Melchiorre Cesarotti e le trasformazioni del paesaggio ... - OpenstarTs

That the meditations may verge upon the gloomy or elegiac was probable, but
not inevitable, as Rousseau himself would show; if a country churchyard [Figure
9] necessarily elicit thoughts of mortality, there were poets like Wordsworth
who could attest to the pleasures of solitary meditations upon Immortality or the
pleasures of simple joyfulness in face of a bank of dancing daffodils. Furthermore,
and again both Gray and Wordsworth provide good examples, these solitary
strollers might well encounter indigenous persons, unspoilt children of the
soil like peasants, but nothing quite as wild or terrifying as the bard.
4. The landscapes of both bard and promeneur solitaire were not, however, topographies
of social intercourse. Burke’s aesthetic category of the beautiful, in opposition
to the private and often imaginary sublime, was a landscape of shared
and communal experience. For this, obviously expansive activity, the landscaped
garden and park were more suitable, though obviously other sites could lend
themselves to social life. Groups could stroll and share conversations because
the terrain was at its best designed precisely for these activities– paths wound
through pleasant shrubbery or conducted visitors to moments of heightened appreciation,
and along the way there might be inscriptions, statues, benches, temples,
and a whole repertoire of fabriques designed to stimulate associations and
promote discussions between the assembled persons [Figure 10].
5. These three landscapes modes, or landscapes tastes, obviously had opportunities
to elide, one into the other, especially when a designer sought to represent them
within a single parkland, as that extremely inventive Franceso Bettini did in his
project for Andrea Dolfin at Mincana. 20 By his own account, this attempt to include
a variety of characteristic landscapes or what he termed «le scene di carattere» was
offered in the interests of both «Novità” and «Bizzarria». It had elements of the
sublime («un Deserto» with ruined buildings, and «una azione eroica”), melancholy
à la Gray (with an «Isola de’ Sepolcri»), along with more bland and pastoral
scenery, while around the mansion itself were clustered the more social sceneries.
Cesarotti’s own parkland, Selvaggiano, also managed to impose a remarkable agenda
of effects onto a small site: these included a «stradoncino lugubre», a «boschetto
funebre», a grotto and a hillock dedicated to Naiads, and many inscriptions. 21
Other less ambitious combinations of landscapes did get built: in some the social
scene could lead guests to places where the frissons of the sublime could be enjoyed,
but always in the security of knowing that it was possible to return to a shared
20This This drawing, in the Doria Pamphili archives archives in Rome, is illustrated in L’Arte dei Giardini. Scritti
teorici e pratici dal XIV al XIX secolo, ed. M. Azzi Visentini, 2 vols., Milan, 1999, II, p.117, and his
text is reproduced on pp. 116-21.
21 Items cited by A. Pietrogrande, Selvaggiano: il poema vegetabile di Melchiorre Cesarotti, cit. (note 1).
transformations in landscape circa 1800.
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