La Villa

LA VILLA

PENN STUDIES IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

John Dixon Hunt, Series Editor

This series is dedicated to the study and promotion of a wide variety of approaches to landscape architecture, with special emphasis on connections between theory and practice. It includes monographs on key topics in history and theory, descriptions of projects by both established and rising designers, translations of major foreign-language texts, anthologies of theoretical and historical writings on classic issues, and critical writing by members of the profession of landscape architecture.

The series was the recipient of the Award of Honor in Communications from the American Society of Landscape Architects, 2006.

LA VILLA

BARTOLOMEO TAEGIO

EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY

THOMAS E. BECK

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2011 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taegio, Bartolomeo, fl. 1550.

[Villa. English & Italian]

La villa / Bartolomeo Taegio ; edited and translated by Thomas E. Beck. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (Penn studies in landscape architecture)

Italian text and English translation.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4317-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Landscape architecture—Italy—Early works to 1800.

2. Agriculture—Italy—Early works to 1800.

3. Country life—Italy—Early works to 1800.

4. Gardens—Italy—Design—Early works to 1800.

5. Country homes—Italy—Early works to 1800.

I. Beck, Thomas E. (Thomas Edward) II. Title.

III. Series: Penn studies in landscape architecture.

SB471.T34 2011

712.0945—dc22

2011002041

For Elizabeth

CONTENTS

Note on This Edition and Translation

Introduction

LA VILLA

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

NOTE ON THIS EDITION AND TRANSLATION

This English translation of La Villa is the first to be published. The text that follows is presented side by side with my transcription of Taegio’s original Italian text published in Milan by Francesco Moscheni in 1559, and is augmented with notes, referred to by Arabic numerals inserted into the translation. The plates that illustrated Moscheni’s edition appear here in the same sequence and relationship to the text as they did originally. Each page of the Italian text bears its original page number, and wherever there was an error or omission in the original numbering of pages, the correct number appears in brackets. References to specific pages of La Villa in the notes to the translation, and in the Introduction, are to the correct page numbers.

INTRODUCTION

The idea of the villa has a persistent relevance. La Villa will be of interest to many who have been entrusted with the making of habitable spaces because, in his treatment of the idea of the villa, Bartolomeo Taegio articulated the purpose and meaningfulness that he associated with a particular kind of place. La Villa contains three elements that make it especially relevant for landscape architects. First, it reveals a Renaissance appreciation of land not only for its economic utility but also for its aesthetic value. Second, it is one of only two extant documents that articulate a theoretical formulation of the position of the garden on a hierarchical scale of landscape interventions in terms of the interaction of art and nature: third nature. Finally, it offers rare clues to the appearance of sixteenth-century Milanese gardens, and to their symbolic and metaphorical significance for their owners.

When Taegio took up the idea of the villa as the topic for his dialogue, he brought into focus an idea that had been the subject of reflection by others before him, both in the Renaissance and in antiquity. La Villa appeared toward the end of a long tradition of villa literature in Italy, a verbal tradition that suffered a protracted and nearly complete interruption during the Middle Ages. This tradition originated in ancient Rome in the time of the Republic, and continued until the dissolution of the empire. Its recovery, which has been called a revival of villa literature, began in Florence in the fifteenth century and spread northward through the sixteenth century, with significant echoes well into the eighteenth century within and outside Italy.¹ The common theme of this body of literature, to which La Villa belongs, is the idea of the villa.

Taegio’s subject is the idea of the villa, not the villa as a type. Typology is an analytical tool, useful for defining categories of objects and spaces, but not very helpful for understanding the richness of symbolic and metaphorical associations that works of architecture and landscape architecture can have for the people who use them. Typology relates to form-making more than it does to place making. Taegio never described or even mentioned an actual building in La Villa. Instead, he alluded to villas by rendering their gardens in language so poetical as to frustrate any attempt to reconstruct them. By virtually ignoring the typology of villas, Taegio’s treatise invites the reader to consider what is simultaneously both immaterial and essential about them.

The form of the argument in La Villa, as in many villa books written before and after it, is dialogical. But unlike most sixteenth-century dialogues written in the Italian language it is not the kind scholars today call documentary, nor is it based on a Ciceronian model. Taegio’s dialogue does not include a scene-setting introduction, an essential feature of documentary dialogues; therefore it demonstrates what Cicero considered a lack of decorum. La Villa is properly called a semifictional dialogue because it is relatively transparent; that is, because readers can look through the dramatic conflict to the contest of ideas behind it, without having to interpret the text in light of their familiarity with the interlocutors’ respective points of view in life.² Sixteenth-century readers of La Villa might have known the true identities of the interlocutors and their real opinions, if they were personally acquainted with the author or his friends. In fact this seems likely, given the typically intimate relationship between writer and reader in the Renaissance. It is possible that Taegio wrote La Villa for a closed group of subscribers who were aristocrats and villa owners, but the dialogue speaks to a larger audience whose understanding of La Villa as a type of the city/country debate is not necessarily complicated by a reading of it as documentary.

A major contributor to villa discourse, Taegio’s voice needs to be heard today. At a time when the balance of nature is being challenged by humanity’s interventions on a scale hitherto unimaginable, the city/country debate needs to be revisited, in order to be imagined anew. Four hundred and fifty years after it was published, La Villa continues to speak about the consequences of the choices human beings make among possible ways of dwelling in the world. Yet, the ability of modern readers to find meaning in the text will depend to a considerable extent on their understanding of the context in which the initial discursive exchange between the author and his sixteenth-century readers took place.

The goal of this Introduction, by unfolding the biographical, political, economic, social, agricultural, horticultural, and philosophical facets of that context, is to situate La Villa within the history of the idea of the villa, thereby orienting the reader to the text and providing a framework for interpreting it. In the field of landscape architecture, which lacks a body of theoretical writing comparable to that of architecture, and in which a comprehensive survey of history, theory, and practice was not even attempted until the eighteenth century, La Villa is an invaluable source of theory from the Renaissance.

The Life and Literary Activity of Bartolomeo Taegio

Bartolomeo Taegio, jurist and man of letters, was born in Milan around 1520 to an old patrician family.³ His father’s name was Girolamo, and the family name (variously spelled Taegio, Taeggio, or Taeggi) is a contraction of Taveggio or Tavecchio, which in turn is derived from Montevecchio, Girolamo’s ancestral home.⁴ It is likely that young Bartolomeo studied law at the University of Pavia, a center of jurisprudence in northern Italy since the fourteenth century.⁵ He was educated not only in law, both civil and canon, but also in humanistic studies. He was admired in the seventeenth century as an orator and as a writer of both prose (in Italian and Latin) and poetry.⁶ When he was in his early twenties he found himself on the wrong side of the law, and his mistake, however faint may be the record of it now, left an indelible mark on his carreer. Whether it ultimately cost him his life is uncertain, but its immediate effect was to compel him to leave the city of his birth.

FIGURE 1. Woodcut portrait of Bartolomeo Taegio, from the verso of the title page of La Villa (Moscheni, 1559).

Sometime between 1540 and 1544, Taegio took up residence in the smaller city of Novara, forty-five kilometers from Milan. A twentieth-century specialist in the history of Novara reports that Taegio was confinatovi per aver commesso un omocidio (banished there for having commited a murder).⁷ Taegio adjusted quickly to his new surroundings. He bought land and started his own law practice in Novara.⁸ Between 1544 and 1546 he founded a semisecret literary society called the Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna, in which, according to local historians, si iscrissero i giovani novaresi più ingegnosi, dando vita così in una piccola città ad un centro di insolita attività letterale culturalmente libera (the most talented Novarese youth were enrolled, thus giving life in a small city to a center of isolated, culturally free, literary activity).⁹ The emblem of the academy was a palm with hanging fruit and the motto adversus pondera surgo. According to Taegio’s nineteeth-century biographer, G. B. Finazzi, Taegio, speaking about this emblem in a speech, implied that the Academy was intended for something better than the reciting of sonnets or strambotti.¹⁰ The inference is that the Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna was conceived for the purpose, at least in part, of preparing its members for political action. Including Taegio, who styled himself Vitauro, there were a total of twenty members of the academy. Six besides the founder are known by their real names. Two of them, Giovanni Pietra Testa and Giovanni Iacopo Torniello, were villa owners named in La Villa.¹¹ The other thirteen shepherds are known only by their pseudonyms.

FIGURE 2. Frontispiece of L’Essilio. Courtesy of Biblioteca civica, Novara.

It was Taegio’s intention to remain in Novara and make it a studious Athens, where all the liberal arts would display their splendor by competing with one another.¹² His vision would never be realized. In 1554 he was, according to Finazzi, constrained to leave and to be tied again to his city of origin.¹³ In none of his published writings did Taegio explain the reasons for this forced return to Milan. Finazzi speculated that Taegio’s inclination toward novità (novelty), his involvement with the Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna, and his relationship with Cardinal Giovanni Morone, who had been held in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome for suspicions in religious matters, attracted the attention of the Spanish authorities, who might have preferred to keep Taegio in Milan, where his actions would have been felt less than in Novara, a smaller city.¹⁴ Taegio remained visible, even holding public office. Cardinal Morone appointed him governor of Lago d’Orta.¹⁵ Taegio also served as one of the vicars general of the state of Milan.¹⁶

Bartolomeo Taegio began his career as a writer at about the time of his return to Milan.¹⁷ By most accounts his first and best published work was Le Risposte (The Replies), which he dedicated to Cardinal Morone. He wrote it in 1554, while he was governor of Lago d’Orta, and probably while he was staying at Isola San Giulio.¹⁸ As the inscription on the frontispiece of Le Risposte indicates, Taegio was already by that time a member of the Collegio di Giureconsulti (College of Jurists) of Milan, a prestigious association of legal specialists. Le Risposte was translated into French in the sixteenth century, and until now it is the only piece of Taegio’s writing that has been published in translation.¹⁹ As many as sixteen more books followed, over a period of eighteen years. Two seventeenth-century encyclopedias of literature that include entries on Bartolomeo Taegio list the same twelve titles, while the earliest of these sources adds that there were other books.²⁰ Later biographical dictionaries of Italian authors provide dates of publication and names of publishers for some of these twelve works, as well as the titles of five additional ones not identified in the earlier sources.²¹ The public library in Novara holds copies of six books by Bartolomeo Taegio.²²

FIGURE 3. Frontispiece of Le Risposte. Courtesy of Biblioteca Civica, Novara.

Le Risposte is a collection of fifty-three essays in the form of replies to inquiries from Taegio’s friends, most of them residents of Novara. All of the Shepherds of the Agogna who are known by name are represented; one suspects that the anonymous ones are as well. The essays contain valuable historical information. The one entitled Della Bellezza del Isola et Lago d’Orta (On the Beauty of the Island and Lake of Orta) describes mid-sixteenth-century Isola San Giulio, and helps to locate its author there in 1554. Another, Della Pittura (On Painting), is dedicated to Bernardino Lanino, one of the promising young painters of the Vercellese school.²³ The titles of the essays reflect the range of themes, both practical—Delle Richezza (On Riches), Del Studio delle Leggi (On the Study of Law), and Delle Qualità che deve haver la Buona Moglie (On the Qualities That a Good Wife Ought to Have)—and theoretical—Della Musica (On Music), Del Chaos Poetico (On Poetic Chaos), and Dell’Amicità c’ha la Pittura con la Poesia (On the Friendship That Painting Has with Poetry). The titles of other essays are suggestive of Taegio’s interest in country life: they include Della Caccia (On Hunting) and Della Solitudine (On Solitude). An essay entitled Di Dialoghi (On Dialogue) is addressed to Francesco Sesallo, the publisher of Le Risposte.

In the year following the publication of his first book, Taegio produced L’Essilio (The Exile), the only one of his extant works besides La Villa to be published by Moscheni. This slim volume contains a letter addressed to Giovanni Battista Piotto, one of the villa owners named in La Villa, in which Taegio expressed sorrow over the separation from his scholarly friends and his garden in Novara, as well as resignation at being confined in Milan, his very sweet homeland. L’Essilio contains other letters addressed to each of the members of the Shepherds of the Agogna, and it is because of this that their pseudonyms are known.

La Villa itself was published in 1559, the year of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, which gave Spain dominion over Milan.²⁴ A twentieth-century Milanese historian calls La Villa un gustoso libretto (an enjoyable little book) devoted to the idea of villeggiatura. He provides a concise description of the book:

É un dialogo tra due gentilhuomini, l’uno innamorato della vita campestre, l’altro allora della cittadina. Il primo, per convalidare la propria tesi, enumera i cittadini che passano in villa gran parte dell’anno, una sfilata di circa dugencinquanta nomi di famiglie e di personaggi, preziosa anche perchè ci mette sott’occhio le persone allora più distinte a Milano.

(It is a dialogue between two gentlemen, one enamored of country life, the other of the city. The first, in order to support his thesis, enumerates the citizens who spend a large part of the year in villa, a list of about two hundred and fifty names of families and personnages, especially valuable because it sets before the eyes the most distinguished persons in Milan at that time.)²⁵

The first of the two gentlemen is Taegio, using the name Vitauro, his pseudonym in the Academy of the Shepherds of the Agogna. The other interlocutor is Partenio, one of the shepherds whose real-life identity is unknown. Testimony to the importance of La Villa for a historian is given by a nineteenth-century author who said,

Dalla pag. 55, alla 106, si accennano in parte, ed in parte si descrivono più ville e giardini del milanese rinomate in que’ tempi. L’opera torna molto preziosa anche per la storia dei costumi lombardi di quel secolo.

(From pages 55 to 106, most of the villas and gardens of the prominent Milanese of that time [the middle 1500s] are either alluded to or described. The work is also very valuable for the history of Lombard customs of that century.)²⁶

The first of Taegio’s publications that followed La Villa is L’Humore (The Humors), a dialogue between the author and Giovanni Paolo Barzi, whose name appears in La Villa. It contains numerous poems, many of them translations of works by Virgil. Dedicated to Giuliano Golesino, L’Humore was published in 1564, the same year as Taegio’s treatise on criminal law, Tractatus Criminales, the only work Taegio wrote in Latin.²⁷

Il Liceo (The Lyceum) consists of two volumes, in which there are riches of historical and biographical facts regarding Milanese literature.²⁸ The first book of Il Liceo is written in the form of a dialogue between Count Galeazzo Visconti and Ennio Ritio, in which, according to the inscription on its frontispiece, the order of the Academies and the Nobility is discussed. It is dedicated to Cardinal Francesco Alziati. The second book, where the art of making enterprises conform to the concepts of the mind is discussed, and the poetical imaginings of the muses talked about, is dedicated to Giulio Claro, one of the villa owners named in La Villa.²⁹ Two poetic compositions by Bartolomeo Taegio entitled Paradossi (Paradoxes) were published only in a second edition of Il Liceo book 1 in 1572.³⁰

FIGURE 4. Frontispiece of Il Liceo. Courtesy of Biblioteca Negroni, Novara.

The last of Taegio’s works to be published, in 1572, was L’Officioso (The Dutiful One), a dialogue dedicated to Saint Carlo Borromeo. It shows the author near the end of his life, intent on works of piety and religion.³¹ The portrait in the front of this book depicts Taegio in his old age, and carries the legend Bartholomaeus Taegius Comes Doctor et Eques (Bartolomeo Taegio, Companion, Teacher, and Knight).

The date, place, and circumstances of Bartolomeo Taegio’s death remain a mystery. A local historian described a marble sepulchral monument, with an inscription dedicated to the Taegio family, in the church of S. Francesco in Vercelli, and he gave 1573 as the year of Bartolomeo’s death.³² It is likely that the stone was installed, as was customary, in the floor of the church, but no trace of it exists today. When the interior of S. Francesco was renovated in the 1980’s the floor was repaved, and a great number of old lapide were removed.

The Political, Economic, and Social Context

When La Villa was published, the state of Milan, a territory that encompassed the western half of present-day Lombardy as well as a large part of Piedmont, was a Spanish possession. Philip II (1527–1598), son of the Habsburg emperor Charles V (1500–1558), had reigned as king of Spain since 1556, the year Charles abdicated and left the empire to his brother Ferdinand I, to whom Taegio dedicated his dialogue in 1559, and whose claim to the imperial throne had just been recognized the previous year.³³ The roots of Spanish control of Milan, and the origins of its sixteenth-century aristocracy, lie in the history of the duchy of Milan from the end of the fourteenth century.

The names of the most active political Milanese families for three hundred years—Visconti, Sforza, Simonetta, Trivulzio, Crivelli, and others—appear repeatedly in the pages of La Villa. Members of the Visconti family had ruled the territory since the title duke of Milan was first bestowed by the Holy Roman Emperor Wenceslas on Gian Galeazzo Visconti in 1395.³⁴ Under their leadership the region flourished economically and artistically in the fourteenth century. By Taegio’s day, many Visconti castles had been transformed into hunting lodges and villas that can still be seen today, such as the Visconti-Sforza castle at Cusago, which Taegio identified as the villa of Countess Maximiliana Sforza.

The fall of the Visconti dynasty came with the death of Filippo Maria Visconti, without heirs, in 1447. After a violent struggle for succession, a condottiere by the name of Francesco Sforza took control of the duchy in 1450, and the people of Milan proclaimed him duke. He removed from positions of power several Milanese aristocrats close to the Visconti whose family names (such as Borrromeo, Trivulzio, and Cotta) appear in La Villa, and he replaced them with members of his own entourage of commoners.³⁵ He restored the economic health of the duchy, which had been debilitated by years of warfare.³⁶

Francesco Sforza died in 1466, and his oldest legitimate son, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, succeeded him. During Galeazzo’s reign the Milanese court became the richest in Italy. His profligacy contributed to the eventual financial bankrupcy of the Sforza dynasty.³⁷ He was assassinated by some of his own courtiers in 1476.³⁸ Galeazzo’s son, Gian Galeazzo Maria Sforza, was only seven years old when his father was killed. The duchy was effectively ruled by the late duke’s secretary and minister, Cecco Simonetta, until he was arrested and subsequently executed in 1480 by followers of Lodovico Maria Sforza (il Moro), the fourth legitimate son of Francesco. Thus Lodovico Sforza became in effect the sole regent of Milan, while his young nephew reigned as duke in title only. Upon Gian Galeazzo’s death in 1494, Lodovico became duke.

The period in the history of Italy from 1494 to 1559 was the age of the Italian Wars.³⁹ The balance of power the duchy of Milan had been able to maintain as the wealthiest and strongest militarily of the Italian city-states was permanently upset in 1494. In that year French troops under their king, Charles VIII, crossed the Alps into Italy to conquer Naples. Lodovico Sforza had endorsed the invasion, but in an about-face he allied himself with the pope, the emperor, Venice, and Spain against the French king, who was expelled from Naples in 1495.⁴⁰ Four years later Charles VIII died, and the duke of Orleans, an old enemy of Lodovico’s, became Louis XII. The new French king claimed the title of duke of Milan on the grounds of his descent from a Visconti princess. In 1499 the Treaty of Blois between France and Venice partitioned Milanese territory, and the army of Louis XII invaded Lombardy under the command of Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, a former captain of the Milanese army who had made himself an expatriot and an enemy of the Sforzas more than ten years earlier when Lodovico passed him over for a promotion.⁴¹ Trivulzio was by no means the only one of his countrymen Lodovico had managed to disaffect. Many of the Milanese, overburdened by taxes levied to support the luxury of the court, welcomed the invaders, and Lodovico Sforza was forced to flee to Innsbruck, where he found refuge and political support from the emperor, whose wife was Lodovico’s sister.⁴² Many works of art commissioned by the duke were stolen or vandalized by the French, and the artists he had assembled dispersed. Noble Milanese families who had been loyal to the Sforza dukes, including the Crivelli and the Visconti, went into exile after the French confiscated their property.⁴³ In February of 1500 the people rebelled, and Lodovico, with the help of many of his old friends, reentered Milan. On his approach to the city he stayed overnight outside Milan at a house mentioned in La Villa called Mirabello, which belonged to the Landriani family at that time.⁴⁴ Backed by imperial troops, Lodovico routed the French forces and was given a hero’s welcome by the people, who had been treated badly by their foreign masters. Lodovico’s restoration was short-lived. A few weeks later he was captured by Trivulzio and imprisoned in France, first at Lyon and then at Loches, where he died in 1508.⁴⁵

FIGURE 5. Frontispiece of L’Officioso. Courtesy of Biblioteca civica, Novara.

Over the next half-century, as French, Spanish, and German rulers competed for mastery of the peninsula, political and cultural preeminence in Italy shifted from Milan to papal Rome.⁴⁶ In 1512 the warlike Pope Julius II, who earlier, as Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, had urged the French to invade Italy, joined forces with Emperor Maxmillian II to remove them, and to install in Milan as his puppet Ludovico Sforza’s oldest son, Massimiliano. After Francis I became king of France upon the death of Louis XII in 1515, he defeated the Italian army at Marignano and negotiated the abdication of Massimiliano.⁴⁷ In 1519 Charles V was elected emperor. In 1521, with the help of Pope Leo X, he expelled the French from Milan and installed the seriously ailing second son of Ludovico Sforza, Francesco II. The 1520s, the decade in which Bartolomeo Taegio was born, was a time of political disorder, disease, famine, and devastation of the countryside. After the death of Francesco II without heirs in 1535, the duchy of Milan passed directly to Charles V and became a province of his empire.⁴⁸

The period of Milanese history from the death of the last Sforza duke in 1535 to the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 was the first part of an era of Spanish domination, which lasted until 1714.⁴⁹ During that era, Milan was ruled by a series of appointed governors who in theory administered the state of Milan for the king of Spain, but who in practice functioned almost autonomously.⁵⁰ Charles V invested his son Philip with the office of duke of Milan in 1540. Philip was installed in 1546, the same year the emperor summoned Ferrante Gonzaga to serve as governor of Milan, which office he filled until his death in 1557.⁵¹ Between 1549 and 1555 a new ring of bastioned defense walls twenty miles in length were built under the supervision of Gonzaga’s architect, Domenico Giunti. Giunti also designed additions, including an innovative portico with superimposed orders, to the suburban villa known today as La Simonetta. Gonzaga bought La Simonetta in 1547 and later sold it to an apostolic nuncio by the name of Alessandro Simonetta, whose name appears in Taegio’s list of villa owners.⁵² Giunti’s portico at La Simonetta still stands today, as do remnants of the defenses he designed for the Spanish government. Commonly called the Spanish walls, they enclosed the suburbs that had sprung up in the fifteenth century outside the medieval walls, which were subsequently demolished, and they effectively doubled the area of the city. The part of the navigli (Milan’s system of navigable canals) that had been built to serve initially as a moat outside the medieval walls was thus incorporated into the city.⁵³

In 1554 Philip took possession of the city of Milan and appointed a magistracy, which consisted of a president and nine officials called questors. The chief executive of the city was the podestà, an administrative official like a mayor, but appointed rather than elected. In 1555 Pope Paul IV made a league with France to expel the Spanish from Naples and Milan, and once more Lombardy became a battlefield.⁵⁴ Lasting peace was finally achieved in April of 1559, roughly seven months after the death of Charles V, with the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, in which France, weakened by religious wars at home, renounced its claims in Italy, and Spain retained Milan.

The establishment of Spanish hegemony in Milan contributed to a shift in the regional economy away from manufacturing toward agriculture. The Milanese economy had begun to recover in the middle of the sixteenth century and enjoyed several decades of rapid expansion after the conclusion of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. In spite of attempts by Spain to block the export of cloth, the silk and wool industries made modest gains in the first half of the sixteenth century, as did the manufacture of leather goods, arms, and armor. The publishing trade in Milan, though relatively small with only about a dozen established firms, was profitable enough to lure Francesco Moscheni, the publisher of La Villa, into moving his business from Pavia to Milan in 1553.⁵⁵ But the sector of Milan’s economy that experienced the most remarkable progress in the 1550s was agriculture.⁵⁶ The reasons for the shift from manufacturing to farming in Taegio’s day are related to demographic growth. The population of the city of Milan was probably more than eighty thousand in the middle of the century and increasing rapidly.⁵⁷ The city was home to approximately one-tenth of the growing population of the state of Milan.⁵⁸ Prices for agricultural produce were rising in pace with the demand for foodstuffs.⁵⁹ As farming became increasingly profitable, many wealthy Milanese merchants and aristocrats invested in the acquisition, reclamation, and irrigation of land in the fertile plain of the Po River valley, and many of these new landowners built houses in the countryside.⁶⁰

The names of two hundred and eighty-four owners of villa estates and gardens that existed in the state of Milan in the sixteenth century are listed in La Villa. These names include many of the high officials of the city of Milan in the epoch of Charles V, including nineteen (almost two-thirds) of the podestà who served between 1537 and 1567, three questors, eleven senators, three presidents of the Senate, and one high chancellor.⁶¹ Leaders of the church identified in this list include nine bishops and one who would become the bishop of Novara after 1559. Two of the villa owners named in La Villa would become archbishops (Giovanni Arcimboldo and Carlo Borromeo), and one (Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici) would become a pope, Pius IV. With the exception of the clergy, all of the villa owners named in La Villa were aristocrats.⁶²

Two aristocracies coexisted in the state of Milan in the sixteenth century. One was the feudal nobility, who possessed hereditary titles and fiefs in the countryside. These cavalieri (knights) and conti (counts), from which the Italian word for countryside, contado, is derived, typically received most of their income from agriculture, and they enjoyed judicial and administrative authority over the peasants who worked their lands.⁶³ The other aristocracy was the urban patriciate, whose claim to the highest status in Milanese society was based on their families’ long histories of residency and political leadership in the city.⁶⁴ Conspicuous among the patricians were the lawyers, from whose ranks the senators rose, and who were recruited by the Spanish government for various bureaucratic posts.⁶⁵ At first each kind of aristocracy had its own separate sphere of influence, either the town or the country, but by the second half of the sixteenth century the distinction between the two groups was beginning to become blurred.⁶⁶

The gradual blending of the two aristocracies is indicated by the changing usage in the sixteenth century of the word gentilhuomo (gentleman), an honorific favored by Taegio. In Milan under the Sforzas the title gentilhuomo was used to designate a courtier of high rank and income from the class of the cavalieri. In the epoch of Charles V the term lost some of its specificity outside of the princely court, although it was still reserved for the feudal nobility. By the end of the sixteenth century the meaning of the word would be broadened to include members of either aristocracy, and eventually almost anyone we would call a gentleman, on the basis of education and comportment more than social status. Taegio was writing in the midst of these changes, just as the term gentleman was beginning to be applied to members of the urban patriciate.

Well over half of the names of villa owners in La Villa appear in two lists of gentlemen, one beginning on page 98 and the other on page 109. At first glance it may seem that Taegio used the term gentilhuomini to distinguish the villa owners of the knightly order from those belonging to the urban patriciate; at least nine of the one hundred and forty-six gentlemen he lists were counts. Concerning only three of the gentlemen villa owners did Taegio say anything about their participation in public life. Only twice in the entire dialogue are city dwellers referred to as gentilhuomini, and then the tone is ironic. In one instance city dwellers are called ociosi gentil’huomini (lazy gentlemen); in another they are said merely to consider themselves to be gentlemen. Closer examination, however, reveals that Taegio’s gentilhuomini are not exclusively knights or counts. Nine of those listed are known to have been podestà, three were senators and one was a president of the Senate; they certainly belonged to the urban elite. Nor do the lists of gentlemen include all of the villa owners who might have been knights; only one of the ten villa owners Taegio called cavallieri and fewer than half of those he identified as counts are included. The fact that Taegio did not equate gentlemen with feudal nobility suggests that by the time La Villa was written differences between the two aristocracies in Milanese society had already become less marked than they had been at the beginning of the century.

During the course of the sixteenth century the urban patriciate became increasingly exclusive, imitating the feudal nobility in its reliance on lineage more than education or service to the state as the primary condition for admission to its order of society. At the same time as the aristocrats were closing ranks, a wealthy class of commoners, purchasing titles and fiefs from the Spanish government, were challenging all claims to nobility on hereditary grounds.⁶⁷ This new nobility of mercantile origin competed with the patriciate "in the refined passion for villeggiatura."⁶⁸ While the villa owners mentioned by Taegio comprised both kinds of the old aristocracy, they apparently included none of these newly titled bourgeois.

The Agricultural Context

La Villa is an early example of the type of villa book that was popular in Italy toward the end of the sixteenth century. Taegio responded to a demand for a new kind of writing in the Renaissance, the essay, letter or dialog on villa life, which James Ackerman calls an innovative literary genre.⁶⁹ La Villa is typical of the genre, in that it reflects its author’s familiarity with farming and gardening practices in the region of the upper Po River valley. However, Taegio’s dialogue differs from other books on villa life written before and after it, in two important respects: it emphasizes the aesthetic value of gardens and farmland, and it treats the villa as a place of leisure devoted to intellectual activity.

Ackerman includes Bartolomeo Taegio among the four North Italian agricultural authorities whose works offer the greatest insight into villa society, and he says that Taegio is the only one of them who represented the villa as a setting for the pursuit of scholarly and philosophical otium.⁷⁰ Besides Taegio, the other three agricultural authorities whose writings Ackerman discusses are Alberto Lollio, Giuseppe Falcone, and Agostino Gallo. Lollio was from Ferrara, Falcone and Gallo from Brescia. The earliest of their works is the Lettera di M. Alberto Lollio, nella quale rispondendo ad una di M. Hercole Perinato, egli celebra La Villa et lauda molto l’agricoltura …, which was published in Venice in 1544. It describes the practical advantages of life in villa over life in the city. Falcone’s La Nuova, vaga, et dilletevole villa was first published in Brescia in 1559, the same year as Taegio’s La Villa. Of all the Renaissance authors on country life, Falcone is the closest to the ancient Roman authorities, Varro and Columella, in his conviction that the villa owner should be tireless in his commitment to the full-time supervision of his estate. In contrast to Falcone, Gallo’s work emphasizes relaxation and diversion as benefits of life in the country. As originally conceived, Le dieci giornate della vera agricoltura, e piaceri del