The garden of love

A lay version of the hortus conclusus of biblical fame, a garden of love is a place of happiness and seduction, where perfect harmony between man and nature reigns. Its origins stretch back to medieval literature and the birth of the concept of chivalry and courteous love according to which the Garden of Eden celebrated and evoked the spring of the world. It is the season of birth and the rebirth of life and of nature, a moment when hopes are renewed and all things seem possible. A vision clearly inspired by the idea of an earthly paradise. The rites of spring, first found in the Song of Songs, subsequently became an oft-quoted leitmotif in medieval poetry, which was still deeply influenced by religion, reaching the apex of its achievement in the Roman de la Rose, the famous poem by Guillaume de Lorris, written around the year 1230, where the various stages in amorous conquest are narrated in allegorical form.

A garden of love is a place where dreams and reality become one, where pairs of lovers stroll or sit on the grass, where the delights of nature are infinitely enhanced by the joys of love. Here lovers can enjoy the fruits of the garden free from prohibitions whose transgression could even lead them to incur the ultimate penalty of death. The idea of obedience and disobedience fades into the background, leaving romance and poetry enlivened by music and feasting in its wake. There may also be a fountain in a garden of love, the fountain of eternal youth, whose healing waters restore youth, and thus the ability to love, to the elderly who bathe in them.

This is the chivalrous version of the religious theme of baptism and the fountain of life: the physical transformation of rediscovered youth substituting the spiritual renewal found in baptism. The theme was a popular one during the Middle Ages and was frequently depicted in everyday objects, such as typical chivalrous love tokens, in illuminated manuscripts and in the frescoes and tapestries which decorated royal courts and noble homes.

The theme remained popular in art, but enjoyed a particular revival at the beginning of the 18th century, when it depicted, perhaps unknowingly, a new era and a new concept of gardens, especially in France. This was the age when the Sun King Louis XIV’s political and cultural hegemony had begun to set and the rigid pattern of the classical French garden in all its triumphant glory began to give way to something more discreet, the Rococo garden. A more intimate garden, no longer the designated backdrop to the pompous life of the court, but rather a stage for the convivial encounters of the worldly aristocracy or the rising middle classes, a setting that recreated the illusion of charming bucolic delights. This trend celebrating the idyll, pure sentiment, flirtation and caprice was also reflected in the world of art with the so-called Fêtes Galantes, where pairs of lovers lingered in intimate conversations dedicated to courtship and amorous encounters. The leading interpreter of this world was Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684 - 1721), who set the scene of his delicate paintings in a wholly sensual and evanescent atmosphere, overshadowed by a vein of melancholy, as if to underline the fleeting pleasures of life and the inexorable march of time. The garden of love thus became a setting for vain caprice and ceremonious ritual, highlighting all the sensuality and the exquisitely refined manners of that all too ephemeral age of elegance which was destined to drown in the deluge of the French revolution.