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In 1564, Pierfrancesco ‘Vicino’ Orsini wrote to the humanist Annibale Caro to request advice about the frescoes of a loggia of his palazzo in the town of Bomarzo.1 Orsini had already chosen the sub...

This article examines Heinrich Wolfflin’s discussion of sixteenth-century Italian landscape design in Renaissance and Baroque (1888). It argues that Wolfflin’s interpretation influenced twentieth-c...

One of the earliest literary representations of ruins in a landscape setting appears in Francesco Colonna’s antiquarian romance, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) (figure 1). Encountering huge ruine...

This chapter presents an overview of the design and experience of gardens in Shakespeare’s England. It focuses on key examples, from Hampton Court Palace, laid out by Henry VIII from the 1530s, to Henry, Prince of Wales’s Italianate garden at Richmond Palace, which was never completed due to his premature death in 1612. As well as providing a selective design history, the chapter seeks to reconstruct contemporary attitudes to landscape design during Shakespeare’s period through comparing actual gardens with literary ones such as Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ inThe Faerie Queene. It is argued that two neglected themes emerge from this comparison: first, the potentially negative connotations of the concept of the enchanted garden and, second, the cultural significance of the representation of monsters in Renaissance landscape design.

The monstrous is an instance of the marvelous in reverse, but it is, nonetheless, an instance of the marvelous. Georges Canguilhem Mikhail Bakhtin has suggested that the image of the gaping mouth i...