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The Hektorović Tvrdalj between Imitations and Examples: The Antique villa maritima from Stari Grad
Radoslav Bužančić
; Konzervatorski odjel Ministarstva kulture Split
Sažetak
As mentioned earlier with the example of Ovid, the translations of Hektorović attract particular attention because of his translation method, which is to provide a kind of reinterpretation of the original work. This kind of interpretation of the original was often used by his contemporaries, and there are numerous examples in which free translation becomes a new work of literature, particularly in the case of renderings of Antique authors the works of whom were not easy to translate artistically while preserving the meaning, particularly without an antiquarian’s knowledge of the quotidian in which the original work was created. It is interesting that Hektorović’s approach to translation was matched by that to building. He altered the canonical architectural mainstream enjoined by fashion according to his own creative approach, which he drew from his readings. If we compare, for example, his Tvrdalj with Lučić’s villa in Hvar, a paradigmatic piece of Renaissance country house architecture, we shall see how original and unique Hektorović’s approach was, eschewing the standard deployment of rooms and devoid of the decoration and architectural sculpture that belongs to the stylistic expression.
As against the architecture of the villa, the organisation of its garden contains elements that we find in the great examples of villa architecture of Italy and Dubrovnik. A huge impact was exerted on the landscaping of the Renaissance garden by the didactic work Liber Ruralium Commodorum, written at the beginning of the 14th century by a Bologna lawyer, Piero de’ Crescenzi, who drew in turn on classical texts concerning agriculture by Columella and Palladius, De re rustica and Opus agriculturae. His work was one of the best read in the whole of Europe, was often translated and went through many editions from as early as the 1470s. The drawing of the frontispiece of the edition published in the vernacular by Matteo Capcasa in Venice is a direct model for the erection of the dovecote tower of the Tvrdalj. The inscription OMNIUM CONDITORI on it refers to Crescenzi’s garden of pleasure that »relieves care celebrating God in the heights, the author and cause of all worthy contentment«.
The garden of Hektorović’s Tvrdalj is certainly one of those that opened up the way to the humanist type of grounds in Dalmatia, drawing on classic examples, including the celebrated garden of the villa in Quaraccio of 1459, described in his diary by its owner Giovanni Rucellai. The grounds of his villa were indirectly a model for Hektorović’s horticultural undertaking, with its abundance of water that was made possible by its location alongside the River Arno, with a fishpond and a fine large garden inspired by ancient literature and the theoretical works of L. B. Alberti. Being a model for Renaissance gardening of the 15th century, the garden of the Quaraccio villa could not have been unknown to Hektorović and his literary circle. Also certain to have been familiar to him and Adriatic such as the celebrated garden of the Villa Medici in Carregio, inherited by Cosimo, and the location for his Platonic Academy during the time of the Church Council held in Florence in 1438 to 1439. The garden, inspired by the model of the grounds of the Roman classical period, was surrounded by a high wall enclosing shrubs of fragrant herbs, flowers, including species from other climes, rows of potted citrus trees that were moved under cover in winter. Water ran from numerous fountains, the best known being that on which Andrea dell Verrocchio did the boy on a dolphin. The promenade and the table of Hektorović’s garden, which he erected for his circle of friends for their philosophical communing, the paths of the pretty grounds and the stone table (tarpez kameni) symbolically preserve the memory of Plato’s symposium. Antique writings about agriculture had a huge influence on the late medieval idea of the villa from the very beginnings of humanism. Cato’s work De agri cultura, Varro’s Res rusticae, Pliny’s Naturalis historia and Palladius’ De agricultura were an inspiration to Petrarch in the work he dedicated to agriculture, now preserved in a late manuscript in the Vatican Library. It is known from this gardening diary that Petrarch tended gardens with his own hands, in Parma, Milan and Arqua, his actions becoming a model to many of the humanists and their followers on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. It is an interesting fact that Petrarch swapped grape vines and other plants with his friends, who also looked after their gardens. For example, for the Milanese garden that he tended for the Monastery of St Ambrose came six laurels from Bergamo. Petrarch exchanged gifts of plants friend Galeazzo Visconti, duke of Milan, a gardener and botanist who established the garden of the new palace in Pavia with his own work. The centre of this garden was a lawn with wildflowers and a pool, and it also had pergolas and an orchard planted in the Roman manner. Like his great model, Hektorović too exchanged plants within his literary circle of friends, including the Benedictine Mavro Vetranović, Nikola Nalješković, Ivan Vidali and Hortenzije Bartučević. Thus Dom Mavro was praised for his gifts of oleanders and cypresses for a garden with pergola-topped stone pillars, orchards, fragrant plants and bushes, in which there were tamarisks, capers, and the inevitable crocuses, cactuses and Indian figs and jasmine that climbed the pillars, and sweet-smelling lilies and rosemary. These thanks were more than just gratitude to a friend, for the exchange of plants from gardens cultivated with one’s own hands was part of the galant conduct of the time. The book of Marcus Terentius Varro Res Rustica, which Hektorović knew well, from all accounts, is in some parts literally put into the building of the Tvrdalj. This hypothesis, if, Varro’s advice about the building of the architectural part of the villa can on the contrary be considered merely commonplace, is confirmed by the decoration of the Tvrdalj with the various inscriptions carved into the stone, a literal implementation of one of Varro’s instructions. He writes to the builder of a villa that it is not good enough if its walls are not decorated with his writing. »And letters…. in stone made« on the Tvrdalj, of which the poet was able to boast, were not the panegyrical inscriptions for special occasions of the Dubrovnik villas, but really tuis quoque litteris exornati parietes essent, of which he had carved, as he wrote himself, twenty and more. This is really a unique example in Renaissance architecture anywhere. A rare example of villa architecture decorated with quotations is the south west loggia of the Palace Orsini in Bomarzo that was created at about the same time as the Tvrdalj. The quotations carved onto its walls are copied from the Bible, with the drawings of Francesco Colonna, or else from the speeches of contemporaries, like the humanist Bocchi and the astrologer, astronomer and mathematician Guarico.
In this light, drawing attention to the literalness of Hektorović’s implementation of Varro’s instructions and other motifs taken from his work, such as the aviary, fishpond, aqueduct and other parts of the villa as recommended by De re rustica, their appearance in the Tvrdalj cannot be seen as a topos appropriate to the building of a Renaissance villa. Quite to the contrary, this is a proof of Hektorović’s interpretation of Varro’s work, and the reinterpretation of the literary contents of various authors in his own rendering. But there was more than that: employing the Antique literary prototype in the building of the Tvrdalj, Hektorović attempted to interpret the look of the vanished ancient villa on the basis of which he was building his country house. The manner of building the walls of the Tvrdalj, with courses of the stone slab called bašetina in Stari Grad, is completely identical to the manner of building of Hellenistic and Roman buildings. The remains of the walls of the ancient ruins that he had inherited on the land on which he built the villa were precisely like this. In an architectural sense, it might be said that the building of his country house was an attempt at the reconstruction of the Roman villa in the space of the Tvrdalj, his own interpretation of the appearance of the former building, of which only the layout of the rooms in the archaeological strata was extant. Hektorović also reconstructed the lost parts of the ruin and developed the garden, drawing as he did so on examples that he had studied in Roman written sources, especially the work De re rustica of Marcus Terentius Varro. In the context of what has been written, this kind of building might be considered an attempt, as it were, to translate the work of Varro by construction.
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Hrčak ID:
240903
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Datum izdavanja:
29.6.2020.
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