Hortus conclusus
[7] Not all actual medieval horti conclusi even strove to include all these details, the olive tree in particular being insufficiently hardy for northern European gardens.
The enclosure might be as simple as woven wattle fencing or of stout or decorative masonry; or it might be enclosed by trelliswork tunneled pathways in a secular garden or by an arcaded cloister, for communication or meditative pacing.
The practical enclosed garden was laid out in the treatise by Pietro Crescenzi of Bologna, Liber ruralium commodorum, a work that was often copied, as the many surviving manuscripts of its text attest, and often printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Late medieval paintings and illuminations in manuscripts such as for The Romance of the Rose – where the garden in the text is largely allegorical – often show a turfed bank for a seat as a feature of the hortus conclusus.
[11] Somewhat earlier, Pietro Barbo, who became Pope Paul II in 1464, began the construction of a hortus conclusus, the Palazzetto del Giardino di San Marco, attached to the Venetian Cardinals' Roman seat, the Palazzo Venezia.
[12] It served as Paul's private garden during his papacy; inscriptions stress its secular functions as sublimes moenibus hortos...ut relevare animum, durasque repellere curas, a garden of sublime delights, a retreat from cares, and praise it in classicising terms as the home of the dryads, suggesting that there was a central grove of trees, and mentioning its snowy-white stuccoed porticoes.
An eighteenth-century engraving shows a tree-covered central mount, which has been recreated in the modern replanting, with box-bordered cross and saltire gravelled paths.
Sometimes, as with a Gerard David's The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor (below) the garden is very fully depicted; at other times, as in engravings by Martin Schongauer, only a wattle fence and a few sprigs of grass serve to identify the theme.
There is no such ambiguity in the scenes where the archangel Gabriel is shown blowing a horn, as hounds chase the unicorn into the Virgin's arms, and a little Christ Child descends on rays of light from God the Father.
In the 16th century the subject of the hortus conclusus drifts into the open air Sacra Conversazione and the Madonnas in a landscape of Giovanni Bellini, Albrecht Dürer and Raphael, where it is hard to say if an allusion is intended.
South Netherlandish illuminations and painting appear to document the "turf benches, fountains, raised beds, 'estrade'[24] trees, potted plants, walkways, enclosing walls, trellises, wattle fences and bowers" familiar to contemporary viewers, but assembled into an illusion of reality.
Designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and with a garden created by Piet Oudolf, the Pavilion was a place abstracted from the world of noise and traffic and the smells of London – an interior space within which to sit, to walk, to observe the flowers.
