part 1 - Iccrom

MEASURING HERITAGE CONSERVATION PERFORMANCE
6th International Seminar on Urban Conservation
Figure 1. The Garden of Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, 1504. Oil on wood. Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain (Source: http: //
homepage.mac.com/kennyneal/jei/050825bosch01.jpg).
1950s, which were inventoried to be provided as
historic gardens. The ability to ensure its conservation
lies in developing a system of indicators which
must be evaluated for authenticity and integrity.
Concerning the inclusion of living beings in its
composition, garden conservation adds to the complexity
of life. This is explicit in the Charter of Florence
(1981), which describes the garden as a monument,
an architectural composition whose main material
is the plant: alive, perishable and renewable. These
living elements of the garden are one of the main
subjects of discussion of the spirit of the place and
seem indispensable for that character of vitality. The
spirit of the place, as the Declaration of Québec (2008)
states, “offers a broader understanding of character
alive, while permanent of the monuments, sites and
cultural landscapes”.
1. The significance of the garden
and the historic garden
In a poetic and spiritual sense, reference to the
garden is formed from metaphors associated with
memories, nostalgia, joy, beauty, colours, flowers,
birds, shadows, light, childhood and fantasy. Nevertheless,
be nature transformed into fireworks and
still ‘nature alive’, it has its own existence, because
it carries these metaphors full of symbols and meanings
that reflect the aesthetic taste of an era, representing
the ideals and aspirations of man and situated
in space and time.
From a semantic point of view, more than any
other historical or cultural heritage type, the garden
brings forth the essence of its constituent
nature: culture and biophysical components such as
vegetation, terrain, soil, water, climate; that is, life;
and the support on which life manifests itself. Take
as its essence the randomness of life, understood as
a continuous process of exchanges and relationships
that manifest, above all, as the possibility to awaken
all the senses because it is among the artistic manifestations
that challenge our sensory systems;
“In principle, gardens are pleasant to the eyes;
the sound of leaves in the wind, source or bird
attracts our ears; the smell of flowers and herbs
attracts our smell; the taste of fruit flatters our
palate and the velvet softness of a fruit or a
flower produces pleasant tactile sensations. It is
possible to add to this set of perceptions that the
drawing of the entire attracts our intellect and
awakens a deep admiration” (Moreno, 1988, p.
312).
When referring to garden, Moreno refers to its
origins pertaining more to the creation of promised
paradise, exposing the possibilities of happiness
offered by Divine Providence through nature. The
strength of fantasy of the Hieronymus Bosch triptych
“The Garden of Delights”, reveals the history of
the world from creation, told in panels depicting the
‘Garden of Eden’, the ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’
and ‘Hell’ (Zorrilla, 2000), Figure 1.
Between heaven and hell, between good and evil,
lies the earthly life full of lust in the utopia of Bosch.
These gardens of human life reveal symbolically the
relationships established at the moment of creation,
and the organized nature of the pictorial composition
of the environment necessary to understand the
narrative. In this structure, united by the same horizon
and luminosity, heaven and earth differ from
hell, bleak and hopeless. These symbolic character
Carneiro, A. R. S.; da Silva, J. M.; Veras, L. M. de S. & A. de F. Silva. 2012. The complexity of historic garden life conservation.
In Zancheti, S. M. & K. Similä, eds. Measuring heritage conservation performance, pp. 33-41. Rome, ICCROM.
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