lovers of scenery and laid great emphasis on choice of site, a hillside spring being the ideal starting point of a garden. The gardens were inclosed, not in this case so much for the sake of defense as for privacy, repose, magnificence, and definite formality. The whole scheme of buildings and gardens was designed as one. The scheme was made to be lived in and often different portions were arranged for enjoyment at different times of day. We read how the Emperor moved from the water-sprayed central pavilion, cool even at noon, to the deep afternoon shade of a grove of planes, and again in the evening walked in the "moonlight court" full of the rich perfumes of gleaming white flowers. The gardens were often on a scale much greater than any of their prototypes in Persia, greater than the Italian villas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with which they were contemporary, or indeed greater than any of the gardens with which we in modern times are familiar except the more magnificent designs of the age of Louis XIV.

These gardens came into being in one of two ways: either they surrounded the palace or temporary dwelling of the owner, or they were the result of the combination of two notable customs of the Moghuls, garden making and tomb building. It was common for any prince or noble to have constructed for himself a pleasure building in the midst of a garden and to use this for his own recreation and that of his friends during his lifetime, and for a tomb and a permanent memorial after his death. There thus grew up under the Moghul dominion in India a great number of these gardens, some of which have remained to the present day so that their design may be appreciated, and still more are in ruins with only traces of their plan. In the more broken and hilly country, the design fitted itself to the topography and therefore varied from place to place, although a certain consistency of scheme is traceable in such gardens as have come down to us. In these the main building was either at the bottom or the top of the terracing. As in the Moghul gardens of Kashmir, of which the Nishat Bagh is an existing example, advantage was taken of the change of elevation to secure by a succession of terraces a combination of inclosure with an opportunity for distant view. In the treatment of water any change of elevation was seized upon to give the additional life and splashing of cascades and water-chutes. In the great plains country around Agra and

Delhi, where less inspiration could be got from the sites, the designs were more nearly alike. In general the garden was inclosed in a rectangular form by high walls, its corners strengthened by towers. In the middle of each wall was often a great entrance gate. The principal building, commonly the pleasure house, stood in the midst of the garden, often surrounded by a canal and with four long water basins extending in a cross from the central pavilion and terminating against four features in the surrounding walls, - entrances or pavilions. The four rectangular plots thus formed between the water courses and the walls were further divided formally, and were sometimes planted in bold masses to brilliant flowers, sometimes set out with trees of different sorts. Though the design was simple and rigidly formal, much pains was apparently taken in the original planting of the gardens to avoid monotony, the different subdivisions often being given a different character by being devoted to the culture of some particular fruit tree or shade tree or flower. Often the principal flower display was confined to long beds running parallel with the paths which bordered the long water-basins, while the tree planting formed avenues paralleling the surrounding walls, or in the larger schemes formed considerable groves in which the tents of some of the followers of the monarch might be pitched when he visited the garden on a royal progress. Not much use could be made in these flat gardens of any form of cascade, nor apparently was much attention devoted to large fountains. Rather, as in the Moorish gardens in Spain, there were a multitude of small jets playing in the midst of the canals or pools or perhaps arching over from the stone coping into the pool. To give an effect of greater depth to the basins, which were usually shallow, they were often paved with blue tiles and further were diversified with the many-colored tiles which formed an important part of the decoration of the garden buildings. The copings of the pools, often beautifully carved, were so cut that the water could be held brimming to their upper surface, still below the level of the raised paths, thus giving both the greatest beauty of reflection and the practical advantage of greater ease of the use of the water throughout the gardens for irrigation. In this these gardens differed from those of Italy, that though in both countries the use of the water from the point of view of beauty and enjoyment was

thoroughly worked out, in India its use in irrigation was a practical requirement as well, without which the garden could not have existed.

Of these tomb gardens of the plains the Taj Mahal at Agra, which by great good fortune has come down to our time in much of its former glory, is the finest example. In the Taj, Persian and Hindu craftsmen vied with each other in the decoration of a still essentially Persian architectural conception. Although the relation of the principal building to the four-parted garden is not typical, since the garden lies to one side of it, it thus takes advantage of a natural opportunity, standing with its terrace on the bank of the river Jumna and so dominating a sweeping view along the river and into the level country beyond. Arranged as it is, the garden gives a fitting setting for the central building, that miracle of architectural beauty the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal, the wife of Shah Jahan.

Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance buildings and gardens - many of which are The Styles of preserved to us as examples of this style at once so historically important the Italian and so adaptable to our present needs - were made by the independent and Baroque and turbulent nobles of the country, proud, ostentatious, competitive, Villas jealous of each other's success, but esthetically appreciative, often excellent artists in their own right, and in any case having command through riches or feudal power of the labor of great numbers of artisans and of the skill of a group of artists of greater attainment than the world has since seen. Practically throughout Italy, the plains and valleys are unpleasantly hot in summer and often unhealthful, while the steep-sided hills, even though they rise but a few hundred feet, are breezy and cool, and the outlying uplands of the higher country are wellwatered. It was natural therefore that the villas of the nobles should be placed on these hills, facing a broad view and a cooling wind, and taking fullest advantage of the water which increased the luxuriance of the gardens and formed the chief feature of their decoration. The mode of life of these Italian princes was not very different from that of the nobles of ancient Rome, to whom they were often so proud to trace their ancestry. Traditions and records of the old Roman villas, indeed in some cases extensive remains of their former magnificence, served as inspiration for new work, as was the case in architecture and the other arts in the period of the Renaissance. Many statues and sculp

tural decorations preserved from classical antiquity could actually be incorporated in the Renaissance designs. The great artists of the time were architects, sculptors, painters, landscape designers, as the occasion served. The villa was one design, including buildings and gardens, and so the evolution of style of the whole rise and flowering of the Italian Renaissance is reflected in its gardens just as it is in its architecture and painting. There were villas of importance and beauty at least as early as the time of Boccaccio*; of those which have come down to our time, sufficiently intact to give us any idea of their original state, part of the Villa Palmieri, the Villa Poggio a Cajano, Villa Castello, and Villa Petraia, in the vicinity of Florence, are among the earliest. In all these cases, there is a certain simplicity and solidity in the mass of the buildings, still close to their prototype of the fortress castle, or indeed often containing portions of these older buildings or being altered from them by the cutting of windows and doors in the old fortress walls. The building dominates a main terrace, simple in form and simply divided, and such other terraces and decorative units as there may have been were apparently related to the building in some direct and obvious mass relation motived by the ground rather than in any elaborate axial arrangement of the general scheme. The water appears in simple and quiet pools or in fountains notable for the excellence of their sculpture rather than for the play of fancy in handling the water. In the Villa Madama at Rome, also of an early date, we see evidences of transition to a general scheme in which the separate parts were subordinate to the unity of the whole.

The later villas, of the sixteenth century, of which some of the finest examples are the Villa Lante at Bagnaia (see Plate 29 and also 19), the Villa d' Este at Tivoli, the upper terrace at the Villa Farnese at Caprarola, and the Villa Medici at Rome, are more evidently the conscious application of architectural design to the outdoor setting of the palace. The various terraces and areas into which the scheme is divided are definitely related to each other as parts of a formal design, and important points in the design terminations of axes and vistas or centers of symmetry - are recognized architecturally with statues or fountains

* The Introduction to the Third Day of the Decameron describes the garden identified as that of the present Villa Palmieri near Florence.