Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 16-175

.Garden and Grove is a pioneering study of the English fascination with Italian Renaissance gardens. John Dixon Hunt studies reactions of English visitors in their journals and travel books to the exciting world of Italian gardens: its links with classical villas, with Virgil and farming, with Ovid and metamorphosis, its association with theater, its variety, its staged debates between art and nature. Then he looks at what English visitors made of these Italian garden experiences upon their return home and at how they created Italianate gardens on their estates, on their stages, and in their poems.With a wealth of literary and visual materials previously untapped, Hunt provides a new history of an intriguing and vital phase of English garden history. Not only does he suggest the centrality of the garden as a focus for many social, aesthetic, political, and philosophical ideas but he argues that the so-called English landscape garden before “Capability” Brown, in the late eighteenth century, owed much to a long and continuing emulation of Italian Renaissance models.Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 16-175 is written by John Dixon Hunt and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBNs for Garden and Grove are 9780812292787, 0812292782 and the print ISBNs are 9780812216042, 0812216040.