Images and ideas of the Italian garden in American landscape architecture.

摘要

The gardens of Italy were a primary influence in the formation of an American landscape aesthetic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the social and intellectual motives which prompted the widespread interest in and adaptation of the Italian model in the United States have been little recognized or understood, and the extent of its influence--particularly as a paradigm for the smaller domestic garden--has remained unacknowledged. This dissertation presents an analysis of the writings and garden designs of three landscape architects who were of particular significance in the creation of the image of the Italian garden for Americans: Charles A. Platt, Guy Lowell, and Martha Brookes Hutcheson. The contributions of other artists to Americans' ideas about the Italian garden--notably Edith Wharton and Maxfield Parrish--are addressed tangentially.;The expressions of landscape designers analyzed in this study consist in large part of previously unexamined materials in American architectural and garden history. A close reading reveals their efforts to encompass the Italian garden within the theoretical discourse of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century aesthetics. The Italian garden was envisioned as a means for contemporary landscape design to gain a balance of classical and picturesque, formal and natural, values. Moreover, the design literature of the 1920s contains a consistent set of ideals for the American domestic garden which can be traced directly to those earlier explicated for the Italian garden, and reveals the migration of the Italian model from elite to bourgeois culture. The powerful appeal of the Italian garden in early twentieth-century America was due in large part to its perceived ability to accommodate the ideals of the era regarding the relationship of art, nature, and society. Prominent among these was the belief that the disorderly legacy of historic garden styles could be contained within an orderly yet flexible contemporary pattern, demonstrated formally as a combination of naturalized plantings within an architectural plan, and culturally as the creation of a garden of the classical golden age within the modern technological and industrial landscape.