Retiro - Madrid

Retiro
Buen Retiro palace, with its flower-gardens, have now completely come to grief; but if we look at old engravings it is evident to the eye that there is an entire want of unity in composition as compared with what we find in their Italian predecessors— not to speak of French garden schemes that had by now arrived at the threshold of their perfection. It all hangs together with the usual Spanish architecture, not quite vanished in the seventeenth century: the palace rooms were grouped round courts, and the plan was very highly esteemed. But there is more than this: the gardens in front of the façades are treated as separate court gardens each by itself, with walls all round. At Buen Retiro the planted courts of the cloister of old San Jeronimo and the beautiful Jardin del Principe in front of the windows of Philip II,’s old house have precisely similar treatment. It is just like an Italian parterre of the sixteenth century, adorned in the main lines of direction with two shell fountains. North lies the chief parterre of the palace, the Jardin de la Reina gives a wrong arrangement of the park, and clearly shows the influence of certain Italian villas — Medici, Ludovisi, Borghese, and others—in that by the side of the parterre a large place is left open for games.