The Italian Renaissance garden: from the conventions of planting, design, and ornament to the grand gardens of sixteenth-century Italy (review)

166 Reviews The events and the stages of the uprising have long attracted the interest of historians. The tumult is one of the few occasions in pre-modern Europe when the disenfranchized and dispossessed did succeed in overthrowing established government and in instigating a regime where they held a share in power. While the Tumult of the Ciompi was but one of a number of working-class revolts which occuned in Western Europe in the late fourteenth century, in Florence for a brief period of six weeks, the wool workers, the popolo minuto, or as they styled themselves, the popolo di Dio, controlled Florence and wrote themselves into the constitution. Historians have long debated the causes, course and significance of the revolt not only because of the problems of evidence but also because of the ideological commitments that come into play. Thus the Tumult has been portrayed at one extreme as therisingof a class conscious proletariat to overthrow the prevailing economic and social order and at another as no more than a typical Florentine imbroglio in which the atomized workers played different and conflicting roles. The regime of the Ciompi was ruthlessly crashed not only on the day but also in memory. Documents emanating from the Ciompi are virtually nonexistent and the official historians of the Republic villified the workers and then goals and actions. While the five chronicles included in this volume differ in their viewpoints and sympathies on the various stages of the Tumult, all but one condemn the Ciompi. The exception, an anonymous chronicle, appears as favourably disposed towards the popolo minuto and the radical stage of the revolt that they instigated. H e explained the acceptance of a petition to reinstate those whome the previous regime had proscribed thus: 'This was done to give a fan share to more people,tomake everyone happy and to give everyone a part in the offices so that they would all be united together as citizens and so that the poor man would have his fair share; because the poor have always carried the burden and only therichhave ever had any gains from it'. The value of this volume is above all for teachers of Italian medieval and Renaissance history and their monolingual students. While literary sources in translation abound, there is precious little material available in English for Florentine political and social history. It is to be hoped that more such translations might be forthcoming from Melbourne's productive band of Italian Renaissance scholars. Roslyn Pesman Cooper Department of History University of Sydney Lazzaro, C, The Italian Renaissance garden: from the conventions of planting, design, and ornament to the grand gardens of sixteenth-century Italy, N e w Reviews 167 Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990; pp. ix, 342; 190 monochrome and 80 colour plates; R.R.P. US$55.00. Claudia Lazzaro's book is not only a feast for the eyes, with its handsome large format and generous endowment of sumptuous full-page colour plates, but an eminently scholarly and insightful analysis that will quickly establish itself as a standard text. Although the subject of much stimulating scholarship in recent years, Italian Renaissance gardens have long needed the kind of general interpretative overview provided by this book. Where previous studiestendedto concentrate on individual gardens or on particular aspects of garden design, such as fountains and grottos, Lazzaro's work is distinguished by her lucid and compelling exposition of the distinctively new ways in which the garden was conceptualized during the Renaissance. Reminding the reader that a garden is above all an arrangement of nature, the author begins with a chapter on the ways in which concepts of nature and culture operate in the planning of the garden. Here she presents a forceful conective to the frequently-encountered view of the Renaissance garden as an expression of human dominance over the natural world, stressing instead the endlessly inventive, playful and deceptive interaction of nature and art in the garden to produce another reality, a 'third nature', which is neither one nor the other but composed equally of both. Chapter two skilfully reconstructs the conventions of Renaissance planting through a careful mining of contemporary textual and visual sources...