Redeeming Nature? The Garden as a Moral Allegory

Abstract

Among the practical and symbolic images associated to landscape, the garden represents more then any other the human aspiration to harmoniously live inside nature and, at the same time, to morally and culturally step outside her. Agricultural land has an external finality because it is connected to production. Whereas the garden has an internal finality. This internal finality, according to time and taste, may follow the laws of a geometrical order (as in the case of the Renaissance Italian-style garden or in the case of the Rationalist French-style one) or be inspired by an ideal “free nature” (as in the case of the Pre-romantic and Romantic English gardening). Nonetheless, never is the garden “only” nature. In turn, it represents a coincidence of nature and imagination, and its essence is itself charged with meanings that transcend the garden’s sheer function of being an artistic elaboration of landscape. As well as agricultural land and wilderness, and before being a natural scenery, the garden is in fact a moral allegory. It is the material projection of a path which takes place in interiore homine, and as such it can be harmonious and ordered, or disharmonious and mind-challenging like a labyrinth. For these reasons, the imaginary connected to the representations of nature as a garden can be retraced in a territory which is not only pictorial, poetical, philosophical, or religious, but all these things together. In my contribution I will try to show how around landscape and its cultural images a map of a moral space can be drawn, in which the garden symbolizes a strategy of both a composition and a fracture between human order and natural order. Through some literary and philosophical examples (especially taken from the Italian Renaissance and the German Neo-classicism of Goethe’s Age) I will propose to read the symbology of the garden as an ambivalent figure of human relationship to nature, in both theoretical and ethical terms.