Through the large amount of documentary and iconographic material preserved in the archives of Turin and Paris, the long season of the French garden in Piedmont. These events, not new to historiography, are dealt with here in a wide-ranging and systematic way. The projects of André Le Nôtre for the park of Racconigi and the garden of the Royal Palace of Turin, his probable visit in 1679, are illuminated by the analysis of the diplomatic correspondence between ambassadors, envoys, agents, ministers and the Savoy duke.
From the papers emerges the fundamental role of De Marne, collaborator of Le Nôtre, in tracing the general lines of the new gardens of Venaria Reale, although entrusted to the direction of Henri Duparc, a member of a family of gardeners active at the castle of Saint Germain-en-Laye.
These episodes exemplify a tried-and-true export mechanism of French models, spread through the sending of drawings, gardeners and planners all over Europe.
A supremacy that continued in 1739 with the conferral of the office of Director to the Parisian Benard, architect of the gardens of Stupinigi, Moncalieri and Agliè. An activity that is close to the exhaustion of the reasons for the formal garden: after Benard's disappearance, the new horizons of the landscape are now ripe.
Author: Paul Cornaglia, associate professor of History of architecture at the Department of Architecture and Design of the Turin Polytechnic, member of the Scientific Committee of the Consortium of Royal Savoy Residences, has long been carrying out teaching and research activities in the field of historic gardens, favoring the seventeenth and XVIII and the formal garden. In this context, he published Rediscovered Marble Gardens. The geography of taste in a century of construction at Venaria Reale. 1699-1798 (1994, 2006). He recently edited The Garden of the Royal Palace of Turin (2019) and, with Vincenzo Cazzato, the catalog of the exhibition Journey in the Gardens of Europe (2019).
Turin (1650-1773)
From André Le Nôtre to Michel Benard
Study Center of the Royal Savoy Residences. The civilization of the courts, vol. 3 – 2021
http://www.olschki.it/libro/9788822267399
