PARKS AND RATIOCINATION
The 17th-century jardin à la française is a hybrid of architecture and painting. André Le Nôtre, jardinier du roi, was trained in the workshops of Simon Vouet and François Mansart before designing the gardens at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Vaux-le-Vicomte, the Tuileries, Sceaux, Chantilly, and Versailles.
Like the other academically-codified artforms, the formal garden is a realization of a set of theoretical propositions, in this case concerning order, duration, dominion, and visual experience. The design of the garden not only renders the material forms dictated by those theoretical propositions, it articulates them as well, self-consciously making its own organizing principles explicit.
The theory of the jardin à la française expresses itself through rules. While many are set forth in treatises on gardening, all of them can be discerned from the gardens themselves:
1.,The garden is an extension of the house; its size, proportions and placement must relate to those of the house in a consistent and rational manner. 2. The overall design is guided by the principles of axiality and symmetry, with a clear central axis extending from house through the full extent of the garden. An equally strong emphasis on axiality, symmetry and perspective pervades the architectural design of the period, allowing interior to exterior to be comprehended through a single technique of vision. 3. The disposition and size of the terraces and parterres, hedgerows, topiaries, trees, paths and waterworks are plotted in accordance with the laws of perspective, which creates the visual paradox of a quantifiable, continuous, yet infinite, recession into space. 4. The garden is permanent and immutable, with no seasonal variation of its plantings and features. The totalizing vision of the landscape and the emphases on order, symmetry and proportion both allegorize human mastery of nature and reveal the divinely-ordained formal perfection that underlies nature. The park at Versailles is a visual treatise on royal power: the king alone has the ability to subdue, manipulate--and even improve--nature.
The meandering, asymmetrical, “natural” jardin à l'anglaise of the 18th-century is as theoretically-determined, visually manipulative and ideologically weighted as the jardin à la française it succeeded, but seeks to conceal, rather than reveal, its artificial and constructed nature.
