The+French+manner

Eighteenth-century English gardens can be traced back to Italian Renaissance models, and ultimately to the gardens of ancient Greece and Rome. Much of this influence came via France.

The gardens of seventeenth-century France. French gardens were themselves deeply indebted to Italy ; when Charles VIII led his army to Italy and conquered Naples in 1494, Frenchmen saw for the first time the glories of Italian Renaissance civilization. Delighted by the gardens he saw adjoining Italian villas, Charles brought back with him twenty-two Italian artists and four tons of artistic booty. A distinctively French gardening style was to develop from these Italian borrowings.

Eighteenth-century English gardeners were clearly influenced by and reacting to the predominant French style, which culminated in -Louis XIV's estate at Versailles as it evolved from the 1660s until the king's death in 1715.

André Le Nôtre was the designer at Versailles. He came to the attention of King Louis because the king's finance minister, Nicholas Fouquet, hired a trio of artists--the architect Le Vau, the painter Le Brun, and the gardener Le Nôtre--to create his new chateau at Vaux-le-Vicomte. There was no preexisting structure to improve or renovate. The entire complex was built from scratch. It was an undertaking on an unprecedented scale, employing some eighteen thousand men.2 As William Howard Adams reports, "three offending villages were leveled and the river Angueil marshalled into a canal over three thousand feet long. Earth was moved to form massive terraces, parterres, and ramps, followed by tree planting on an imposing scale." A grand fete was held in 1661 to celebrate the completion of the ensemble. Offended by the conspicuous extravagance of his underling, Louis had him arrested and shortly hired away his trio of artists to improve the small hunting lodge he had inherited at Versailles.

The gardens at Vaux (considered by some Le Nôtre's masterpiece) and at Versailles exhibit the quintessential traits of the French formal garden: symmetry, grandeur, and great expanse. These gardens are rectilinear and architectural, unified by recurrent geometry and relentless axial symmetry. Their design relates house to garden and each garden part to every other. The broad alleys crossing at right angles or radiating outwards in a patte d'oie (goose foot) pattern mark the gardens' structure. While earlier French gardens were often centered on some architectural feature which closed off the view, Le Nôtre swept the alleys to the very horizon, appropriating and controlling all the visible landscape. The rectilinear areas within the intersections of these alleys were often given over to parterres. These were low gardens (the word comes from "par" and "terre," meaning on or along the ground), in which clipped boxwood, flowers, and colored gravel traced ornate patterns recalling Venetian lace or elaborate brocade. Hence the term parterre de broderie, in reference to the art of embroidery. The parterres were designed to be viewed from a lofty vantage point, often one within the chateau itself.

The symmetry and axiality of such views helped to unify the garden. These traits also allowed French gardens to be expanded and added to indefinitely simply by extending the axes and incorporating more land into the garden grid. Le Nôtre did just this in his fifty years of continuous work at Versailles. Comparing a series of garden plans from different years, F. Hamilton Hazlehurst shows how the gardener would first work in one area of the garden, say the northern parterres, then enlarge the southern sections to balance the transverse axis. The chateau also played a role in this give and take. At times the gardens overwhelmed the building, awaiting intended architectural improvements that would bring the two back into harmony; at other times expansion of the building rendered the existing garden inappropriate and necessitated further work there.

Water was another crucial feature of the French formal garden. The medieval moat gave way to canals traversed by pleasure boats, and fountains and waterworks abounded. The Grand Canal at Versailles was nearly a mile long, with cross canals every half mile. At various times Dutch sailors and Venetian gondoliers were hired to ply its waters. Christopher Thacker claims that " Versailles was in Louis's reign a water garden, one of the great water gardens in the world." At their zenith, the king's gardens contained fourteen hundred fountains. This imposed considerable hardship, however, for water was always in short supply. Despite the construction of the machine of Marly in 1688, whose fourteen water wheels raised water from the Seine to reservoirs serving the gardens, and despite ambitious plans to divert local rivers, the fountains could not all play simultaneously. A scheme of signals was devised so that when the king toured the gardens, various water effects could be turned on and off in step with his progress.

Versailles lacked the temples and follies associated with so many gardens from the Renaissance. There were, however, sculptural ensembles throughout the park, and these contributed to a unified iconographical pro gram, one assimilating Louis XIV to the sun god Apollo. André Félibien, a contemporary visitor, commented on this conceit as follows: "Since the Sun is the king's device, and since the poets identify the sun with Apollo, there is nothing in this superb edifice which is not linked to this divinity."

A final ingredient in Le Nôtre's ensemble were the bosquets, or groves. These intimate wooded areas provided a relief from the formality and monumentality of the garden as a whole. They were often entered by a single path, and the surrounding greenery cut off any views of the larger ensemble. Within, each enclave contained virtuosic waterworks and places for conversation, dining, and entertainment. The bosquets were altered often during the years Le Nôtre worked at Versailles. For example, the Bosquet des Sources, created in 1675, was replaced by the Colonnade some ten years later,14 while in 1677 two earlier bosquets, the Pavillon d'Eau and the Berceau d'Eau, gave way to the Arc de Triomphe and the Trois Fontaines. Thus the bosquets were treated much as an art collector treats his paintings, constantly altering the selection open for view.

One bosquet, the Marais, was proposed by Louis's mistress, Louise de La Vallière. At its center was a rectangular pool containing a metallic tree. The tree was in fact an elaborate fountain, and water sprayed from its branches and leaves. The border of the basin was lined with metallic ferns and flowers. These too were fountains, as were the gilded swans gracing each corner. White marble tables at each end of the pool supported baskets of gilded flowers from which jets of water streamed. And finally, along each side of the pool stood two buffets d 'eau. These were tiers of red and white marble bearing a "mock feast"--urns and vases spewing water in fanciful and diverse forms.

Hazlehurst criticizes the Marais as fussy and claims that later bosquets were nobler in scale and conception. Jean Cotelle's painting of the Trois Fontaines shows a long, sloping site divided into three terraces. Each terrace is occupied by a fountain of a different geometric shape--an octagon at the bottom, then a square, then a circle. Water plays from the fountains in myriad ways forming vertical jets, arching crowns, and sparkling liquid tunnels. The three levels are joined by subtly varied stairways and rocaille cascades. When the entire ensemble is viewed on axis, the various fountains align: the arch of the middle level frames the jets of the uppermost pool, and water seems to spill down the upper cascade and flow to the square pool below. These carefully crafted illusions add to the joy of the bosquet.

To get some sense of the unity and power of Le Nôtre's creation, consider the view west along the main garden axis in the 1670s, shortly after the elongation of the Grand Canal. The garden facade of the chateau extended for more than six hundred feet. A viewer standing there, or looking down from Le Vau's recently completed envelope which enlarged and balanced that facade, first saw a complex water parterre which mixed water, green borders, plants in vases, and sculpture. Its basins were swirling and complicated in form, with a round central pool flanked by four cloverleaf basins.

Beyond the water parterre stairs led down to the Jardin Bas, a large area of parterres culminating in the Latona Basin. This basin contributed to the garden's iconography for it honored Latona, the mother of Apollo. Legend had it that Latona, banished by the jealous Juno, was jeered by peasants while trying to drink at a spring. As punishment her lover Jupiter turned them into frogs. The Latona Basin features the goddess at the center. Spouting frogs ring the pool's periphery, while various figures in between, writhing and spouting water, are shown midway in their transformation from human to amphibian form . West of the Latona Basin began the Allée Royale, a majestic avenue with broad walks enclosing a central green sward, the tapis vert. Beyond the allée was the Grand Canal, which continued along the western axis for nearly a mile. At the juncture of the allée and the canal lay another magnificent fountain, the Bassin d'Apollon. Apollo, the horses which pulled his chariot, and various tritons and whales filled the large quatrefoil basin.

The Grand Canal was enlarged in 1671 in order to balance the newly renovated western front of the chateau and to match in scale and grandeur the growing gardens. Le Nôtre carefully adjusted the proportions of the canal and the Allée Royale so that they would appear equal in width when viewed from the chateau's second-story terrace. This illusion was accomplished only by making the canal in fact much wider than the allée, and by increasingly elongating the three basins marking the beginning, middle, and end of the canal so that they would all three appear equal and square when viewed from afar. From different vantage points, parts of the western garden axis would come in and out of view,thus adding further subtleties to Le Nôtre's scheme.

Le Nôtre devoted great energy to optical effects of the sort just described. Versailles was a garden which constantly controlled and manipulated its viewers' perceptual experience. The vista I have been describing, which stretched westward from the chateau to the visible limits of the horizon, both constituted and expressed Louis's absolute control over a vast stretch of land and, symbolically, over an entire nation. Thacker puts this aspect of Versailles into context, noting that such "conspicuous use of land to adorn one's residence, without any return of crops or fattening of cattle was a sign of power, and a proof of wealth-English landlords, and even the English monarch, could not afford this ostentation".

Versailles makes a statement not only through its extent, the vast amount of land which is put to such use, but through the manner in which that land is leveled, tamed, and regularized, emblazoned with features and designs which everywhere testify to the glory of the Sun King. The magnificence of the gardens of Versailles can be appreciated all the more if we keep in mind how inappropriate and inhospitable the site was to begin with. The swampy and marshy terrain was described by the duc de Saint-Simon as "that most dismal and thankless of spots, without vistas, woods, or water, without soil, even, for all the surrounding land is quicksand or bog." He went on to complain that though the gardens were magnificent, enjoying them was difficult: "To reach any shade one is forced to cross a vast, scorching expanse. The broken stones on the paths burn one's feet, yet without them one would sink into sand or the blackest mud." We should note that Saint-Simon's assessment of the gardens of Versailles is belied by their extraordinary popularity. Visitors crowded the grounds on the rare occasions when they were open to the general public, special tours were arranged for visiting nobility, and Louis himself wrote a guidebook or itinerary, La manière de montrer les jardins de Versailles, to aid visitors in appreciating the garden's splendors.