Page - 449 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Volume 1

449The Neugebäude may have been built.25 While the building of all this was going on, the gardens and orchards were already being planted, for instance with fruit trees sent to Vienna from the Royal gardens in Prague, doubtless under the supervision of the two (chief) gardeners, Claude Rennart and Carl de Seiniß, both of French origin, who had meanwhile been appointed. The upper gardens, their surrounding walls and the various towers and gal- leries seem more or less to have been constructed as initially planned. This was not the case, however, for the construction of the building that was to provide the focus of the whole lay out. While work in the gardens continued, exactly in the centre of the long terraces new foundations were dug for a building appar- ently as wide as the central part or ‘Mittelrisalit’ of the Neugebäude as it was eventually built. The few remains of this project, soon abandoned, suggest that at least at the north and south side this building was to rest on a substructure consisting of an arcade carried on heavy piers. This is a construction which suggests various possible models among the villa architecture of the Italian Renaissance, such as Giuliano da Sangallo’s Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano [Fig. 9.26], Raphael’s Villa Madama, Gerolamo Genga’s Villa Imperiale at Pesa- ro, or Falconetto’s Villa dei Vescovi at Luvigliano [Fig. 9.27].26 When laying the foundations of this villa had hardly begun, its plan was abandoned in favour of a larger and more monumental concept: apart from the central building this would include two pavilions on either side, on the location of the present corner blocks or Eckrisalite. The existing upper terrace 25 The existence of the adjuncts to the west only to be deduced ‘auf grund baulicher Indi- zien’ (Seebach/Schreiber 1990, p. 376), it is not indicated whether these are remains of the foundations or traces preserved in the existing fabric of the main building. 26 Discussed by Holzschuh 1990 and Seebach/Schreiber 1989, pp. 375–376. Figure 9.26 The Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano (Giuliano da Sangallo., ca 1480), detail of the painting by Giusto Utens, ca 1600; Florence, Museo Firenze com’era. Figure 9.27 Villa dei Vescovi at Luvigliano (Padua), Giovanni Maria Falconetto and others, ca 1535–1540.