What is it about?
Gardens were used as meeting spaces for groups of poets, artists and writers in Early Modern Italy. They were seen as more 'democratic' places where people of different status could mingle and participate in friendly debate over the arts. In Rome around 1700 a group of poets revived the Olympic Games as a poetry competition, staged in some of the gardens that dotted the hills around the city.
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Why is it important?
This chapter explores how landscape, and gardens in particular, were closely linked with ideas of creativity and the history of ideas. It is part of a groundbreaking collection of essays that finally reveals the importance of garden settings in the history of intellectual and artistic development in and intellectual pursuits in early modern Europe.
Perspectives
The chance tow rite about the Arcadian Academy for an edited book on the hisotry of gardens and academies was a great pleasure, and it was great fun to examine an earlier form of the Olympics that exercised the mind rather than the body!
Katrina Grant
University of Sydney
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Place Both Real and Imagined: Play, Performance and Narrative in the Gardens of the Arcadian Academy in Rome, October 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004517547_014.
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