Green palaces. Part I

In art, there is a powerful but less recognized form of expression due to its perishable characteristic; I’m referring to gardens. They can be as humble as majestic. On this occasion, I want to make a tribute to one that I’ve walked a few times, the Boboli Gardens, that inhabit inside the Palazzo Pitti, and can be visited apart from the Palazzo. Designed and constructed under the appetite of the Dutchess Eleonora de Toledo, wife of Cossimo I di Médici.

All the noble villas and palaces’ gardens [Greek, Roman, French, German, Austrian, ¿mexican? Or whatever nationality], deserve their own review and artistic words. So, why have they been left aside or treated as an accessory to architecture, sculpture, music, painting, writing and the rest, when they should have their own chapter? I also know that especially architecture has an eye on them as part of its projects, since the famous and celebrated Hanging Gardens of Babylon, including the engineering-irrigated system to this day, but I must say that landscape architecture has been put aside and pretty down the rest of the arts, including architecture itself.

Giardino di Boboli, Niccolò Pericoli [Tribolo], 1549

I can bet that most people, when visiting the Palazzo Pitti, after the tour inside of it, when they go out to walk the gardens, of course they love them, but as the cherry that crowns the cake, not that they are a cake like another palace, a green palace.

I wonder why people feel those astonishing spaces are just for recreation and solace and joy, and not for what they are truly: living monumental sculptures.

I stop here for Part II of this text. I hope you read it. See you there.

Green palaces. Part I