In Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture, Katrina Grant argues that the theatre exerted a significant but neglected influence on the design and experience of landscape in early modern Italy. In chapter one, Grant discusses the cliché that the arts of the seventeenth century were “theatrical” and suggests that if it is to have any value, this notion needs to be distinguished from modern ideas about the theatre and theatricality. Instead of platitudinous statements about the general “theatricality” of baroque works of art, and the simplistic categorisation of gardens according to the tragic, comic, and satyric set designs of Sebastiano Serlio’s Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospettiva (1545), derived from Vitruvius’s De re architectura (1st century AD), Grant convincingly proposes that we need to “examine the wide array of ‘theatrical’ elements of garden design and garden experience on a case-by-case basis. And this needs to begin with a closer understanding of how landscape was presented on stage” (37).

The next three chapters pursue this aim. Chapter two traces the development of pastoral settings in stage design beginning with Poliziano’s La fabula d’Orfeo, which was performed in Mantua in 1480. The evolution of intermedi from autonomous interludes between the acts of a drama into the new theatrical genre of opera is also discussed. From the late sixteenth century onwards, the intermedi often depicted pastoral themes and, like gardens, provided an opportunity for artists and engineers to simulate the effects of natural phenomena. A high point in the development of intermedi sets was the designs for the play La Pellegrina (1589) in celebration of the Florentine wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Christine de Lorraine by Bernardo Buontalenti, who was also active as a garden designer. Buontalenti’s work provides a clear example of the links between theatre and garden design at the end of the sixteenth century. For instance, the Mount Parnassus that he designed for the second intermedio recalls the similar structure that he devised for Francesco I de’ Medici’s garden at Pratolino. Grant makes the important point that, besides a shared imagery and iconography, theatre and landscape designers could draw on the recent rediscovery and translation of technical treatises on mechanics such as Hero of Alexandria’s Automata (1st century AD).

Chapter three begins with the observation that the scenography of early modern opera has been neglected by scholars. Grant then compares the emerging genre of landscape painting and drawing with the representation of natural scenes in the theatre through a focus on the work of the Parigi family of set designers in Florence, Francesco Guitti’s scenographic landscapes commissioned by the Barberini family in Rome, and Ludovico Burnacini’s set designs for the Hapsburg court in Vienna. The fourth chapter considers the use of machines in the seventeenth-century theatre, focusing on the works of Giovanni Battista Aleotti, who was responsible for the first translation of Hero’s Automata into Italian in 1589, and those of Guitti, Giacomo Torelli, and Bernini.

In the second half of the book, Grant’s focus shifts to gardens. Chapter five traces the development of the idea of the garden as a theatre from the late sixteenth century onwards. Grant notes the new interest of designers in recreating ancient villas such as that of Pliny the Younger at Laurentium, and discusses a handful of other relevant sources including, besides Vitruvius, Francesco Colonna’s antiquarian romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and the “memory theatre” of Giulio Camillo’s Idea del Teatro (1550). She then examines several theatres that were constructed in gardens, including at the Villa Poggioreale near Naples, the Belvedere Courtyard and Theatre in the Vatican, the Villa Madama in Rome, the Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo, the Reggio Parco in Turin, and the Medici garden in Pratolino.

Chapter six considers the idea of the garden as a stage and the role of visitors as both spectators and performers with reference to the equestrian ballet that was performed in the stone amphitheatre of the Boboli Gardens in Florence in 1637. Grant notes that no subsequent garden theatre was constructed on this scale but that a wide range of structures—"Topiarized hedge, fountains, flowerbeds, piazza, stone amphitheatres, hippodromes, and courtyards” (180)—came to be referred to as “theatres.” She argues that many of the theatres of seventeenth-century gardens can now only be identified through a study of printed sources such as Giovanni Battista Falda’s Ville e Giardini di Roma (1683) and Le Fontane delle Ville di Frascati nel Tuscolano con il loro Prospetti (1687). In chapter seven, Grant traces the development of the idea of the garden as a stage for the display of nature, which she argues reflects a shift in the perceived relationship between humans and the natural world at sites such as the water theatres of Frascati, including at the Villa Aldobrandini. Chapter eight focuses on the hedge theatres of the Accademia degli Oscuri in Lucca and the outdoor performances of the Accademia degli Arcadi in Rome.

Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy is a rich, informative book but there are some missed opportunities to directly compare the conventions and motifs of the theatre with those of gardens. For the sake of an example: Grant loosely associates Guitti’s design of an artificially ruined proscenium for a performance of La Contessa, torneo fatto in Ferrara in 1631 with Giulio Romano’s frescoes for the Palazzo del Te in Mantua depicting the Fall of the Giants but does not mention a potentially more obvious link to gardens. In his 1591 guidebook, Francesco Bocchi commented on the deliberately ruinous state of the Grotta Grande in the Boboli Gardens, which “aroused delight, but not without terror, because the building seemed about to collapse to the ground” (Le Bellezze della città di Fiorenza). Designed by Buontalenti, the grotto may provide a precedent for the stage design. The earlier date of the Grotta Grande (1583–93) also has implications for Grant’s assertion that Guitti’s illusion “marks the shift away from concerns about verisimilitude and the increasing dominance of surprise and wonder.” In gardens of the second half of the sixteenth century, at least, effects of surprise and wonder (meraviglia) are key objectives of designers.

One other aspect of the book deserves comment. As Grant notes, Buontalenti wrote the phrase “L’ARTE VINSE LA NATURA” (art supersedes or conquers nature) in a copy of a treatise by Domenico Mellini on perpetual motion (69). He inscribed this comment against a passage in which Mellini argues that Aristotle contradicts his own fundamental tenet that human art either imitates or perfects nature but never supersedes it. Later, in chapter four, titled “Triumph over Nature: Machines and Meraviglia on the Seventeenth-Century Stage,” Grant characterises set design as a clear example of the contemporary belief in the “human ability to control and manipulate nature” (114).

Grant has in mind here the established narrative that Aristotelian ideas about nature were displaced and ultimately rendered obsolete by the advent of the so-called “mechanical philosophy” in the seventeenth century. However, this assumption has become increasingly contested by scholars. Recent historians of science, such as Daniel Garber, argue that: “the Scientific Revolution, if there was one, cannot be reduced to the rejection of Aristotelianism, the valorization of machines or the emergence of mechanics” (The Mechanization of Natural Philosophy, 2012). The recent rethinking of received ideas about the rise of the mechanical philosophy should cause us to tread carefully when faced with apparently clear statements about the preeminence of art, such as Buontalenti’s. Patricia Falguières has, for example, insisted upon the resurgence of Aristotelianism, arguing that Aristotle’s ideas are fundamental to Mannerist aesthetics (E. Kris, Le Style rustique: le moulage d’après nature chez Wenzel Jamnitzer et Bernard Palissy (1926), 2005). We also know much more today about the legacy of the Fascist-era celebration of the Italian Renaissance garden on the subsequent historiography and garden history. In the 1920s and 1930s, ideologically motivated writers such as Luigi Dami and Ugo Ojetti asserted that late sixteenth-century gardens unequivocally expressed the triumph of art over nature (Ojetti, ed., Mostra del giardino Italiano, 1932).

All of this is to say that the conceptualization of the relationship between art and nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a highly complex topic in which there are numerous competing historical views and convictions. Guidobaldo del Monte’s 1577 claim that mechanics “operates against nature or rather in rivalry with the laws of nature,” quoted by Grant (126) is, for example, opposed by the French ceramicist Bernard Palissy’s Aristotelian statement of three years later that “artificial fountains improved upon natural ones” because “one has [here] helped nature, just as to sow grain, to prune and labor in the vineyards is nothing else but helping nature” (Discours admirables,1580). Future studies of the relationship between the theatre and the garden will be better placed to untangle the many contradictions of this kind that attended the early modern idea of nature thanks to Grant’s valuable contribution.