Grotto - Garden Grottoes

Garden Grottoes

The creation of artificial grottoes was an introduction of Mannerist style to Italian, and then to French, gardens of the mid 16th century. Two famous grottoes in the Boboli Gardens of Palazzo Pitti were begun by Vasari and completed by Ammanati and Buontalenti between 1583 and 1593. One of these grottoes originally housed the Prisoners of Michelangelo. Perhaps still earlier than the Boboli grotto was one in the gardens laid out by Niccolò Tribolo (died 1550) at the Medici Villa Castello, near Florence. At Pratolino, in spite of the dryness of the site, there was a Grotto of Cupid (surviving), with water tricks for the unwary visitor. The Fonte di Fata Morgana ('Fata Morgana's Spring') at Grassina, not far from Florence, is a small garden building, built in 1573-4 as a garden feature in the extensive grounds of the Villa "Riposo" of Bernardo Vecchietti. It is enriched with sculptures in the manner of Giambologna.

The outside of such grottoes might be architectural or designed like an enormous rock or a rustic porch or rocky overhang; inside one found a temple or fountains, stalactites and even imitation gems and shells (sometimes made in ceramic); herms and mermaids, mythological subjects suited to the space: naiads, or river gods whose urns spilled water into pools. Damp grottoes were cool places to retreat from the Italian sun, but they also became fashionable in the cool drizzle of the Île-de-France; near Moscow, at Kuskovo the Sheremetev estate there is a handsome Summer Grotto, built in 1775.

Grottoes could also serve as baths, as at Palazzo del Tè, where in the 'Casino della Grotta', a small suite of intimate rooms laid out around a grotto and loggetta (covered balcony), courtiers once bathed in the small cascade that splashed over the pebbles and shells encrusted in the floor and walls.

Grottoes have served as chapels, or at Villa Farnese at Caprarola, a little theater designed in the grotto manner. They were often combined with cascading fountains in Renaissance gardens.

The grotto designed by Bernard Palissy for Catherine de' Medici's château in Paris, the Tuileries, was renowned. One also finds grottos in the gardens designed by André Le Nôtre for Versailles. In England, an early garden grotto was built at Wilton House in the 1630s, probably by Isaac de Caus.

Grottoes were eminently suitable for less formal gardening too. Alexander Pope's grotto is almost all that survives of one of the very first landscape gardens in England, at Twickenham. There are grottoes in the famous landscape gardens of Painshill Park, Stowe, Clandon Park and Stourhead. Scott's Grotto is a series of interconnected chambers, extending some 67 ft into the chalk hillside on the outskirts of Ware, Hertfordshire; built during the late 18th century, the chambers and tunnels are lined with shells, flints and pieces of coloured glass . The Romantic generation of tourists might not actually visit Fingal's Cave, located in the isolated Hebrides, but they heard of it, perhaps through Felix Mendelssohn's "Hebrides Overture", better known as "Fingal's Cave," which was inspired by his visit. In the 19th century, when miniature Matterhorns and rock-gardens became fashionable, a grotto might be nearby, as at Ascott House. In Bavaria, Ludwig's Linderhof contains an evocation of the grotto under Venusberg, which figured in Wagner's Tannhäuser.