal at the entrance to the Nile connecting Alexandria and Abukir and renowned in antiquity for its magnificence. Emperor Hadrian had visited Egypt in ad 121 and, returning to his villa, built his Canopus surrounded by classical sculpture. Nine years later he returned to Egypt, this time accompanied by Antinous, his “beloved” youth, who drowned in the Nile. Hadrian’s grief was intense. For consolation, he erected likenesses in stone of the beautiful young man, to be reflected in the waters of the Canopus as if he were Narcissus. Hadrian declared Antinous a god, and temples for his worship were erected around the Roman world. His story—the tragedy of youth, beauty, love, and death—was told and retold, eventually making its way into eighteenth-century English gardens.
Yorkshire, England
Castle Howard, with elements of past and future landscape design, stands as a link between enclosed gardens and those of open spaces, and between the geometric and the new planned natural. Older formal gardens lie within a large, parklike setting, and within the asymmetrical landscape are garden buildings that act not as focal points but rather as places for viewing the property.
The designer John Vanbrugh lacked neither nerve nor imagination. In his young life he had been an employee of the East India Company stationed at the trading post in Gujarat, then soldier, spy, prisoner in the Bastille, and radical, promoting as undercover agent the armed invasion by William of Orange to depose James II. When he was in his mid-thirties, his first play was produced, launching an active career as set designer, theater manager, and author of witty and risqué plays. At first acclaimed and popular, his plays were increasingly criticized by the conservative social establishment for advocating the rights of women in marriage. Then, in 1699, with no training as architect, he accepted the commission to design Castle Howard, which would become one of England’s greatest estates.
In a portrait attributed to Sir Godfrey Kneller, is the smug Vanbrugh writing a play or planning a garden? Jonathan Swift quipped about Vanbrugh’s lack of design training, “Van’s genius, without thought or lecture, Is hugely turn’d to architecture.”
The central dome of Castle Howard is reminiscent of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Fortress-like hedges make the castle look invulnerable, and despite fire and other disasters it has been home to eleven generations of Howards.
As unlikely as was Vanbrugh’s appointment as architect was the setting where the project was conceived. Fountain Tavern in London was the meeting place of the Kit-Cat Club, ostensibly a gathering of wits for dining, drinking, and conversation. More seriously, the club, made up of Whig politicians and intellectuals, promoted through its membership the rights of Parliament, limitations on the power of the monarchy, and Protestant succession to the English throne. Among the members were such luminaries as playwright William Congreve; essayist Joseph Addison; Sir Robert Walpole who was to become Britain’s first prime minister; Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle; and his distant relative John Vanbrugh. By the end of a convivial evening at the club, Charles Howard had agreed that Vanbrugh should be the one to design his new castle.
Charles Howard had inherited the vast tract of land near York on which a medieval castle once stood. But by 1700 when construction of Castle Howard began, the old castle lay in ruins. Both Howard and Vanbrugh had made an extended tour of Italy including Vicenza, location of the architect Andrea Palladio, but the style they chose for the house was English Baroque. Though not trained, Vanbrugh was meticulous and he was ably assisted by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. Breaking with tradition, Vanbrugh sited Castle Howard on a north-south axis, making every bedroom south-facing.
When Vanbrugh came to the garden design his lack of training may have served him well. He appears to have been free from conventional conceptions, just as he was in the plays he wrote. The effect of his design is that of an oversized stage-set with scenes to enliven the imagination and create a mood, anticipating gardens to come. A former soldier himself and perhaps thinking of the medieval castle that once stood nearby, he introduced a number of military images, including massive, bastion-like, trimmed yew hedges in front of the house and the Pyramid Gate, or entrance, with crenellated walls.
Wray Wood lies close to Castle Howard like forest plantations at Vaux-le-Vicomte.
Architect Nicholas Hawksmoor argued for a small, Gothic structure but Vanbrugh’s Roman-inspired design won the day for the family mausoleum atop a hill overlooking the Palladian bridge.
Earlier, Lord Howard had determined to keep intact Wray Wood, a plantation of mature beech trees on the east side of the house. Straight avenues had been proposed, to be cut through the forest as at other English estates, one design calling for an enormous star of carriage roads. The earl rejected these ideas, directing instead labyrinthine gravel paths to wind and twist through the trees, each leading eventually to an urn, seat, fountain, cascade, statue, or summer house. The charm and innovation of this approach was lauded by contemporary visitors and later identified by historians as an early break with the geometric tradition of landscape design. But Vanbrugh’s crenellated wall almost surrounding the wood rather like a medieval hunting park militated against the effect.
The twists and turns within the wood end in intriguing, elegant, or mysterious objects just as do the bosquets at Versailles.
Perhaps remembering his travels in Italy, Vanbrugh designed and placed dramatic garden buildings where, as at Hadrian’s villa, the visitor was meant to take in the dramatic views of the countryside. One such building, the Italianate mausoleum, moved Horace Walpole to declare that it “would tempt one to be buried alive!”
Animals grazing in the field to the right are prevented by the ha-ha wall from getting closer to Castle Howard.
Spinario, seen here at Castle Howard, was a popular subject for sculpture in eighteenth-century England, the epitome of the classical hero. The legend held that “the boy pulling the thorn” had run from Sparta to Athens with the thorn in his foot so as not to lose time warning the Athenians that the Spartan army was on the march.
So unseen is the line of the ha-ha that today grasses are allowed to grow tall at its edge, a warning to hikers of the dangerous ditch.
A key feature countering Vanbrugh’s enclosing walls is the invisible fence that allows an unbroken view while keeping animals confined. Horace Walpole credited highly regarded landscape designer Charles Bridgeman with its invention, but it had a medieval predecessor. The French deer leap or leapy deepy encouraged deer to mount a ramp constructed in a ditch and then leap the fence that sat atop the ramp. Once inside the hunting park they were not able to jump back out. Called a ha-ha, the Bridgeman invisible fence was a new way to solve the problem of grazing animals wandering up to the house. Walls had previously kept them away. Now the open landscape provided no barrier to their joining house guests, even putting their heads in the dining room windows. The introduction of sash windows, the perfect complement to popular Palladian architecture, exacerbated the problem. Previously, casement windows left partially open acted as a deterrent.
The ha-ha proved an ingenious solution. A ditch is dug with a gentle slope on one side and a vertical retaining wall on the house side of the property. When cows or sheep come to the wall and can go no farther, they retreat to their grazing field. The land leading to the ha-ha on either side is a level plane so that from a distance the grassy sward appears unbroken. The ha-ha at Castle Howard, thought to be one of the earliest in England, points the way to the Arcadian vistas and to later landscape park design. William Kent, Capability Brown, other eighteenth-century English landscape designers, and in America, President George Washington made use of the ha-ha.
One question remains: is there an identifiable iconography at Castle Howard as there had been in many Italian Renaissance and French Baroque gardens and would be in later eighteenth-century English landscapes? In Wray Wood one can see themes of mythological rusticity—Apollo, Bacchus, Venus, Diana, a satyr ravishing a nymph, and a shepherd with his dog, all painted white. The experiences of both Charles Howard and John Vanbrugh in Italy and the constant use of classical literary allusions in eighteenth-century England suggest there might be a larger program that governed the whole layout of Castle Howard. One suggestion is that the plan bears a striking resemblance to the map of Troy, encircled by walls with fields and Grecian camp beyond, that appeared in Alexander Pope’s 1716 translation of the Iliad. As compelling is the argument that Charles Howard simply purchased the best of what was available including pieces by renowned garden sculptors John Cheere, Andrew Carpenter, and John van Nost. In either event, Howard and Vanbrugh set the stage for other Arcadian and Augustan gardens to come.
Yorkshire, England
One could accurately call Studley Royal a transition landscape but to do so would diminish its reputation as the most beautiful water garden in England. It weds design principles of the older, geometric French style with the new concept of planned natural just coming into fashion in England, creating a work of art that conveys a remarkable sense of both peacefulness and freedom.
No one needed peace and freedom more than did John Aislabie, creator of the garden at Studley Royal. He should have returned home from his political career a distinguished statesman. Instead he returned exiled, disgraced, and humiliated. Aislabie had inherited the property near York as a boy, but his demanding life in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century kept him away as he served as member of Parliament from Ripon, treasurer of the Navy, and finally chancellor of the exchequer. In the last position he promoted the South Seas Company proposal to take over the national debt through the sale of bonds, personally shepherding the bill through the House of Commons. Even when it was clear to knowledgeable insiders that the scheme was failing, Aislabie encouraged new investors.
Then, in 1720, the South Sea Bubble burst. An investigation by Parliament showed Aislabie had profited from his deception. He resigned the exchequer and was found guilty by Parliament of “the most notorious, dangerous, and infamous corruption.” Expelled from the House of Commons, removed from the Privy Council, and disqualified from public office for life, he served time in the Tower of London. Upon his release he returned home ruined, all hopes dashed for his once-promising future. Licking his wounds, he pursued his interest in landscape design, pioneering a new form, finally to be remembered by history as much for creating the most elegant of gardens, now a World Heritage Site, as for his role in the Ponzi scheme.
Beginning in the twelfth century, Cistercian monks and lay brothers tended sheep in the valley, made wool, and mined lead, making Fountains Abbey rich and respected.
Studley Royal lies in a unique valley. Looking in one direction one sees the majestic medieval Ripon Cathedral, in the opposite direction the remains of Fountains Abbey, once the largest monastery in England. With the dissolution of the monasteries between 1536 and 1541, the abbey was vacated and over the next three hundred years became but a romantic ruin. John Aislabie was to take full advantage of these views, his son William actually buying Fountains Abbey.
The valley is created by the little River Skell that curves dramatically not far from the abbey. On the sloping hills that rise above the river’s natural channel Aislabie planted trees, not as a straight allée but to appear as if they had seeded themselves. Perhaps he had learned this from Queen Anne’s gardeners, Henry Wise and George London, who used both large stretches of water and forest plantations. Aislabie included conifers, making the garden as attractive in winter as in summer. These forests form a kind of enclosure, but different from the rigid stone walls that once enclosed Fountains Abbey, showing his imaginative adaptation of an older design concept.
On a rise at the edge of the full-moon pond, the Temple of Piety is reflected in the water, its straight lines contrasting with the graceful curves of Bacchus.
In the adjacent hills Aislabie provided places for viewing the geometry of the moon ponds from above.
The river itself straightens and then is channeled as it nears the heart of the garden at Studley Royal. Known as the moon ponds, the water garden is two crescents hugging a circular pond. They are pure geometry in the tradition of André Le Nôtre’s gardens in France and Daniel Marot’s at Het Loo, but unlike these gardens there is no central axis, no radiating goosefoot carriage roads, and no parterres. Again, Aislabie’s achievement stands with that of other great landscape designers in transforming an older design principle into a new look, this one elegant and stately in its simplicity.
A wide ring of turf sloping slightly and gently downward to the water level forms a frame around the ponds. No plants are allowed to grow at the water’s edge, a landscape feature that would be adopted in later eighteenth-century gardens. On the edge of the full-moon pond, at right angles to the river and in line with the garden’s center, is the classic Temple of Piety. The finishing touch at Studley Royal is its exquisite sculpture all carefully sited so as not to be crowded, overdone, or ostentatious. All but the stone statue of Hercules and Antaeus are made of lead, recalling the work of the Fountains Abbey monks. Neptune with trident commands from the center of the circular moon pond. Bacchus graces a crescent; his counterpart, Galen, has now disappeared. Another lost sculpture is the Dying Gladiator, a popular subject in eighteenth-century art and one with whom Aislabie, the defeated statesman, must have felt a special affinity.
The design of Studley Royal, combining the older geometric lines of the moon ponds, the new designed natural of an Arcadian forest, classical architecture, and elegant sculpture, conveys a rare purity. We can only wonder how a man who had been deceptive in public and financial life could create such a garden. Is it because a garden is itself an illusion, a deceit? Or perhaps the act of creating the garden that would contribute to the change in landscape design was transforming for John Aislabie himself.
Oxfordshire, England
Artists sometimes say that in the act of creation their work takes on a life of its own, and conversely those who read, listen, or look often see something not consciously put there by the creator. Because he left no extant notes, it is not possible to know just what William Kent had in mind when he designed the landscape at Rousham, but three pieces of evidence suggest his intent to present not just classical scenes but a narrative. He spent ten years in Italy studying the art of ancient Rome and of the Italian Renaissance and buying antique pieces for his patron Lord Burlington. As a painter he often used as subject scenes from classical mythology and literature. And, importantly, he set out a route so that the scenes at Rousham unfold for the visitor in a prescribed sequence as in a story.
The sculpture is the work of Peter Scheemakers, one of England’s foremost eighteenth-century sculptors. A similar sculpture in the Rometta at the Villa d’Este also refers to the founding of Rome. Beyond on the hill, the eyecatcher beckons.
Laurels planted by Kent serve as understory to the trees, darkening the scene and deepening the sense of mystery.
Many gardens tell stories that are understood only if the visitor is familiar with the references, just as to understand stained glass in medieval churches the viewer must know the Bible stories to which the images allude. Most of today’s visitors at Rousham, not being classically trained as were eighteenth-century visitors, may not appreciate fully the story being told.
But modern visitors following Kent’s sequence at Rousham may be aided by a wonderful book first published in 1949: A Hero with a Thousand Faces by mythology scholar Joseph Campbell. Campbell describes the monomyth, a story told and retold in cultures around the world from time immemorial to the present. While the storyline has many variations, its basic plot tells of a person who leaves the security of home to venture into the world, there to make discoveries and meet new challenges, and then to return home a changed person. It is the story of great religious leaders and the outline of countless fairy tales and legends from Virgil’s Aeneid to Star Wars. Campbell says it is also every person’s story because it is a metaphor for the process of growing from childhood to adulthood, from dependence to autonomy. Further, it is not a story we live but once. Rather it is repeated each time we have a new and life-changing experience if we but remember Socrates’ admonition that the unexamined life is not worth living. A journey through the landscape at Rousham may serve, as does a labyrinth, as a means of personal and spiritual reflection.
The early Roman copy of the lost Greek sculpture known as Dying Gaul or Dying Gladiator was discovered in 1623 and soon became a popular subject for garden sculpture.
Pan presides over his garden and woods.
Stone swans recall Zeus who, disguised as a swan, seduced Leda, queen of Sparta and mother of Helen of Troy. Will the seductive scene here keep the hero from pursuing his quest?
At Rousham, the road to new adventures, new insights, and a changed identity begins at the house’s veranda. The very design of the garden was to give the eighteenth century a new identity. Gone were the geometric lines and protective walls. As in other arenas of eighteenth-century life, a new openness and new perspectives were expressed in garden design. William Kent declared that “all nature is a garden,” and garden commentator Horace Walpole wrote that Kent “lept the fence.”
Stepping out onto the veranda from the house, the would-be hero views the long bowling green and commanding sculpture at its end. His eye is then drawn across the River Cherwell and up the hill beyond to the “eyecatcher.” Designed and placed by Kent, it appears to be a ruined medieval building, awakening the viewer’s curiosity, a herald calling him to venture forth. Striding across the bowling green, our hero comes first to the sculpture of horse and lion locked in mortal combat, a reference to the founding of Rome. It is the first suggestion that the journey will have challenges and dangers but also holds the promise of monumental consequences.
Despite any misgivings he may have, the young hero is drawn forward. Turning left as Kent directed, he at first strolls by the peaceful and pastoral scene of cattle grazing in fields adjacent to the path. He turns toward the field, only to find his passage halted by a ha-ha. Is the message that there are unattainable pleasures or that danger may be just out of sight? Should he go forward or turn back to the comfort and security of home? The house is no longer visible. He has made the separation. Hesitating but briefly, our hero turns left, entering the woods. The unknown lies ahead.
After a short walk, he emerges into a clearing. The path he has been following is high above and parallel to the River Cherwell on his right. He comes to a clearing and there finds a balustrade from which he views the river’s bend below. He pauses, too, before the Dying Gladiator reminding him that not all heroes are successful, not all return home.
Continuing through the woods, the hero enters, as Kent directed, at the top of the astonishing Vale of Venus. He looks on the goddess from behind, to the octagonal pool below, and to the river beyond. He is glad he came on this journey, for, after all, what could be more exciting to a young man than the body of a beautiful woman? He lingers, wondering if he should make this the end of his adventure, remaining forever in this oh-so-pleasing place.
On a lower level than Venus, Pan, the god of nature, presides over his domain. As the hero descends he is suddenly aware that he is being watched. From the bordering yews opposite Pan, a faun—forest creature half man, half goat—looks the hero’s way with a wickedly amused and enigmatic smile. Is he friend or foe?
Our adventurer passes behind Venus and turns down the hill toward the octagon pool, passing Venus on his right. But halfway down the slope, on his left he notices a rill, serving in the design as a small river. From time immemorial travelers have used the progress of water in streams and rivers to guide their path. Our hero turns left to follow the rill though the dark woods until he comes to the Cold Bath. Eerie, mysterious, not a little frightening, and certainly unpleasant, it brings him back to reality after the ecstasy of his fascination with Venus.
Continuing, the traveler enters a shaded arbor, with light at the end silhouetting a figure. He welcomes the idea of another person, for every hero’s journey includes mentors, guides, and guardian spirits. He will seek advice about his journey and enjoy companionship. He shouts a greeting and extends his hand, only to find as he gets closer that the figure is facing away from him. He is intrigued. Who is the figure and what is he looking toward? Some writers have called him Apollo, but more convincing is the case made by scholar Michael Symes who identifies him as the beautiful Antinous, the youth beloved by Emperor Hadrian. Like Hadrian, our hero need not travel alone.
Sculpted by John van Nost and placed opposite Pan, the faun startles the visitor who, descending the vale on the far side of Venus, sees him watching from the hedge.
William Kent set this uninviting Cold Bath in the deep woods.
Antinous looks not backward toward the hiker but forward.
From Antinous the path leads to the Temple of Echo where the sojourner pauses, contemplating and finally voicing his thoughts and questions as to the meaning of his odyssey. His utterances echo across the valley and return recognizable but altered, reminding him that he is the same person who began his journey but also now changed. He makes his way downhill to the River Cherwell which he has seen as a barrier keeping him from his goal. Now, looking upstream, he sees Heyford Bridge which will open the larger world to him, literally and metaphorically. He crosses and climbs the hill to the eyecatcher.
Rivers have been the symbol of a life journey in countless legends. Bridges lead to new lands and new opportunities. The Heyford Bridge is shown beautifully here.
Brought together here are Eros and Philia, Venus and man’s best friend. Woman and dog: both may serve as guardian spirit.
Mission accomplished, the hero retraces his steps across the bridge, follows the riverside path, and, as Kent directed, turns toward home. Now he finds himself looking upward to the Vale of Venus with its cascades and its small, marble tablet in the upper cascade wall—to a friend, this one the “faithfull Ringwood, an otterhound.” He has circled around and sees love from a different perspective. No furtive glances now, an adult, he is emboldened to look on Venus directly.
To his astonishment, just beyond the Vale of Venus is a replica of the Praeneste, the forecourt of the Temple of Fortuna in Italy where ancient Romans sought oracles to learn their fate. The hero’s story reaches a climax for here he will discover the boon. His journey and reflections reveal precious knowledge about his future and the good that he, like Prometheus carrying the torch, will bring back for the good of others.
But there is something more. Atop the Praeneste is the disquieting image of the Dying Gladiator and the balustrade from which early in his journey the hero had looked out over the river to the fields and hills beyond. He has come a long way, encountered challenges, but persisted. His landscape journey has been about gaining new perspectives, finally seeing clearly what was before but dimly perceived. Perhaps Kent, in hiding and then revealing the gateway to the Temple of Fortune, was recalling his own long sojourn in Italy that changed his perspective and fortune.
Next the hero pauses in the amphitheater formed at the bank of the river. Mercury, made of lead, delivers his message. Bacchus and Ceres allude to prosperity. The sacred journey is almost complete. Our hero climbs a final hill, conquering the last obstacle. Home is now in reach. Joseph Campbell reassuringly reminds us, “Each who has dared to harken to and follow the secret call has known the perils of the dangerous, solitary transit. . . . We have not . . . to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us. . . .Where we have thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”
Kent’s placement of the Praeneste is praised as a clever use of limited space, but it also reminds those following the Rousham path that through the journey of life we come to understand what was previously hidden.
Up the steep slope and across the bowling green to the house, our young hero returns home changed. He is now a man.
Claude Lorrain’s painting Landscape with Aeneas at Delos combines the open, Arcadian countryside with classical structures.
Wiltshire, England
The pioneering landscape design introduced by John Aislabie and William Kent offered new perspectives by extending the view and using asymmetrical and curving lines. At Stourhead, Henry Hoare set Augustan Age literary images and references to English history in a planned natural, parklike setting. In so doing he created a means to contemplate and indeed anticipate England’s future. His contemporaries and future visitors have declared Stourhead to be one of the most engaging of European gardens.
He was just beginning what was to be a highly successful career as banker and financier when, at only twenty years of age, he inherited the Wiltshire property from his father. Three years of travel in Italy stimulated his interest in painting and he began collecting the works of Nicolas Poussin, Gaspard Dughet, and Claude Lorrain, whose Landscape with Aeneas at Delos would serve as model for the primary scene at Stourhead.
The Pantheon at Stourhead is three quarters the size of the original. Like the High Baths at Hadrian’s villa and the Pantheon in Rome, an opening in the center of the roof allows in the light.
His design revolves around a planned natural lake two miles long and covering twenty acres, created by damming the River Stour where two valleys converge. On the hills surrounding the lake, following Alexander Pope’s advice to plant trees “in large masses as shades are in a painting,” Hoare used firs and beeches for color contrast. The skyline thus created makes the slopes seem even steeper. The trees are grouped in such a way that the landscape is not seen all at once but as a series of pictures. As in the paintings he collected and admired, Hoare placed at lakeside or in the hills various structures, each serving as focus for a view.
While the landscape plan appears to adhere to the new design principle of asymmetry, in fact there are two cross-axes across the lake that point to the two interwoven themes of the garden: the events leading to the founding of the Roman Empire as recounted in Virgil’s Aeneid and Britain’s growth as nation and empire.
Henry Hoare’s grandson Richard Colt Hoare inherited Stourhead. He added the leaded and arched windows to make the cottage appear more Gothic.
At the western end of the east-west axis is the primary focal point at Stourhead, a replica of the Pantheon in Rome designed by architect Henry Flitcroft. Sitting on a hill above the lake where it is reflected in the water, it is beautifully sited with a Romanesque bridge in the foreground. Nearby the Gothic Cottage associates by proximity the Roman and British Empires.
At the eastern end of the lake, the village of Stourton and the parish church with its square tower are incorporated in the scene as if to say that the bedrock of the British Empire lies in its small villages. Hoare was delighted with this view, likening it to a Gaspard Dughet painting. In the foreground of the “painting” and as a final touch, he placed the High Cross which he acquired in 1780. For four centuries it had dominated the market square in Bristol at the crossroads in the center of town. The base of the cross is four octagonal piers with ogee arches. Above are two tiers with alcoves containing the statues of English monarchs, the top a pinnacle and cross. Views from the hills above the lake juxtapose the Pantheon and the High Cross, the classical and the Gothic, Rome and Britain.
The north-south axis across the lake contrasts with the historical references of the east-west axis. It uses the Aeneid as an allegory for the storms that rock and endanger a nation, of the intervention of a calming force, and of peace earnestly sought. On the south side, the Temple of Apollo recognizes the god whose vengeful actions led to the Trojan War. Across the lake there once arose from the waters a sculpture of Neptune with his four horses that were, according to Hoare “very fine and full of spirit,” recalling the opening scene of the Aeneid in which Neptune quells a great storm.
The grotto, a much-celebrated feature of Stourhead, lies in a straight line across the lake on its north side. While some eighteenth-century gardens included grottoes for lighthearted amusement, at Stourhead the grotto contributes to the iconography and is meant to be taken seriously. Approaching from the walking path requires a hike down the steep hill where plantings increasingly hide the surrounding views so that upon arrival the visitor, undistracted, feels fully the cool and calm. Words from Book I of the Aeneid are inscribed above the grotto entrance: “Inside are sweet waters and seats of living rock—the house of nymphs.”
In 1773, the town fathers of Bristol, believing that with increased pedestrian traffic and horse-drawn vehicles the medieval market cross posed a danger, had it taken down. Eventually it was given to Henry Hoare who placed it, as seen here, at Stourhead.
The view to the other side of the lake from the Temple of Apollo once included Neptune and his horses, now sadly disappeared, no one knows how or why.
Two figures convey the grotto’s message. The River God is a replica of the sculpture of the god of the Tiber who pointed Aeneas in the direction of Rome. The Reclining Nymph invites repose, a message reinforced by the couplets of Alexander Pope inscribed at her base:
Nymph of the Grot, these sacred springs I keep
And to the murmur of these waters sleep.
Ah, spare my slumbers, gently tread the cave
And drink in silence or, in silence, lave.
Other structures reinforce the message. The Temple of Flora with its Latin inscription “Keep away, anyone profane, keep away” is the first building on the counterclockwise, circuitous route. Saint Peter’s Pump covers the springs that feed the river. King Alfred’s Tower, with its commanding view of the countryside, pays tribute to Alfred the Great, the Wessex king who defeated the Danes in a decisive battle near the tower’s location.
The created topography of Stourhead, including the lake and plantations, is in the new planned natural style. The garden buildings and sculpture follow the older rules of garden design with their straight axes that end in focal points, although visitors often miss the axes since they cross the water of the lake. In bringing together the old and the new, Henry Hoare created a landscape that is intellectually cohesive and aesthetically satisfying. The planting of hills around the irregular lake together with the architecture and positioning of the structures create pictures worthy of the painters Hoare admired and collected. In Stourhead, he seems to have followed Apollo’s command to Aeneas: “You must prepare great walls for a great race.”
The River God is the work of John Cheere, a well-known eighteenth-century sculptor.
Fresh springs flow on either side of the Reclining Nymph, a copy of an antique statue of Ariadne acquired by the Vatican in the sixteenth century.
