Winner of the 2006 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award by the Society for Architectural Historians.
Italian villas are generally regarded as beautiful
havens where a privileged elite, fleeing the harsh realities of
the city, found peace and harmony amid buildings and gardens framed
upon classical ideals of proportion, balance, and the natural. In
her interdisciplinary book, Dianne Harris presents a radically different
view of villa life as it developed during the eighteenth century
on the vast estates dominating the fertile Lombard plain. Governed
from Vienna by a Habsburg regime bent upon increased tax revenues,
the great landowning families lived lives fraught with tensions
and contradictions. Although they retained many privileges and indulged
in shows of wealth and social distinction, they faced mounting demands
for reform and progress from an absolutist state.
The Nature of Authority employs what Harris
calls "panoramic history" to trace the mingling of enlightened reform
and a culture of display in the design and functioning of villas
and villa life in eighteenth-century Lombardy. Cadastral maps are
juxtaposed with Marc'Antonio Dal Re's famous prints of the "delights"
of villa life; both are woven into an exceptionally wide-ranging
investigation of the villas, their gardens, and crop-bearing fields
and their representation in visual and written sources from agricultural
treatises to books of etiquette. Combining this diverse material
with a sharp focus upon the organization of space and class privilege,
Harris shows how the villas served as centers of complex cultural
and sociopolitical transactions, fashioning a landscape that was
at once a beguiling vista and a tool in the enforcement of a strict
hierarchy of use and value.
Harris's innovative book reveals the complicity
of landscape in the formation of culture and the structures of everyday
life. It also elucidates the significance of Lombardy as a testing
ground for Habsburg policies of enlightened reform in the social
and natural orders.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Landscape and Enlightened Absolutism
1 Landscape and Representation: The Printed View and Marc’Antonio
Dal Re’s Ville di delizie
2 Mapping the Landscape of Reform
3 Displaying the Social Landscape
4 Villas of Delight? The Architecture of Production and Display
5 Environmental Absolutism: The Villas Clerici
6 Gardens in Eighteenth-Century Lombardy
7 Gardens and Social Distinction
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Dianne
Harris is Assistant Professor of
Landscape Architecture and Architecture at the University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign. She is the co-editor of Villas and Gardens
in Early Modern Italy and France (2001).
