Ancient Garden Fountain Designers

Ancient Garden Fountain Designers Fountain designers were multi-talented individuals from the 16th to the late 18th century, often working as architects, sculptors, artists, engineers and cultivated scholars all in one. Leonardo da Vinci, a Renaissance artist, was renowned as a imaginative genius, inventor and scientific expert. He carefully captured his observations in his now celebrated notebooks, after his immense interest in the forces of nature inspired him to investigate the properties and motion of water. Combining imagination with hydraulic and gardening expertise, early Italian water feature creators changed private villa settings into innovative water exhibits filled of emblematic implications and natural elegance. Known for his incredible skill in archeology, architecture and garden design, Pirro Ligorio, the humanist, offered the vision behind the splendors in Tivoli. Other water fountain designers, masterminding the incredible water marbles, water features and water antics for the many estates near Florence, were tried and tested in humanist themes and traditional scientific readings.

The Impact of the Norman Invasion on Anglo Saxon Garden Design

The Impact of the Norman Invasion on Anglo Saxon Garden Design Anglo-Saxons encountered incredible modifications to their day-to-day lives in the latter half of the eleventh century due to the accession of the Normans. The Normans were better than the Anglo-Saxons at architecture and horticulture when they came into power. But before concentrating on home-life or having the occasion to contemplate domestic architecture or decoration, the Normans had to subjugate an entire population. Castles were more fundamental designs and often constructed on blustery hills, where their people devoted both time and space to exercising offense and defense, while monasteries were large stone buildings, commonly situated in the widest, most fruitful hollows. Gardening, a placid occupation, was unfeasible in these unproductive fortifications. Berkeley Castle is probably the most unchanged model in existence at present of the early Anglo-Norman form of architecture. The keep is thought to date from the time of William the Conqueror. An enormous terrace encompasses the building, serving as an impediment to attackers wanting to dig under the castle walls. On one of these terraces lies a charming bowling green: it is coated in grass and flanked by an old yew hedge that is created into the shape of rough ramparts.

The Source of Today's Garden Water Fountains

The Source of Today's Garden Water Fountains Hundreds of ancient Greek documents were translated into Latin under the authority of the scholarly Pope Nicholas V, who led the Roman Catholic Church from 1397 to 1455. He undertook the embellishment of Rome to make it into the worthy capital of the Christian world. In 1453 the Pope commissioned the repairing of the Aqua Vergine, an ancient Roman aqueduct which had carried clean drinking water into the city from eight miles away. Building a mostra, a grandiose commemorative fountain built by ancient Romans to memorialize the arrival point of an aqueduct, was a tradition revived by Nicholas V. At the bidding of the Pope, architect Leon Battista Alberti began the construction of a wall fountain in the place where we now find the Trevi Fountain. The aqueduct he had reconditioned included modifications and extensions which eventually allowed it to supply water to the Trevi Fountain as well as the famed baroque fountains in the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza Navona.