This text examines the long historical development and disciplinary diversity of Italian garden studies.

In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan develops a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, arguing that the monster was a key figure in Renaissance culture and that the incorporation of the monstrous into gardens was not incidental but an essential feature.

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700.

This collection of essays explores the role of gardens in early modern academies and, conversely, the place of what might be called 'academic culture' in early modern gardens. While studies of botanical gardens have often focused on their association with a research institution, the intention of this book is deliberately broader, seeking to explore the interconnections between the built environment of the early modern garden and the more or less organised social and intellectual life it supported. As such, the book contributes to the intersection of several fields of research: garden history, literary history, architectural history and socio-political history, and considers the garden as a site of performance that requires an intermedial approach.

Designed Landscapes is a case-by-case study of 37 significant, existing works of landscape design worldwide, largely constructed since the Renaissance. Being an informative and easy-to-read reference volume for practitioners and students alike, it presents key precedents in landscape architecture using site plans and recent photographs to showcase each project. Organised and presented in 12 sections based on project type, each project is examined based on date, previous site condition, designer(s), design intentions, current composition, unique features, ownership and management, and comparable projects. Each chapter offers an insightful critique of the featured projects. Written by the authors of Great City Parks, the book posits that these carefully selected key projects have maintained their status throughout the ages because they express values and design intentions that continue to inform the practice of the landscape architecture in the present day. The book concludes with a ten-point summary of lessons for professional practice gleaned from the studies. Including a wide range of case studies from countries including many in western Europe, the United States, Canada, India, Japan and China, and lavishly illustrated with over 200 full-colour images, the book is a must-have volume for anyone interested in the history and current practice of landscape architecture.

RES 59/60 includes “The making of architectural types” by Joseph Rykwert; “Traces of the sun and Inka kinetics” by Tom Cummins and Bruce Mannheim; “Inka water management and display fountains” by Carolyn Dean; “Guaman Poma’s pictures of huacas” by Lisa Trever; “Peruvian nature up close” by Daniela Bleichmar; and other papers.

This book is the first study of the portico and its decorative program as a cultural phenomenon in Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a largely neglected group of porticoes decorated with painted pergolas that appeared in Rome and environs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it tells the story of how an element of the garden—the pergola—became a pictorial topos in portico decoration, and evolved, hand in hand with its real cousin in the garden, into an object for cultural emulation among the educated patrons of early modern Rome. The liminality of both the portico and the pergola at the interface of architecture and garden is key to the interpretation of these architectural and painted forms, which rests on the intersecting frameworks of the classical tradition, natural history, and the cultural identity of the aristocracy. In the mediating space of the Renaissance portico, the illusionism pergola created an art gallery, a natural history museum, and a virtual garden where one could engage in leisurely strolls, learned conversations, appreciation of art, and scientific investigation, as well as extensive travel across time and space. The book proposes the interpretation that the illusionistic pergola was an artistic formula for the early modern perception of nature.