The Labyrinth as an Architectural Mediator: Vredeman De Vries and the Geometric Garden in The Netherlands

In 1583, together with Philips Galle, Hans de Vries Vredeman (1527-1609) published a treatise on the Gardens entitled Hortorum Viridariorumque Elegantes et Multiplicis Formæ to have a large influence in the Netherlands and throughout Northern Europe, mainly thanks to its subsequent expanded editions in 1600 and 1636-1640. With this book, Vredeman cast a fundamental bridge between Italian Renaissance Garden and Northern Europe Garden. By organizing the presentation of the schemes referring to architectural orders (Doric, Ionic and Corinthian), Vredeman tries to confer on garden art an architectural status. Thus it is not to be considered a book of models or a theoretical work but rather a recueil exemplifying how to decline garden designs to his own idea of Vitruvian architecture. Among the many fantastic plan lay-outs for gardens, no less than nine are the form of labyrinths. To be precise they are mazes, where one can get lost. Mazes are supposed to be born in Italy between the end of XVI and the beginning of XVI century as a Mannerist variant of the classic labyrinth.While Serlio had presented four labyrinths in plan, in order to be easily understood and copied, Vredeman’s mazes are represented in a perspective view, like all other pictures in the book, even if the high point of view offers the spectator the illusion of dominating the garden general design.Despite of being just intellectual exercises, Vredeman’s labyrinths negotiate an architectural way not only to the garden design – they are far too large for Dutch urban garden size - but to a geometrization of landscape that is to manifest most in his book on Perspective . It is our opinion that Vredeman adopted labyrinths in order to give an architectural dignity to Garden Art both by evoking an architectural archetype of antiquity and by enriching it with elements taken from the mythical Maison Dedalus, not to say that some of his labyrinths seem to hide an architectural plan in their mazy scheme.