di Clovis WHITFIELD
Domenichino has not been recognised for the role he played in developing the landscape tradition that evolved into garden design, at least not as much as he is regarded as the precursor of Claude and Poussin landscape paintings.
He was however the vital innovator who had most influence on the generation that followed Annibale and Agostino Carracci, and his example was most effective because it gave structure to what was an essentially decorative pictorial tradition, and made it into an effective formula for a number of artisans to practice a range of designs that included figure subjects. But he was an architect as well as a painter, and although there are few buildings where we can see his invention, he was also the first landscape architect and we owe a lot to his ordering of the ‘classical landscape’.
It was not just the design of the great variety of surrounds to fresco decorations, the compartments of the massive ceiling of Santa Maria in Trastevere, copious stucco angels and atlantes, the monuments to Girolamo Agucchi (1555.1605) in San Pietro in Vincoli, or the one to Cardinal Filippo Sega (1537-1596) in Sant’Onofrio in Rome, but the attitude towards design as a whole impacted on how he structured landscape paintings, and landscape design. ‘Il suo passatempo dopo le operazioni era lo studio d’Architettura, alla quale stava fissamente applicato, con pensiero di esercitarsi con questa in publiche operazioni:
come anche nella Prospettiva, et in altri ammaestramenti, che si convengono alla Professione’ [1]
The Bolognese Alessandro Ludovisi was elected Pope 9th February 1621, and chose his nephew Ludovico Ludovisi, then aged 25, as Cardinal, who immediately began using his position and access to immense wealth to advance artists from their home town. Guercino was commissioned to paint the consummate Aurora in the Villa on the Pincio he had acquired from Cardinal del Monte, Domenichino, Guercino and Viola (& Brill) did the four compartments there of the Stanza dei Paesi, Giovanni Battista Agucchi was named Segretario dei Brevi and his protégé Domenichino made Architect to the Palazzo Apostolico.
This might seem surprising, but when he returned to Bologna in 1617 he had not only married (the much younger Marsibilia Barbetti), had a child, but devoted himself to the study of architecture. The election of the new Pope from his home town brought him promptly back to Rome, and he was named Papal Architect, but also Architetto dell’ Acqua Vergine, the Roman aqueduct that still today brings water from twelve miles outside of Rome, to the Trevi Fountain and those in Piazza del Popolo. Much work was needed to repair the ancient structure The disastrous flood of 1570 had led to increased study of hydraulics, culminating with Pius IV’s restoration of the Acqua Vergine in 1570.
Although the periodic flooding that the Tiber produced in Rome was a recurrent phenomenon and was repeatedly addressed , in reality there was more understanding of hydraulics in Northern Italy, and it may have been this that Domenichino had access to in Bologna (1617-21) . In any case the job of maintaining the ancient aqueduct was no sinecure, and the painter was clearly chosen in part because of his experience, with Agucchi, in the Ninfeo delle Acque at the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, as well as with the frescoes he painted there in the Stanza di Apollo. The cost of bringing the flow of water from Molara, a property belonging to Duca Angelo Altemps in Rocca Priora, had turned out to be more than the cost of the Villa itself, so we can understand the importance of having an architect in charge of this important aqueduct [2], one who understood the engineering challenges of bringing water to a site that included the highest point in Rome.
In 1622 Ludovico Ludovisi was awarded a further 12 once (an oncia. was a measure of flow, unquantifiable today) of the Acqua Felice, the first new aqueduct of modern Rome, which ran 24 kilometres, mainly underground, before reaching the fontana – mostra (1587) on the Quirinal, designed by Domenico Fontana. While it was Maderno who would be responsible for the transformation of Del Monte’s distilleria into the pleasure palace it would become, we know from Baglione that Domenichino – by this time the architect in charge of the water supply – was also responsible for the scompartimento del boschetto delle statue.
His profession was not limited to painting, but extended to engineering, much as Bernini would be involved in elaborate public fountains and massive works involving both architecture and sculpture. From Falda’s bird’s eye view of the grandiose park, which encompassed many times more than the small patch (190 canne or around half a hectare) of Del Monte’s property, we can see the ambitious scale of Ludovico Ludovisi’s park, which extended from the Porta Pinciana to the next gate to the city, the Porta Salaria, covering up to thirty hectares.
Del Monte had been granted by Pietro Aldobrandini three oncie of the flow of water in the Aqua Vergine pro usu vineae tuae in Monte Pincio [3], and had a gardener to look after the vineyard. He does not seem to have made much difference to the surroundings, nothing like what Ludovico Ludovisi had in mind in 1621. Surely it was the combination of Domenichino the landscape painter and Agucchi who between them had the imagination to conceive the theatrical use of water at Frascati, so that the same combination came to mind when planning this new landscape in Rome. The most significant expense had been that of bringing the supply of water, and his experience at Frascati was evidently a factor in the engagement of this artist to plan it. Agucchi’s plan for painting a subject from Tasso [4] demonstrates his exceptional familiarity with a nurseryman’s choice of trees
‘E per far il paese al più naturale, che fosse possibile, sarebbe ben di mettervi delle palme, de platani, sicomori, lentischi, serrebenti, generi, oltre qualcheduno di più domestici, che ulivi, altri, olmi quercia, e frassino, e pome, e fichi ma perché non potrebbero ne discernersi tutti bastaria giù facili da riconoscervi come le Palme, i Platani, e pieni i Olivi, e Alori’.
The virtue of Domenichino, when he first met with the Monsignore, was that he excelled in a genre of landscape painting ‘with small figures’, and indeed it was the ability to insert a narrative on an appropriate scale in a landscape setting that struck his patron. looking for art that could be appreciated in a domestic setting. Although his written programme for an Erminia and the Shepherds painting was written for Lodovico Carracci, the most successful interpretation was Domenichino’s, now in the Louvre. And it would become a hallmark of a tradition that had an enduring future.
It was Bolognese artists who were responsible for introducing landscape painting into Rome, and this was famously because of Annibale Carracci, and his brother Agostino, the prime mover in the academy that they belonged to. What is not obvious today is that although Annibale was well-known for doing some landscape paintings, in which he had an extraordinary facility, he did not leave much trace of them in Rome, particularly. after he embarked on the Farnese decorations. And after completing the ceiling of the Galleria, he was not only drained but also physically impaired, so that there are no further projects where we can detect his hand.
The idea that he himself played a part in the now famous series of lunettes in Palazzo Aldobrandini al Corso does not take his decline into consideration, nor the fact that his employer, Odoardo Farnese, was at odds with Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini that would have made such a collaboration improbable. But the Carracci had a studio in which a number of young artists were assisting as well as emerging, and these were regarded as having an excellent pedigree because of their training in that school.
The lunettes were painted over several years under the direction of Albani, who received payment for the six canvasses in January 1605. The most important personality in this school was Agostino, who had a more structured approach to the challenge of decoration, and was able to teach design, including landscape, which was an important element in Roman interiors.
It was only when he arrived in Rome in 1598 that work began in earnest on the Galleria, and while it is Annibale’s hand that is rightly seen throughout, there is no doubt that it was his brother who was the one who planned not only the iconography, but also the day-to-day execution. He was used to teaching, and his experience of other artists’ work – during his career as an engraver – gave him confidence in design.
So far as landscape painting was concerned, he was not as intuitive as his younger brother, who had no problem visualising scenes and placing figures and animals in appropriate settings, but he was more aware of the need to provide a framework for the Bolognese idiom that he and his compatriots represented in Rome, a fashion that gained considerable favour in no small part owing to the success of the Farnese decorations.
It was Domenichino, encouraged by Pietro Aldobrandini’s secretary Agucchi, who embraced this genre, and it was he who made his name with these paesaggi con figure piccole, including the series of lunettes in the chapel of the palazzo on the Corso. Particularly the one with the Flight into Egypt, the supreme example of a carefully constructed view, figures appropriately scaled in the centre foreground, perspective carefully organised with the water in the foreground and in the distance, devices like the boatman and the muleteer descending a a slope, silhouetted birds and legs of people and animals against sky and water, conveying depth of view, and a distant mountain behind the central castle. As Edward Norgate wrote
‘Yet one general rule I had from my old friend Paulo Brill, which he said will make a Landscape caminare, that is move or walk away, and that is by placing Darke against Light, and light against Darke’ [5].
We see the contrivances that Bolognese landscapists adopted here, which are so different from the free flowing naturalism that Annibale could effortlessly muster. Ludovisi saw to it that the interior of his Villa would have a room devoted to this new landscape, where Guercino, Domenichino, Viola and Brill would each compete. There was a hierarchy of subject matter for painters, and landscapes still-lifes, armoury and grottesche were still artisanal professions, and Domenichino would have specialists to do these parts in his own compositions, after he had become successful.
So just as Viola had collaborated with Domenichino on the frescoes of the Stanza d’Apollo in the Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati (1617) we can see that the older painter was good at directing the designs that were really executed by others, the plans for the Villa and its surrounding park were entrusted to a team, and the garden design of the Parco Ludovisi set a standard for the ordering of Nature, for those who could afford this luxury.
Carla Benocci, in her study of the Villa (2010) documented the urgency with which Ludovico Ludovisi (and his uncle the Pope,) set about securing the various properties that made up twenty hectares at a cost (by 1632) of 56,825. scudi. This was a huge project that demanded an overall plan, and its success brought the admiration of contemporaries, right up to the redevelopment of the entire site in the nineteenth century. It was a collaboration between skills, just as the illusion of the architectural perspective in Guercino’s Aurora ceiling would be designed by a professional quadraturista – Agostino Tassi.
The park surrounding the Villa was to be spectacular, and intended to rival those that Pietro Aldobrandini had made, at Frascati and around the Villa Magnanapoli on the Quirinal, and those created for Scipione Borghese in another area of the Pincio. In fact Pietro Aldobrandini had died the day after Alessandro Ludovisi was elected. The area of the Pincio where the Pope’s nephew set about creating a park was then made up of vineyards and farmland, the Villa Del Monte itself was only a small parcel of land, as it happened with the highest point in Rome
It presented an ideal opportunity for bringing order to the surrounding countryside, with grand avenues ending in fountains and sculptures that were even to be found while excavating the existing land, which had been the site of the Baths of Constantine. This coincided with Domenichino’s approach to the composition of landscape painting, where the view is based on a constructed perspective, with coulisses. on either side, a repoussoir in the middle distance, and a feature like a lake or road to join the foreground to the middle distance, and the scale of the figure subject related to the distance from the foreground.
In these prospects the agreeable trees and bushes are a foil to the appropriately scaled figures, giving meaning and narrative to what was an extension of the landscape vignettes that had punctuated Roman interiors since Giovanni da Udine had seen classical examples in the excavations of ruins like those discovered in Nero’s Domus Aurea.
It is the variety of forms employed that is evident in the surviving views of the Ludovisi park, with more rustic woodland contrasted with pruned hedgerows, parterres of flower beds, marble heads and statues at the end of avenues, lemons and other citrus fruits to provide a scented experience, and fountains.
Domenichino was also able to repurpose some of the existing features from Del Monte’s distilleria. It is not usually remembered that this was the function of the casino for the Cardinal when he took it over in 1596 from Francesco del Nero. It must have been surrounded by a garden of simples that provided specimens for medicinal research, for the building was a laboratory for alchemy and investigations into phenomena that were then termed natural magic.
This involved distilling – not only spirits like brandy, but all sorts of essences and aromas, as well as the botanical and scientific interests of the intellectuals who founded the Accademia dei Lincei in 1603 and the opportunities that artisans could achieve with a foundry, glass making that would produce a clear crystal that could be used for lenses and some of the great collection of glassware that would be listed in the 1627 inventory of Del Monte’s collection. The original structure of the Villa was retained when Ludovico Ludovisi took it over, Filippo Breccioli’s drawing of the proposed elevation for his patron, which is already surmounted by the Ludovisi arms, also indicates that the stillaria was to be kept ‘senza muover muri vecchi’.
This repurposing was evidently the origin of the large terracotta vettine that were set up around the Villa by the Ludovisi capomastro muratore in fare il condutto delle acque in 1633. He was Simone Brogi, who had been a key operative in Domenichino’s designs for the Cappella della Strada Cupa in Santa Maria in Trastevere, making the eight stucco Atlantes and accompanying Cupids [1] (1627/28).
Domenichino was enticed away to Naples in 1631, but the park at the Villa Ludovisi did not demand his continued presence, and the terracotta vettine punctuated the site, with their pedestals and travertine lids; these are the vessels that we see arranged in a circle around the Villa in Israel Silvestre’s view (1641), and they must have been part of Del Monte’s ditilleria; the vettina is a terracotta urn used for wine or oil, and in Brogi’s account they were 7 palmi high (approximately 156 cm) matching the existing urns in the streets around the US Embassy, Palazzo Margherita.
Originally there were twenty-four of them, as described in the account Brogi submitted for the engineering of the water supply [1], still with the travertine covers and bases noted in 1633. Two of them are shown on the corners of the avenue opposite the main Villa in Falda’s engraving (1683), and they were still in the park in the 19th century, as seen in the photographs taken by Ignazio Boncompagni Ludovisi in 1885 before the urban redevelopment, and some have impressions of the labels identifying the contents from their original purpose.
Claude-Joseph Vernet’s view (1749) shows the fountain with a River God, opposite the entrance of the Villa, with a formal parterre in front of the rustic wood, where the labyrinth was. It shows the alternation of herms, statues and the vettine, and the lines of cypresses that also marked the main avenue down to the uccelliera and the main Villa.
The main Fontana del Tritone was situated in front of the main Villa (now Palazzo Margherita), the entrance to the park was marked with two vettine, a formal parterre ended with a wrought iron aviary (Uccelliera), rivalling that of which Carlo Rainaldi had designed next to the Villa Borghese.
Guercino in his fresco in the Stanza dei Paesi also shows the trick fountains that caught the unwary visitor, a technological marvel that impressed many travellers to Rome.
These would have been novelties that many visitors recalled, where the
‘scherzi di alcune fonti restano ingannate certe Dame, vennero bagnate da molti occulti zampilli’,
a technical novelty most likely invented by Domenichino the engineer. Sebastiani (1683)[8] tells us that the villa was ‘architettata dal famosissimo Domenichino’ and Milizia (1768) :
‘disegnò ancora entro Roma Villa Ludovisi, in cui fece tanti belli e vari viali, scompartì il boschetto in guisa leggiadra, e vi eresse quel Palazzino, che è veramente pittoresco’.
It is difficult to imagine the setting, as the Villa no longer commands the view it enjoyed at the time of Falda’s engraving (c. 1670) but it had a great sequence from the Fontana del Bosco, with a River God, as we see in Vernet’s view.
This was at the end of today’s Via di Porta Pinciana, (now home to the Parking Ludovisi) and behind the fountain was the Bosco, with a ‘Giardino Segreto’ a labirinto and an uccelliera for birds and an area of woodland for trapping them for sport. This is a quite varied site, with the Villa at its summit, and Domenichino was clearly aiming to impose order on nature rather than emphasise the picturesque. Ludovisi was also a great collector of antiquities, and these statues punctuated not only the building itself, but also the avenues leading to the main palazzo, now Villa Margherita, which was the principal residence of the Ludovisi family, But it was the vettine were the recurring features of this design, on the corners of avenues as well as in the circle around the Villa itself; there were after all twenty-four of them that Mastro Brogi charged for repositioning in the park.
The Ludovisi also owned several Domenichino landscape paintings, including the Hercules pair now in the Louvre, and the Flight into Egypt also in the same collection. By this time he was clearly in charge of multiple projects, but especially for the planning and planting of the vast park; and in the paintings he also had help, for in the Garden of Eden [Original Sin]
’gli animali sono di mano di un Fiammingo e il Paese del Viola ancorché squisitamente gli animali e i paesi sapesse il Zampieri dipingere’ [9]
‘lo stesso vuol dirsi degli altri tre quadri, de’ quali le sole figure sono del suo pennello, ed i paesi dell’istesso Viola’ (ibid).
These were done before Alessandro Ludovisi became Pope, if Baglione is right in saying that Viola gave up painting because his preferment to the position of his guardaroba; (he died soon after in August 1622). We can detect the devices that made up the genre of the ‘Bolognese’ landscape, basically an extension of what Agostino Carracci had taught, but with the ‘immensi siti’ that are the hallmark of Viola’s hand.
The landscapes, including the pair of Hercules subjects and the Flight into Egypt were much admired in France predictably with attributions to Domenichino alone; there was no connoisseur in Paris to gainsay the more famous name., and away from their original setting they were regularly attributed to the most famous names, firstly Annibale and then Domenichino.
The gardens that the painter had designed were also much admired in the eighteenth century, not least for the collection of antiquities that Ludovico Ludovisi assembled. So this was also the site of the original ‘classical landscape’, and although it was tempting to regard Annibale’s so-called ‘conversion’ to a more classical idiom at the end of his activity (with the Aldobrandini lunettes) he had nothing to do with them and Domenichino’s is the model so many ‘Bolognese’ landscapes are based on.
It was adopted by Giovan Francesco Grimaldi. ‘Il Bolognese’ who arrived in Rome in 1627, and with Domenichino’s help set about studying the examples of landscape painting that he and others from the Carracci school that were to be seen in Rome. With the professional architectural experience that is evident in the work he did for the Ludovisi it is easier to understand his earlier organisation of landscape in the most famous of the Aldobrandini lunettes, the Flight into Egypt; it is right to see him also as a pioneer in the planning of actual landscapes, a precursor of Capability Brown (Kirkharle, 1716 – Londra, 6 febbraio 1783), and Humphrey Repton (1752 – 1818).
Clovis WHITFIELD Umbria 2 Acosto 2026