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Piero De'crescenzi's Liber Ruralium Commodorum: Unearthing the Origins of the Pleasure Garden

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Piero De'crescenzi's Liber Ruralium Commodorum: Unearthing the Origins of the Pleasure Garden Piero de'Crescenzi's Liber ruralium commodorum: Unearthing the Origins of the Pleasure Garden Johanna Elizabeth Bauman Charlottesville, Virginia B.A., George Mason University, 1989 M.A,. University of Virginia, 1995 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy McIntire Department of Art University of Virginia May 2000 - II - ABSTRACT Piere de' Crescenzi's Liber ruralium commodorum, which was completed around 1306 and consists of twelve books, was the first major treatise on agriculture written in the middle ages. Although it is often mentioned in histories of medieval and Renaissance gardens, because it contains descriptions of pleasure gardens, there has never been a consideration of the pleasure garden descriptions in the context of the treatise as a whole. The main purpose of this dissertation is to recontextualize the role of the pleasure garden in an agricultural estate, by considering the relationship of Crescenzi's descriptions of pleasure gardens to the remaining agricultural books of the treatise. The dissertation begins with a consideration of Crescenzi's social, political, and intellectual backgrounds and how these influenced his decision to write a treatise on agriculture. Having placed Crescenzi in the context of the thirteenth­ century encyclopaedic tradition, the treatise is then summarized, making special reference to the sources Crescenzi employed, which include Roman agricultural writers, and treatises on medicine and the natural sciences, among others. This summary, which reveals the breadth of Crescenzi's undertaking and begins to demonstrate how the pleasure garden relates to Crescenzi's endeavor, is followed by an exploration of the prevailing definition of art and of - III - agriculture, which includes a consideration of the status of agriculture in the medieval hierarchy of the arts. Having established the contexts of the author, the treatise, and the definition of agriculture, the pleasure garden descriptions are analyzed, showing how they relate not only to the rest of the treatise, but also to existing literary tropes and traditions. This analysis makes it possible, finally, to consider the aesthetic properties of pleasure gardens, which are simultaneously elevated from and rooted in agricultural theory and practice. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................... 2 INTRODUCTION ............................................... 3 CHAPTER 1: BACKGROUND 20 I. BIOGRAPHY . .. 23 II• SOURCES • . .. 39 CHAPTER 2: DESCRIPTION OF THE TREATISE . .. 50 BOOK ONE: LOCATING, OUTFITTING AND RUNNING AN ESTATE•• 51 BOOK TWO: PLANT PHYSIOLOGY, SOILS, AND SOWING 63 BOOK THREE: GRAINS AND OTHER CROPS 73 BOOK BOUR: VITICULTURE•• 75 BOOK FIVE: TREES • 77 BOOK SIX: HERBS•• 79 BOOK SEVEN: MEADOWS AND GROVES. 82 BOOK NINE: ANIMAL HUSBANDRY 86 BOOK TEN: HUNTING •••••• 93 BOOKS ELEVEN AND TWELVE: MNEMONIC SUMMARY AND CALENDAR 97 CHAPTER 3: THE ART OF AGRICULTURE 99 I. WHAT IS ART? •••••• 101 II• THE ORIGIN OF ART 106 III. THE ANCIENT CLASSIFICATION OF THE ARTS•• 119 IV. MEDIEVAL CLASSIFICATIONS OF THE ARTS 131 v. THE CLASSIFICATION OF AGRICULTURE. 143 CHAPTER 4: THE PLEASURE GARDEN 157 I. DESCRIPTION OF THE EIGHTH BOOK 158 II. RELATIONSHIP TO EXISTING LITERARY TROPES AND TRADITIONS 1 175 III. THE AESTHETICS OF CRESCENZI S PLEASURE GARDEN ••••••• 196 CONCLUSION .......................................... 209 ILLUSTRATIONS ............................................ 217 APPENDIX: TRANSLATION . 230 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................. 252 - 2 - ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks are owed to Jamie Woolard for helping me to prepare the translation of Book Eight, Professor Tom Noble for helping me to translate a passage from Crescenzi 's will, and Frau Dr. Reinhilt Richter-Bergmeier for making portions of her manuscript available to me before publication. This dissertation is dedicated to everyone who helped me along the way. To the faculty of the McIntire Department of Art for allowing me to focus on garden history in every course I took. To my advisors, David Summers and Paul Barolsky, for their unflagging support and keen insights into my topic. To Lydia Csato Gasman for being an intellectual mentor and great friend. To my fellow graduate students and friends near and far for providing much needed encouragement and sanity breaks. To my father for not letting me quit. And to my mother, whose garden has always been a major source of inspiration. - 3 - INTRODUCTION Two of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks contain lists of books. One of them he labeled a "record of books I keep 1 locked up in the chest; " the other , it has been surmised, 2 may have been a list of books he wanted to purchase. These lists dated to 1503-4 and 1497 respectively, provide significant insight into Leonardo's varied interests. Both include the name "Fiero Cressentio," surrounded by the likes of Pliny and St. Augustine. This Fiero Cressentio, who is also referred to as Fiero de' Crescenzi and Petrus de Crescentiis, was the author of the Liber ruralium commodorum. Begun in the thirteenth century and completed in the early fourteenth, his was the first full-scale treatise devoted to agriculture since Palladius' fourth century Rerum rusticarum. Leonardo's interest in an agricultural treatise is not surprising given his obsession with the natural world, but also with the role of human beings in transforming and shaping the world by means of art and technology. Even so, it is intriguing to speculate upon why Leonardo was interested Madrid MS. II. 2b, transcribed in Jean Paul Richter ed., The Literary works of Leonardo da Vinci 2 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. 355. Many thanks to Karen Goodchild for alerting me to the2 presence of Crescenzi in Leonardo's book list. Codex Atlanticus, folio 210 recto, reprinted in G. D'Adda, Leonardo da Vinci e la sua Libreria (Milan, 1873); also reprinted in Richter and E. Macurdy, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York: George Braziller, 1954), pp. 1163-65. - 4 - in Crescenzi's work. Perhaps it was to get ideas for constructing the pergolas and other garden structures that 3 are scattered throughout Leonardo's sketchbooks. (figs. 1-3) Or perhaps it was to learn more about the physiology of plants and their growth patterns before representing them. (fig. 4) Or perhaps it was to gather information on how to dig wells and irrigate fields. At present, it is impossible to know whether or not Crescenzi's book was particularly important to Leonardo or wherein his specific interest in it lay, since his commentary does not extend beyond its presence on the book list. A closer look at Crescenzi's treatise and the wide range of subjects it covered, however, can begin to explain why this book would have appealed to Leonardo and why it would have been the first book on agriculture to appear in print in 1471, a mere ten years after the invention of the printing press. The Liber ruralium commodorum was completed between 1305 and 1309 by the retired Bolognese lawyer Fiero de'Crescenzi. Although Crescenzi declares that he has "tested" and "tried" ancient wisdom against his own experience, most of his work is based on existing texts, from Roman agricultural treatises to contemporary expositions on veterinary medicine, in keeping with the thirteenth-century encyclopedic tradition. See for example, William A. Emboden, Leonardo da Vinci on Plants and Gardens, (Portland, OR: Dioscorides Press, 1987), passim; for the passages on gardens in the Notebooks, see Macurdy pp. 299; 1034-1035; 1036-1037; 1041. - 5 - As if in response to Vincent of Beauvais' comment that there 4 should be a book devoted to all aspects of agriculture, Crescenzi's treatise is a veritable encyclopedia of topics related to agriculture. The treatise includes a dedication and a preface and is divided into twelve books. In the first book Crescenzi describes the best location for a farm in terms of climate, winds, and the availability of water. Books two and three deal with the properties of plants, pruning and grafting, sowing fields, soil types, and the use of fertilizer. Books four and five are concerned with viticulture and arboriculture, respectively. Book six is an alphabetical listing of 133 different types of herbs, vegetables and other simples, prefaced by a chapter on the virtues and origins of herbs. Book seven concerns the uses of meadows and groves and how they may be created through human intervention. Book eight describes the different types of pleasure gardens and how they are constructed. Books nine and ten both deal with the animal world, the former with domesticated animals and the latter with techniques for hunting wild ones. And the last two books provide no new information, but recapitulate the first ten: book eleven summarizes the previous books in order to make them accessible to memory, and the twelfth book is an agricultural Serge Lusignan, "Les arts mecanique dans le Speculum Doctrinale de Vincent Beauvais," in Les Arts Mecaniques au Mayen-Age, (Montreal: J. Vrin, 1982), p. 43. - 6 - calendar that arranges some of the information contained in the treatise in short entries for each month. Listing all of the topics Crescenzi covers reveals the breadth of his treatise, but discovering the wide variety of scholarly contexts in which his work is discussed points to its depth. The Liber ruralium commodorum is mentioned, however briefly, in studies dealing with the history of agriculture and land use, 5 the history of medicine, 6 the history of science, 7 the history of illuminated manuscripts, 8 and 9 finally, the history of gardens and landscape architecture. Although Crescenzi's treatise appears in a wide range of contexts, the scholarly literature that does exist is neither vast nor particularly exhaustive and it is limited to short articles and essays, or brief references in books on other topics. There are, however, two major exceptions. A collection of essays on Crescenzi's life and times was Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, transl.
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