The Princely Landscape as Stage: Early Modern Courts in Enchanted Gardens

The designed landscape, or garden, stands in for the wider landscape: it is a microcosm of nature, intended to embody an ideal of nature held by the individual or group that created it. In the garden, art and nature work together to generate meaning, and in this they shape how the broader landscape is understood. For courts in Europe in the early modern period, the pleasure garden constructed around the villa or suburban palace was a midpoint between the organized but constrained urban world of the city and the disorganized, often threatening world of the wilderness.¹ Gardens, especially the large-scale...