Pleased to see this chapter published in a new book on Academies and Gardens edited by Denis Ribouillault – a topic well overdue for scholarly attention!
https://brill.com/edcollbook/title/62485
Book blurb
This collection of essays explores the role of gardens in early modern academies and, conversely, the place of what might be called ‘academic culture’ in early modern gardens. While studies of botanical gardens have often focused on their association with a research institution, the intention of this book is deliberately broader, seeking to explore the interconnections between the built environment of the early modern garden and the more or less organised social and intellectual life it supported. As such, the book contributes to the intersection of several elds of research: garden history, literary history, architectural history and socio-political history, and considers the garden as a site of performance that requires an intermedial approach.
My chapter focuses on the Arcadian Academy in Rome:
The Accademia degli Arcadia (Arcadian Academy), founded in 1690 in Rome, regularly met in gardens and described their meeting place as the ‘Bosco Parrasio’ (Parrhasian Woods). For the first thirty years of the academy’s existence, they met across many different sites in Rome until a permanent home was built for the Academy on the Janiculum Hill in the 1720s. Nature, landscape and gardens are a constant theme in the writings of the Academy as they reimagine Rome as a new Arcadia. The textual sources, including poems, discourses, published histories, longer prose texts and the proceedings of the Giuochi Olimpici (the Arcadians revival of the Olympic Games) all convey how nature, landscape and garden form part of the foundations for the Academy’s intellectual endeavours. This chapter looks how the physical sites reflected Arcadian ideals of simplicity, egalitarianism, memorialisation and a nostalgic yearning for the classical landscape.
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