One Garden May Reveal Another: Obrist’s List

gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome were continually reformed by a long trail of invited guests. The idea was not to really transform the existing structure and vegetation of the classic Renaissance garden but instead to change perceptions of them using art works physical and temporal—including performance. During the course of the exhibitions, paths and hedges, grass panels, boschi, and the diminutive Mount Parnassus all assumed the role of matrix rather than subject, hosting the interventions of artists invited to engage this celebrated landscape. Since 1804 the villa has been the home of the French Academy in Rome, and for centuries it served as the most prestigious address for students from the École des Beaux Arts and other French schools of art, design, and classical studies. Pensionnaires remained in Rome for at least two years, completing their classical education by direct exposure to Italy’s art and architecture treasures, and enjoying life along the temperate Mediterranean. Until well into the twentieth century, fellows in architecture selected a classical site— often one in ruins—and intermixed design, archaeology, and at times even landscape architecture, to create proposals—often highly fanciful and grandiose—for their restoration. These designs, normally in the form of magnificent drawings, were shipped back to France, giving them the name of envois, or submissions.1 In many ways, the nineteenth century was the Academy’s high-water mark, and until the return of the historical interests that accompanied post-modernism, Rome was not high on the list of destinations for those wishing to confront world conditions as we know them. But in the past few decades, the Villa Medici regained currency as an address sought by French students and young professionals, even if the relevance of the academy (and all the Rome academies and programs, for that matter) had been floating in the aftermath of the 1968 social turmoil. The grants are still made for two years (compared to one year or less at the American Academy in Rome) and life is good. For outsiders, access to the celebrated sixteenth-century Villa Medici garden, whose original fabric of parterres and bounded rooms remains remarkably intact (if at times a bit threadbare), has been available on a limited basis. The profile of the academy, however,