John Evelyn and the garden of Epicurus

• Autores: Carola Small, Alastair Small
• Localización: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, ISSN 0075-4390, Nº 60, 1997, págs. 194-214
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The writers discuss the Epicurean gardens of the 17th-century British garden designer John Evelyn. In the last few years, it has been shown that philosophy, symbolism, and garden design were closely related in Evelyn's mind, and there has been a rising interest in him as a pioneer of the landscape garden. Evelyn's interest in the ideas of Epicurus was partly due to his emphasis on the principle of ataraxia—tranquillity achieved by avoidance of all extremes of passion and distress—but principally due to his association of Epicurus with a garden: Epicurus's owned a garden in Athens, which he bought in 306 B.C. The Epicurean ideal, with its emphasis on a withdrawal from worldly cares, was expressed in three gardens designed by Evelyn before 1660: at Wotton, Albury, and Deepdene in Surrey, England. Evelyn later abandoned Epicurean moral symbolism in his garden design as a new, more hedonistic form of Epicureanism became fashionable.