Borrowing from China. The Society of Jesus and the Ideal of Naturalness in XVII and XVIII Century European Gardens

China played a seminal role in the evolution of 17th and 18th-century European garden art. While from the early 18th century the vogue for chinoiserie prompted the introduction in western gardens of garden structures in an inventive Chinese style, already from the last decades of the 17th century references to Chinese garden design were used by theorists—in England first and then in continental Europe—to promote irregular design as a reaction to the regular Baroque gardens. The article discusses Jesuits’ accounts of Chinese gardens. It highlights the contribution of these accounts to Western understanding of the gardens of China and the role they played in the cultural debate on the development of Western garden art from gardens inspired by geometry to those inspired by nature.