The ninth-century idealised plan of Saint Gall (illustration) shows an arcaded cloister with a central well and cross-paths from the centers of each range of arcading. The ruined and overgrown Roman villas that were so often remade as the site of Benedictine monasteries had lost their planted garden features with the first decades of abandonment: "gardening, more than architecture, more than painting, more than music, and far more than literature, is an ephemeral art its masterpieces disappear, leaving little trace." Georgina Masson observed: "When, in 1070, the abbey of Cassino was rebuilt, the garden was described as 'a paradise in the Roman fashion'." But it may have been merely "the aura of the great classical tradition" alone that had survived. The origin of the cloister is in the Roman colonnaded peristyle, as garden histories note. The enclosure might be as simple as woven wattle fencing or of stout or decorative masonry or it might be enclosed by trelliswork tunneled pathways in a secular garden or by an arcaded cloister, for communication or meditative pacing. All medieval gardens were enclosed, protecting the private precinct from public intrusion, whether by folk or by stray animals. The convention of four paths that divided the square enclosure into quadrants was so strong that the pattern was employed even where the paths led nowhere. In the history of gardens the High Medieval hortus conclusus typically had a well or fountain at the center, bearing its usual symbolic freight (see " Fountain of Life") in addition to its practical uses. The meaning of hortus conclusus suggests a more private style of garden. An actual walled garden, literally surrounded by a wall, is a subset of gardens. The second, Onze Lieve Vrouw van Tuine (literally "Our Lady of the Garden"), is venerated at the cathedral of Ypres.Īll gardens are by definition enclosed or bounded spaces, but the enclosure may be somewhat open and consist only of columns, low hedges or fences. One is the statue at the hermitage-chapel in Warfhuizen: " Our Lady of the Enclosed Garden". Two pilgrimage sites are dedicated to Mary of the Enclosed Garden in the Dutch- Flemish cultural area. The enclosed garden is recognizable in Fra Angelico's Annunciation (illustration at above left), dating from 1430-32. Not all actual medieval horti conclusi even strove to include all these details, the olive tree in particular being insufficiently hardy for northern European gardens. In the Grimani Breviary, scrolling labels identify the emblematic objects betokening the Immaculate Conception: the enclosed garden ( hortus conclusus), the tall cedar ( cedrus exalta), the well of living waters ( puteus aquarum viventium), the olive tree ( oliva speciosa), the fountain in the garden ( fons hortorum), the rosebush ( plantatio rosae). This was a representation of her "closed off" womb, which was to remain untouched, and also of her being protected, as by a wall, from sin. As such, Mary in late medieval and Renaissance art, illustrating the long-held doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary, as well as the Immaculate Conception, was shown in or near a walled garden or yard. The verse "Thou art all fair, my love there is no spot in thee" (4.7) from the Song was also regarded as a scriptural confirmation of the developing and still controversial doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception – being born without Original Sin (" macula" is Latin for spot).Ĭhristian tradition states that Jesus Christ was conceived to Mary miraculously and without disrupting her virginity by the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Holy Trinity. The Madonna on a Crescent Moon in Hortus Conclusus by an anonymous painter
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