The art of garden and landscape design and the mathematical sciences in the early modern period

Abstract

The mathematical sciences of the early modern period comprised many fields of knowledge, and those such as astronomy, geography, optics, music, practical geometry, acoustics, architecture and arithmetic were often deliberately oriented towards practical applications. Between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, practitioners of the mathematical sciences and garden and landscape designers shared the conviction that nature could be controlled and manipulated, and the methods used and the knowledge acquired in the mathematical sciences opened up new ways to do this. These potentialities affected the realm of landscape design and gardening in various formative ways that reached directly into the political sphere by offering new possibilities for political representation, of which there are numerous noteworthy examples, including the gardens of Versailles, perhaps the most magnificent representational gardens in seventeenth-century Europe.