References
[1] Recent modern editions of Microcosme are: Hans Staub, ed., Maurice Scève. Œuvres poétiques complètes. 2 vols., Bibliothèque 10/18 Olivier de Magny dir. (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1971), Vol. 2 pp. 33-127; Enzo Giudici, ed., Le Microcosme de Maurice Scève (Paris: Vrin, 1976). Albert-Marie Schmidt, half-a-century ago, played a major role in the rediscovery of French Renaissance scientific poetry. He published a most influential anthology of French poetry of the period: Albert-Marie Schmidt, Poètes du 16e Siècle, La Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). See also, inter alia, Albert-Marie Schmidt, La Poésie scientifique en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1938); Albert-Marie Schmidt, ‘Haute Science et poésie française au seizième siècle’, in Les Cahiers D’Hermès ed. by Rolland de Renéville, La Colombe, (1947).
[2] I discern Erwin Panofsky’s distant influence in the fascinating if idiosyncratic attempt by Denise and Jean-Pierre Le Dantec to read garden form, in diverse periods, as inscribed textuality and thus, as closely related to contemporary historical texts and political ideologies. Denise Le Dantec, and Jean-Pierre Le Dantec, Reading the French Garden Story and History (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990); see also Allen S. Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th Century Metaphysics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995).
[3] My essay can be read as a complement to Weisberger’s book, whose timeline could not include Scève’s poem. Jean Weisberger, La Muse des jardins. Jardins de l’Europe littéraire (1580-1700) (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2002).
[4] It thus antedates by half-a-century the devising and the birth of the fashion of parterre en broderie. See for instance Franklin Hamilton Hazlehurst, Jacques Boyceau and the French Formal Garden (Nashville TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1966).
[5] He nourished this encyclopaedic poem with the impressions collected during the travels he undertook at that time, due perhaps to religious strife, with the city of Lyons taken over by Protestants. On this point, see Albert Baur, Maurice Scève et la Renaissance lyonnaise. Etude d’histoire littéraire. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1906), p. c. 150.
[6] We are indebted to François Rigolot for underlining Scève’s deep ambivalence in his Microcosme. In addition to an hymn to human progress, which had been Albert-Marie Schmidt and Hans Staub’s reading, there was a need to heed Gérard Defaux’s caveat ( Gérard Defaux, Le curieux, le glorieux et la sagesse du monde dans la première moitié du XVIe siècle (Lexington: French Forum Publishers, 1982), p. 80.): the text in no uncertain terms condemned curiositas, the fatal leaning of mankind which had caused it to commit original sin. François Rigolot, ‘Le figuier et le coudrier: allégorie et réflexivité dans le Microcosme de Maurice Scève’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et de Renaissance, XLIX (1987), 7-24.
[7] My effort in this translation is best appreciated in the light of a delightful and moving book, also dealing with translation into English of French Renaissance poetry, Douglas R. Hofstader, Le Ton Beau de Marot. In Praise of the Music of Language. (New York: Basic Books / HarperCollins, 1997).
[8] There is an evident agrarian origin to Medieval and Renaissance gardens: see especially Emilio Sereni, History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Renaissance gardens saw the convergence of quite a few different crafts, architecture, painting and sculpture, botany, collections of plants both native and exotic, agrarian technologies, hydraulics, and ornemental art of various types. See on this point Cristina Acidini Luchinat, ed., Jardins des Médicis. Jardins des palais et des villas dans la Toscane du Quattrocento (Milano: Federico Motta, 1997). Claudia Lazzaro has stressed the importance of plantations in defining the Renaissance garden: Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Gardens: From the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1990).
[9] The author’s intent, in penning scientific poetry, was language-directed rather than didactic. Whenever he mentions technical terms, he is not so much interested in their precise referents, in their semantic value, as in combining them for their consonantal value, focussed that he is in achieving a mimetic relationship between his poem and the divine architecture it celebrates. This is well expressed by Fernand Hallyn, ‘Maurice Scève, Poète Scientifique (Notes sur Microcosme )’, Cahiers Textuel (1987), 43-48; Fernand Hallyn, Le Sens des formes. Études sur la Renaissance, coll. Romanica Gandensia, XXIII (Genève: Droz, 1994).
[10] “the verb “voûtoyer” is archaic already in Scève’s time. As Halévy has noted more generally for French Renaissance poetry, the archaic word often serves as the rhyme and is further underlined by a variety of syntactic devices: Olivier Halévy, ‘Poétiques de l’archaïsme au XVIe siècle: entre ornement littéraire et initiative linguistique’, in Stylistique de l’archaïsme, Laure Himy-Piéri and Stéphane Macé, eds. (Cerisy-la-Salle, 2007).
[11] See for instance Elisabeth B. MacDougall, Fountains, Statues, and Flowers: Studies in Italian Gardens of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks Library and Collection, 1994).
[12] Craig Campbell, Water in Landscape Architecture (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1978).
[13] Boyceau, as early as October 1612, was supervising plantations meant for the future gardens of the Luxembourg Palace which the Queen Mother projected to have built in Paris on the model of the Pitti Palace in Florence. Construction proper started in 1615. The two parterres, the large one and the small one both, whose designs are part of Boyceau’s book, were certainly built under his supervision. His influential treatise, filled with maps detailing his designing principles (Jacques Boyceau, Traité Du Jardinage (Paris: Michel van Lochom, 1638)) was written at the request of the King Henri IV. Publication was deferred at the time of his death. It appeared posthumously. Jacques de Nemours, a nephew of Jacques Boyceau de la Baraudière, had replaced him as superintendent of the King’s (Louis XIII) gardens. Marie Le Coq, widow of Jacques de Nemours, saw to publication of Boyceau’s treatise. An excellent monograph was devoted to Jacques Boyceau: Franklin Hamilton Hazlehurst, Jacques Boyceau and the French Formal Garden (Nashville TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1966).
[14] The importance of Boyceau’s book stemmed from the diagrams and maps of gardens illustrating it. His publisher, Michel van Lochom, doubled up as a well-known engraver. As Herbert Butterfield pointed out, initially in a lecture series presented at Cambridge University in 1948, woodcuts and copperplate engravings ensured that drawings and diagrams could be accurately copied and multiplied in printed books, which laid one of the bases for modern science. Herbert Butterfield, ‘Renaissance Art and Modern Science’, University Review, 1 (1954), 25-37.
[15] With the Renaissance and the rediscovery of linear perspective, the experience of the individual viewer became central. The newly-developed centrality of the individual led to a value-neutral space ordered by mathematical principles of perspective. The Renaissance garden thus gradually jettisoned the Medieval sacralization of the garden space. See Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001).
[16] Monique Mosser, and Georges Teyssot, eds., The Architecture of Western Gardens: A Design History from the Renaissance to the Present Day (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991).
[17] William Empson, ‘Bare Ruined Choirs’, Essays in Criticism III (1953), 357-58.
[18] The art of the parterre was specifically French. It is described by Estienne, who wrote his book in Latin in 1545 and published it in 1554. He translated it into French and revised it in 1564, the year he died. His son-in-law Liébault augmented it between 1564 and 1586. The book is meager on aesthetics, though. It is contemporary of Microcosme in its writing and initial publication. Charles Estienne, La Maison Rustique. trans. Jean Liébault, 1564-1583).
[19] Scève often borrowed the petrarchian technique of contrasts and oppositions, J. Sacre, ‘La reconstruction d’un motif des Rime de Pétrarque dans la Délie de Maurice Scève’, Revue des Etudes Italiennes (Paris), 22 (1976), 358-71.
[20] In addition to Scève’s petrarchist and neo-platonic (Ficinian-based) inspiration, with its spiritualism, the human body played an important role as Hunkeler has pointed out. Thomas Hunkeler, Le Vif du sens. Corps et poésie selon Maurice Scève. , coll. Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. 66 (Genève: Droz, 2003),
[21] Elizabeth B. MacDougall, ed., Fons Sapientiae: Renaissance Garden Fountains, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, 5th, Held in 1977 (Washinton DC: Trustees for Harvard University, 1978).
[22] The Renaissance garden embodied the aristotelian notion of nature being in a dynamic, not a static mode, and striving for greater perfection. It was influenced by the perceived need for a sense of wonder. Henceforth, the gardens would confront even their casual strollers not only with the wonders of nature, inclusive of exotic plants and birds, with the wonders of art as well, with man-made contraptions such as grottoes and fountains. It moved gardens in the direction of both a natura naturans and a natura artificialis: Eugenio Battisti, ‘Natura Artificiosa to Natura Artificialis’, in The Italian Garden, ed. by David R. Coffin (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oak Trustees for Harvard, 1972).
[23] Robert W. Berger, ‘Garden Cascades in Italy and France, 1565-1665’, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 33 (1974), 304-22. A prime example for display of such waterworks and fountains is Villa Torlonia, in Frascati.
[24] French garden architects, especially in Desargues’s time, were practitioners of geometrical theorems. A remarkable example, from the seventeenth century, is the optical illusion of anamorphosis abscondita which Le Nôtre resorted to in designing the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte. Allen S. Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th Century Metaphysics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995). Ackerman drew attention to the principle of an axial relationship between the palace and the garden. James S. Ackerman, ‘”The Cortile Dei Belvedere”‘, in Distance Points: Essays in Theory and Renaissance Art and Architecture (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1991).
[25] Brent Elliott, Flora: An Illustrated History of the Garden Flower (Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada: Firefly Books, 2001).
[26] Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron. trans. J. M. Rigg (London: The Navarre Society, 1903).
[27] Allegorical intents of the medieval garden, evident in terms such as “Garden of Love” or “Garden of Salvation,” still manifest themselves in early sixteenth century French gardens. William Howard Adams, The French Garden, 1500-1800 (New York: Braziller, 1979).
[28] Luigi Dami, The Italian Garden (New York: Bretano, 1925); Mirka Beneš, and Dianne Harris, eds., Villas and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xx + 428 pp.; Cristina Acidini Luchinat, ed., Jardins des Médicis. Jardins des palais et des villas dans la Toscane du Quattrocento (Milano: Federico Motta, 1997).
[29] Gardens associated with villas in the Veneto, the inner countryside with Venice as its window on the Adriatic, were originally associated, not with decorative design, but with agricultural production in the rich alluvial plain drained by the Po river. Margherita Azzi Visentini, Il Giardino Veneto Dal Tardo Medioevo Al Settecento (Milano, 1988); ‘The Gardens of Villas in the Veneto from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries’, in The Italian Garden, Art, Design, Culture., ed. by J. Dixon Hunt (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 93-126.
[30] Keith Cameron, ed., Bernard Palissy, La Recepte Véritable. Édition critique. (Genève: Droz, 1988); Frank Lestringant, ed., Bernard Palissy. Recette Véritable., coll. Argô (Paris: Macula, 1996); I will quote from another edition, Bernard Palissy, De L’Art de Terre, suivi De La Recepte Véritable, coll. Lumen Animi (Paris: Le Pot Cassé, 1930).
[31] A hypothesis defended by Franck Rolland, ‘Palissy and the Garden of the Castle of Troissereux’, in Proceedings of the 3rd International Huguenote Conference (Stellenbosch & Franschoek, South Africa, 2002), p. 161.
[32] Let us note in passing that Bernard Palissy has also made his the practice of trimming and sculpting shrubs into various shapes. However, he is still clearly unaware in the early 1560s of the potential of the box plant for this purpose. The only plants he mentions are rosemary, hyssop (which is how I read Palissy’s “lizos” and “various other types of herbs”, trimmed in the shape “of a crane, of a rooster, of a goose etc.” (p. 164). Claude Mollet prided himself in the introduction of trimmed box hedges instead of cypresses in the French formal garden. See Sten Karling, ‘The Importance of André Mollet and His Family for the Development of the French Formal Garden’, in The French Formal Garden, ed. by Elisabeth B. Macdougall and F. Hamilton Hazlehurst (Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1974), pp. 1-25.