Visioni e pensieri sull’arte a Ferrara
Tre grandi progetti per la fine del secolo Ventesimo L'arte di Ferrara da qualche anno è entrata in possesso di uno strumento di grandissima efficacia evocativa, che nessuna, o quasi, tra le grandi città dell'arte italiana può esibire con altrettanto legittimo orgoglio. Da quando uno storico, Werner Gundersheimer, ha portato alla conoscenza degli amatori dell'arte lo straordinario manoscritto vaticano di mano di Sabadino degli Arienti,
Gardens in Ferrara
The demise of a family and a power, however, could no longer be staved off by the propitiatory song of the ladies of the court as its notes wended their way upwards towards the merlons of the castle.
But the myth of the garden survived as a mental model of Paradise, and resisted the menacing turbulence of history's tempests while the wave of the contingent, bearing the flotsam and jetsam of a world gone mad, lapped the last Eden granted to man's folly: the garden of the Finzi Continis.
Inspired by the memory of the Grotto of Princess Marguerite Caetani and by Ferrara's via sacra, la via dei Piopponi (today Corso Ercole I d'Este), Bassani's imaginary garden reaffirms that principle proper to the Edenic idea of a place that is both consolation and memory, an inviolable sanctuary of the affections, but also a precarious refuge from history as it knocked at Micòl Finzi Contini's great dark door.
The rebirth of the garden that doesn't exist
The story of Ferrara's gardens is a strange and absorbing one. In the days of its greatest splendour, the city of the Este's had constructed a system of gardens that made Ferrara famous throughout the world and served to create that particular architectonic feature known as a pleasaunce. And yet, with the devolution of 1598 that saw the Este family abandon the city to be replaced by the Papal powers, those gardens were immediately "unmade AND uprooted".
Ancient splendours, vicissitudes of a Renaissance pleasaunce
At the bottom of corso Giovecca stands the Palazzina of Marfisa d'Este: a noble and harmonious building, its architecture is imbued with a sense of moderate, contained rhythm. It was built in the mid Seventeenth century by order of Francesco I d'Este, the third son of Alfonso I and Lucrezia Borgia.
The structure was part of a grand urban plan boldly conceived by Francesco d'Este. Already the owner of palazzo Schifanoia, with the construction of the Palazzina on via Giovecca and the subsequent acquisition of Palazzo Neroni on via Cisterna del Follo, Francesco's plan was to integrate the gardens and green spaces linking all three buildings thus imposing a rational organization on the whole south-eastern side of the city, still largely innocent of buildings.