The Garden of the Villa Madama, Rome

The Garden of the Villa Madama in Rome at the National Museum Cardiff depicts the unfinished Renaissance villa designed by Raphael for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (later Pope Clement VII) around 1518. The villa’s gardens, with their spectacular views over Rome, attracted numerous 18th-century artists including Wilson, who found in them the perfect fusion of architecture, nature, and historical resonance. Richard Wilson's Italian landscapes were the foundation on which his entire career was built. The years he spent in Rome in the 1750s, studying the work of Claude Lorrain and Gaspar Dughet in the landscape of the Roman campagna that had inspired them, gave him the compositional intelligence and tonal discipline that distinguished his mature work from the topographical painting that preceded him in British art. His Italian subjects — the Alban Hills, the volcanic lakes, the ruins of the campagna — were produced both for the British tourists who wanted souvenirs of their Grand Tour and for the collector market in London that was learning to value landscape painting as a serious genre.

Wilson captures the terraced garden setting with attention to the formal plantings and architectural elements. The view over Rome provides atmospheric depth that exploits Wilson’s mastery of distance and light.