The Rose, the Vergier, and the Pictured Surface: Representing the Garden in Textual, Visual, and Material Culture in France and Italy, c. 1170-1410

This thesis investigates secular representations of gardens in textual, visual, and material culture in France and Italy between 1170 and 1410. The most important text is Guillaume de Lorris’ seminal Roman de la Rose (c. 1230), which circulated widely and wielded an immense influence on later imaginary gardens. The structure of the poem’s garden – a sequence of boundaries treated as ekphrastic set pieces – established a pattern of oppositions and constructions that would be refashioned by later poets and artists. The thesis is deeply concerned with boundaries, with enclosure, and openings, but it takes a novel approach in gathering varied forms of artistic expression from France and Italy, crossing material and disciplinary thresholds to place art and literature in direct contact. The thesis demonstrates that the garden emerged as the site par excellence for the exploration of self-reflexivity, working as a place where art and nature were bound together, and where it was possible to reflect metaphorically on artistic composition, textual and pictorial. Poetry of the period was intensely focused on the construction of literary artefacts, and on the text itself as artwork; in turn, visual and material culture was centred on and shaped by the ‘multimedia’ qualities of the codex, and intended for literate audiences that expected playful re-imaginings rather than straightforward illustration. The garden was key to these wider phenomena. Chapter one examines the richly ornamented outer limits of the garden in the Rose, both in the text and in the illuminated codex. Chapter two focuses on the fountain as a site of reflection and perception within the garden, showing how playfully this place was reinterpreted in and beyond the manuscript. The third chapter is dedicated to the secular painted gardens in the papal palace at Avignon, where the green places of romance were elevated to an extraordinary prominence.