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The lakeside panorama offers an environment that is peaceful and evocative, but it also presents marked contrasts. The lake suggests tranquillity but, at the same time, it arouses unexpected emotions. Only uniform at first glance, the landscape around the lake stands out for its extraordinarily clear light, but the areas of shade are deeper and more disquieting. The constant movement of the lake’s surface sometimes conceals the real depth of the water, and at other times it contrasts with the clear outline of the banks which the lake unites instead of separating. The calming proximity of the banks enables you to make out the shapes and outlines, but the diversity of each stretch allows you to imagine adventurous journeys of exploration. |
| In literature, in painting and in the art of gardens, the soft natural features of the landscape around lakes have been an extraordinary source of inspiration, prompting the expression of different moods, but at the same time its contrasting environmental features represented a major impetus for literature during the Enlightenment and the ideal background for strong emotions and romantic sentiments. |
As an inspirational motif and an ideological and philosophical premise, lakes characterised an important period in the history of Western gardens, where it became the ideal topos in which to merge ideas and depict landscapes that support particular didactic emotions. In many gardens the lake appears as a mirror that reflects the scene, exhorting positive, emblematic and moral thoughts and values.
During the Romantic era, the lake was thought to reflect the sentiments of whoever observed it, and the garden became the setting chosen to represent its physical qualities and its symbolic or evocative connotations of mood, a device already widely used in literature, and in other forms of artistic expression and society. |
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