THE RENAISSANCE GARDEN IN THE PERIOD BETWEEN ANDREA AND GIOVANNI ANDREA I DORIA

Andrea concerned himself in giving his palace gardens in keeping with the importance of the residence, facing the sea to the south, and to the north arranged in a series of terraces which climbed the hill of Granarolo. Giovanni Andrea I gave the monumental complex its definitive layout, thereby completing the Renaissance framework.

The evidence regarding the garden of Andrea is fragmentary, and it is hard to distinguish between the various phases of the sixteenth-century works.
There is mention of a first organization of the area surrounding the building, probably under Perin del Vaga, Andrea’s court artist between 1528 and 1533. The result of his work must have been the “very agreeable gardens” which, according to the Annali del Partenopeo, greeted Charles V during his stay at the palace.

In the 1540s, probably between 1545 and 1547, Andrea entrusted the Florentine Giovannangelo Montorsoli with the task of “making new additions of buildings and of beautiful gardens” to the palace. Montorsoli, who had collaborated with Michelangelo in Florence and Rome, had already worked for the Doria. His work on the gardens was probably influenced by his knowledge of Roman and Tuscan gardens, with particular reference to the garden of the Villa di Castello, designed by Nicolò Tribolo for Cosimo I Medici, following an iconographic plan created by Benedetto Varchi.

In plotting the garden to the north of the palace, Montorsoli had to deal with the precipitous Granarolo hill. He created a system of terraces, on which were constructed pergolas, groves of citrus fruits, gardens of various sorts embellished with statues and fountains. An English visitor, William Thomas, in 1549, mentions in tones of amazed admiration the six gardens created, “one above the other”, in the rock of the hill, and enriched with enough earth to feed large numbers of plants and fruit trees. The structure of the north garden, as described by Thomas and illustrated by Massys, recalls unequivocally the late fifteenth-century garden of the Villa Medici at Fiesole, built on three terraces realized on rock and held up by mighty retaining walls.

Giovanni Andrea had the south garden ringed with a series of constructions designed for various uses: on the east side a low building which included the “wardrobe”, ovens and mills; on the south side a block with terrace and loggia standing out on the sea, held up on marble columns, which took the place of a simple structure erected at the time of Andrea. Lastly, on the west side, a splendid aviary, trapezoidal in ground plan, was built to mask the irregularities of the garden, of which now remained only a perfectly rectangular area.

A German visitor, the architect H. Schickhardt, in 1599 noted in his notebook his impressions of the palace, attaching a sketch which is the first graphic evidence of the lower garden. He shows four fountains disposed symmetrically at the corners, surmounted, says the relevant caption, with statues portraying the seasons.

The statues will be replaced in their original setting in the course of a restoration programme in the near future. At the centre of his rapid sketch, Schickhardt indicates the position of a fountain under construction. In the very year of his visit, 1599, Taddeo Carlone began to execute the monumental Fountain of Neptune, which still today, reassembled after having been badly hit during the bombardments of 1944, is the fulcrum of the garden.

The desire of Giovanni Andrea to continue the tradition started by Andrea (who had commissioned from Montorsoli a statue of Neptune in stucco, now lost), celebrating the power at sea of the Doria family by way of the exaltation of the god, in whose features is clear the allegorical reference to the figure of the great admiral. Thirteen years before, Giovanni Andrea had commissioned the statue of a colossal Jupiter, placed in a niche at the highest extremity of the garden.

The two statues faced each other, thereby creating an imaginary perspective axis which linked the hill extremity of the garden to the sea, crossing over the palace which thus appeared symbolically placed under the protection of the two divinities. In the iconographic plan, the presence of the “sea loggia” is of great importance, giving access to the south garden from the Doria private quay. Aligned along the central axis, this construction was conceived as an ancient Roman seaside villa, with terraces held up on columns, central courtyard and a triumphal access staircase. A more hidden entrance to the palace was via the underground tunnels on the east side of the palace, by way of the Sala degli Argenti and a small bridge which led to the garden of the upper terrace, known today as the “Garden of the Satyr”.

Giovanni Andrea extended the northern garden, purchasing in 1603 the Doria Galleani property, including the magnificent Grotto of Alessia. On his death (1606) the palace and the gardens constituted a single complex of splendid proportions and homogeneous design, destined to last substantially unaltered up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, although with some updating in keeping with changing taste.