Chapter 10 The Villa d’Este at Tivoli and Its Gardens in Marc-Antoine Muret’s Tivoli Cycle of Poems and Uberto Foglietta’s Tyburtinum

George Hugo Tucker

infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum liberat Hippolytum, nec Lethæa valet Theseus abrumpere caro vincula Pirithoo.

For, from the darkness of the Underworld, not even Diana Frees chaste Hippolytus, Nor can Theseus break Lethe’s chains For his dear Pirithous. Horace, Odes 4.7.25–28 … namque ferunt fama Hippolytum, postquam arte novercæ occiderit patriasque explerit sanguine pœnas turbatis distractus equis, ad sidera rursus ætheria et superas cæli venisse sub auras, Pæoniis revocatum herbis et amore Dianæ. […] at Trivia Hippolytum secretis alma recondit sedibus et nymphæ Egeriæ nemorique relegat, solus ubi in silvis Italis ignobilis ævum exigeret versoque ubi nomine Virbius esset.

For they say that Hippolytus, after dying by his step-mother’s Machinations, and satisfying his father’s punishment with his Blood, torn apart by his frightened horses, returned to the Starry sky and upper breezes of heaven, summoned back by The Healer’s herbs and Diana’s love. […] But kindly Trivia hides Hippolytus in a secret dwelling-place, And sends him away to the nymph Egeria and her grove,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004385634_012 The Villa d’Este at Tivoli and Its Gardens 219

Where, alone, inglorious, in Italian woods, he might live out, His days and where he might change his name to Virbius. Virgil, Aeneid 7.765–769, 774–777 ∵

This study examines two interlinked contemporary Latin testimonies of 1569 and 1571 about the conception and construction in 1560–1571 of the gardens of Ippolito II d’Este’s Villa in Tivoli (Tibur) and their fountains, statues, and iconography, the great project of that magnificent and princely cardinal-gov- ernor of Tivoli and Cardinal of Ferrara,1 entrusted principally to his antiquar- ian architect Pirro Ligorio (c.1510–1583), to whom, moreover, an anonymous vernacular description, in manuscript, of the Villa’s gardens, dating from about the same period (c.1568), has also been attributed by David Coffin.2 Each of these two subsequently published Latin descriptions, which date from the summers of 1569 and 1571 (pre-dating, by three years and by one year, respectively, Ippolito d’Este’s death in Tivoli on 2 December 1572), constitutes a detailed, informative tribute to this Maecenas of Tivoli from within his hu- manist entourage—one in epistolary, descriptive prose, and the other in de- scriptive, occasional verses. The first, addressed to Cardinal Flavio Orsini of Genova and occasioned because the latter was unable to visit Tivoli in person, was penned by the visiting Genovese historian Uberto Foglietta (1518–1581), a close friend of Ligorio’s who was in the service of Orsini. The second, set out in a series of poems of varying length, was composed by the expatriate

1 On whose presence in Tivoli, see, notably, Marina Cogotti and Francesco Polo Fiore, eds., Ippolito II d’Este, cardinale, principe, mecenate (Rome: 2013). 2 David R. Coffin, Pirro Ligorio: The Renaissance Artist, Architect, and Antiquarian (University Park, Pa.: 2004), esp. pp. 83–105: chapter 3: “The Villa d’Este at Tivoli”; idem, The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome (Princeton: 1988 [1979]), pp. 311–340 (“The Villa d’Este, Tivoli”), esp. 319–320. The anonymous “Descrittione di Tivoli, e del Giardino dell’ Ill’mo Cardinal di Ferrara …” (Paris BnF MS cod. Ital. 1179, fols. 247ro–266vo) was published in David R. Coffin, The Villa d’Este at Tivoli, Princeton Monographs in Art & Archaeology 34 (Princeton: 1960). On Ligorio’s antiquarianism, see Erna Mandowsky and Charles Mitchell, Pirro Ligorio’s Roman Antiquities: The Drawings in MS XIII. B. 7 in the National Library in Naples, Studies of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes 28 (London: 1963); George Hugo Tucker, The Poet’s Odyssey: Joachim Du Bellay and the “Antiquitez de Rome” (Oxford: 1990), pp. 116, 142–147, 203–204, 229, and 239 (on Ligorio’s links with the circles of Joachim Du Bellay in Rome 1553–1557 [in- cluding Marc-Antoine Muret], and with Du Bellay’s Roman Antiquitez de Rome and “Romæ Descriptio”, Poemata [Paris: Federic Morel, 1558]).