Italian villas and their gardens; . atter was absent from Rome from 1516 to 1535—thatis, precisely during what must have been the formativeperiod of Alessis talent. The Perugian architectcertainly shows little trace of Michelangelesque influ-ences, but seems to derive rather from the school of hisown great contemporary, Palladio. The Villa Scassi, with its Tuscan order below andfluted Corinthian pilasters above, its richly carved friezeand cornice, and its beautiful roof-balustrade, is perhapsmore familiar to students than any other example ofGenoese suburban architecture. Almost alone amongGe
Italian villas and their gardens; . atter was absent from Rome from 1516 to 1535—thatis, precisely during what must have been the formativeperiod of Alessis talent. The Perugian architectcertainly shows little trace of Michelangelesque influ-ences, but seems to derive rather from the school of hisown great contemporary, Palladio. The Villa Scassi, with its Tuscan order below andfluted Corinthian pilasters above, its richly carved friezeand cornice, and its beautiful roof-balustrade, is perhapsmore familiar to students than any other example ofGenoese suburban architecture. Almost alone amongGenoese villas, it stands at the foot of a hill, with gar-dens rising behind it instead of descending below it tothe sea. Herr Gurlitt thinks these grounds are amongthe earliest in Italy in which the narrow mediaeval Jiortusinchtsus was blent with the wider lines of the landscape ;indeed, he makes the somewhat surprising statement that all the later garden-craft has its source in Alessi, who, 180 A GARDEN-NICHE, VILLA SCASSI, GENOA. fe GENOESE VILLAS in the Scassi gardens, has shown to the full his charac-teristic gift for preserving unity of conception in multi-plicity of form. There could be no better definition of the garden-science of the Italian Renaissance; and if, as it seemsprobable, the Scassi gardens are earlier in date than theBoboli and the Orti Farnesiani, they certainly fill animportant place in the evolution of the pleasure-ground ;but the Vatican gardens, if they were really designed byAntonio da Sangallo, must still be regarded as thesource from which the later school of landscape-archi-tects drew their first inspiration. It was certainly here,and in the unfinished gardens of the Villa Madama,that the earliest attempts were made to bring the un-tamed forms of nature into relation with the disciplinedlines of architecture. Herr Gurlitt is, however, quite right in calling atten-tion to the remarkable manner in which the architecturallines of the Scassi gardens ha
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