Hold that the beauty of the orders comes from fixed proportions that please by nature, as consonances do in music; where the ancients differ, the differences answer to circumstances such as distance and height.
Compose, do not copy
Do not paint one place as it is: compose the picture from studies of many places, taking from each what is beautiful, so that the whole is a place that never existed but might have.
Reynolds set Claude against the Dutch: their landscapes are “a representation of an individual spot, and each in its kind a very faithful but a very confined portrait”, while “Claude Lorraine, on the contrary, was convinced, that taking Nature as he found it, seldom produced beauty. His pictures are a composition of the various draughts which he had previously made from various beautiful scenes and prospects.”
Claude composed his buildings the same way. His harbours are not real ports: he put the Villa Medici on a quay at the sea, moved Michelangelo’s Capitol to a harbour, and gave his palaces the façades of the palaces of his Roman patrons. A model built from one of his pictures is therefore a model of a place that never was, built by the rules of the buildings he borrowed.
Related rules
In place of a wall, bound the garden with a ditch whose side towards the garden is a vertical retaining wall and whose other side slopes up to the field, so that cattle are kept out and the view from the house runs on uninterrupted into the park.
ditch c. 1.5–2 m deep: wall on the garden side, turf slope on the park side
Let the character of the site direct the design: whether the ground should be raised or lowered, a view opened or closed, water led or stilled. Prefer variety, surprise and concealed bounds to symmetry.
Compose the garden as a painter composes a landscape: in groups of trees for light and shade, with water winding through the hollows and a temple or bridge placed where it will be seen across it, so that each turn of the walk opens a new picture.
Bring grass up to the walls of the house and keep the cattle off it with a ha-ha; plant trees in clumps on the rising ground and as single specimens on the lawn; and enclose the park with a belt of woodland, with a drive inside it from which the park is seen.
Make the lake by damming a stream in its valley, give it a winding, irregular outline with promontories, and hide both its ends behind trees, a bend or a bridge, so that it seems a river flowing through the park.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Compose, do not copy”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/claude-composed-from-studies. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.