DISEÑO Y CREACIÓN DEL CURSO VIRTUAL (PORTAL E-LEARNING) DE LA

official University o f the Republic since 1405.15 Padua, re-conquered less than three months after the traumatic destruction o f Venetian forces at Agnadello in 1509, was one o f the more stable Venetian “colonies.” The presence o f m any Venetian students at the university transformed the city into a satellite o f the capital. M oreover, a num ber o f Venetian nobles, for example Bernardo Bembo, owned villas near Padua in the fifteenth century, and their fam iliarity with Paduans helped reduce tensions.16 In spite o f the turmoil in the first quarter o f the sixteenth century, Padua played an important role in the development o f public support for agriculture in the Veneto. Recognizing the pressing alimentary needs o f the capital city, the Paduan community, or at least the pro-Venetian Paduans and the large num ber o f Venetians who lived in Padua and the surrounding province, argued in favor o f hum an responsibility for and control over his environment. This theoretical position justified more practical exercises in hydraulic engineering and agronomic experimentation, as it steered La Serenissima on a course tow ard self- sufficiency and a deep-seated attachment to the Trevigiano, Paduan, Vicentino and Veronese. Prominent Paduan intellectuals such as Alvise Com aro and Pietro Bembo spoke glowingly o f the rewards o f country life.17 Where they differed from the earlier humanist champions o f the villa, like the Florentine poet Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) and the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), was in their emphasis on the villa’s historical connection with agriculture.

15 Logan, 46-47.

16 Tension between V enice and the subject cities was characterized by Frederic Lane as a “lack o f any national feeling” on the mainland that contributed to the rapid capitulation o f cities from Brescia to Padua to the forces o f the League o f Cambrai. However, support for V enice was manifested during the reconquest o f Padua when local partisans m et the Venetian army and its leader, Andrea Gritti, at the gates o f the city, shouting “Marco, Marco” in honor o f the republic’s patron saint. Lane, 243-245.

17 Muraro, 53-57.

19

The active role Comaro envisioned for the villa owner, for example, required him to work his land and, i f necessary, make the land fruitful with all the tools science and ingenuity could devise. The mechanism o f change was hum an reason. The application o f reason to the problem s o f malarial swamps and spring flooding, V enice’s special, chronic concerns, improved nature. In the process, land was brought under cultivation,

refashioned b y hum an agency, and recognized as different from, and better than, raw nature. Although Com aro does not identify a specific tem i for the improved landscape, choosing to characterize his activity as bonificazione or reclamation, a contem porary term used by two authors to describe gardens, terza natura, suggests that sixteenth-century landscape intervention was understood as the creation o f a nature that was distinct from G od’s first, created nature.18

The problem o f three natures, consisting o f the first or Divine nature and both a second and a third nature made by men, dominated debate about agriculture and gardens in the Cinquecento. Two Italian authors, Bartolomeo Taegio (active m id 16th c.) and Jacopo Bonfadio (c.1500 - 1550), used a new term, terza natura, in the m id-sixteenth century to distinguish the garden o f a country house as a nature clearly distinct from both primordial nature and the industrial nature o f man. Taegio published a treatise On the

Villa in M ilan in 1559 that included the term in a lengthy discussion o f country house culture in early m odem Italy.19 Bonfadio, whom we will discuss further in Chapter Three as a m em ber o f the Bem bo household in Padua, was an itinerant scholar from Salo on

18 The Italian term, bonificazione, is now translated as “reclamation,” but its root indicates that the main feature o f the transformation was seen as the improvement or “making good” o f the terrain in question.

19 Bartolomeo Taegio, La Villa: diaologo d i M. Bartolom eo Taegio (Milan: Francesco M oscheni,

Lake Garda who used the term in a letter to his friend, Plinio Tomacelio, in 1541.20 The designation o f not one but three natures responded to a new theory o f gardens in which the garden would be defined as a “third nature” that occupied a m iddle ground between the raw nature created by God and the world o f men. C om aro’s “reclaim ed” lands most likely fit into the second nature; but the new theory o f a terza natura owed a great deal to the Paduan cultural and economic elite and the developm ent o f villa agriculture and scientific farming in the Veneto. For Bonfadio and Taegio, the artifice (artefice) that created the beautiful (vago) garden justified its separation from G od’s creation on one extreme, and from the realm o f roads, bridges, and aqueducts on the other. Both authors acknowledged a problem with this “third nature:” the lack o f boundaries betw een the group o f natures. This problem was a result o f the simple fact that m any o f the m aterials o f the garden - e.g. plants, stones, water - are them selves natural and the act o f gardening replicates the ingenuity and labor identified as the source o f “second nature.” Lacking a term for such an intermediary landscape, Bonfadio and Taegio introduced the phrase

terza natura in their discussions o f the art and artifice o f the garden.

In the twentieth century, the “third nature” has become the focus o f historians’ attention, and they use the term to emphasize the importance o f artifice in the Italian Renaissance garden.21 In Chapter Three, I will present an argument that associates the first use o f terza natura by Bonfadio with Venetian villa culture. For now, I would like to

20 Jacopo Bonfadio to Plinio Tomacelio, Lettere volgari d i diversi nobilissim i huomini et eccellentiss. ingegni, scritte in diverse materie, Libro secondo (Venice: A ldi Filii, 1548). The letter is also included in a nineteenth-century collection that includes a biography o f the artist: L ettere d i Jacopo Bonfadio, G. B. Comiani, ed. (Como: Fratelli Galimberti, 1825), 18. See also: R. Urbani, “Jacopo Bonfadio,” D B IXII (1970): 6-7.