Saturday, March 1, 2014 at 11am in the Pillsbury Auditorium at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Mention of
ancient Roman gardens conjures images of lavish suburban estates with
far-reaching views and outfitted with sprawling gardens containing specimen
plantings from around the world, aviaries and fishponds, pergolas for outdoor
dining, and sculpture-lined swimming pools such as those described by the younger
Pliny in his letters or evidenced by the remains of Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli.
Such gardens would influence Byzantine, Islamic, and monastic gardens as well
as gardens of Renaissance Europe; they would resonate in gardens from the
seventeenth century onwards, their underlying presence felt to the present day.
These Roman
estates and their gardens are generally viewed as resulting directly from a
desire to emulate the palaces of Hellenistic nobles, experienced first-hand by
Romans when they became masters of the Mediterranean in the second century BCE.
It is said, in turn, that Romans of lesser means replaced kitchen gardens with
decorative plantings and, in the absence of space for planting, even covered
their walls with garden murals, all out of a desire to live as luxuriously as
the elite. This, however, is just part of the picture; fashionability is hardly
enough to explain the extent and longevity of the garden movement in the Roman
world.
This lecture
addresses the origins and underlying principles of the Roman Green Movement as
manifested in Roman domestic gardens of the mid second century BCE and
thereafter. The movement had its origins at a most volatile point in Roman
history, a time ripe for utopian reverie.
It was a time when citizens worried deeply about the effects of Roman
conquests and of extravagant building efforts on an increasingly depleted
Earth—and when it appeared most desirable to “return” to simpler times, to the
imagined comforts of a hallowed agricultural past idealized by tradition.
Combining a full
range of paradisiacal associations, sacred and profane, Roman domestic gardens
and their painted counterparts came to express an ideal of living harmoniously
with nature.
Annette
Giesecke is with the University of Delaware, and holds her degrees from Harvard
(Ph.D.) and UCLA; her research interests include gardens in the Classical
world, Greek and Roman art and architecture, and urbanism and ethics of land
use in classical antiquity. Her most recent publications include The
Epic City: Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome
(Harvard University Press, 2007) and EARTH PERFECT? Nature, Utopia, and
the Garden (contrib. and ed., Black Dog Publishing, London 2012). Forthcoming books include The Mythology of Plants: Botanical Myths
from Ancient Greece and Rome (Getty Publications, 2014) and The Good Gardener? Nature, Humanity and the
Garden, editor and contributor (Black Dog Publishing, 2014).
A
no-host lunch open to AIA members with the speaker will follow the lecture at
Christos Greek Restaurant, 2632 Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis
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