Trees

In 1982, Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi published L’Architettura degli Alberi, the catalogue of the exhibition held that same year in Reggio Emilia and then in Modena. The Modenese show was held right here, in the Palazzina dei Giardini. During his university studies, Cesare Leonardi had been struck by the rich vegetation of the hills surrounding Florence and the monumental trees in the city parks. His sense of awe in the face of the marvellous forms of nature, towards which he recalls “feeling a greater attraction than towards forms of architecture,” led him to propose to the teacher Leonardo Savioli a thesis on landscaping concerning an urban park in Modena, in the area later allotted to Parco della Resistenza. In the early stages of the work, he develops the awareness of the impossibility to design a park without a deep knowledge of the elements of which it is made up, i.e. trees.For this reason, he decided to study trees, and to do so through direct experience. Initially in Florence and then in Modena and on the Modenese Apennines, he photographed every exemplar that he believed to be interesting and noted down its measurements. He then proceeded with the redrawing process, using photography as a basis and exploiting the criterion of a 1:100 representation scale.Starting from his study on trees, Leonardi undertakes a parallel and independent photographic research project. This reconnaissance of species continued for some twenty years involving Franca Stagi and the collaborators of their studio and taking on the dimension of an ‘epic’ vicissitude. They travelled the length and breadth of Italy, from the Botanical Gardens of Palermo, via the Reggia di Caserta, to Villa Taranto on Lake Maggiore, and then through Europe: the Swiss lakes (“here there are marvellous trees” he recalls) and across France, right up to the parks of London.  L’Architettura degli Alberi features 374 drawings of 211 species, to which to add the drawings of details (leaves and fruits) and the description sheets on each individual species (territories of origin, their adaptation to the urban environment and other climactic conditions). In the case of deciduous species, the tree is represented in two versions: with foliage and bare.Drawing has a two-fold purpose: on one hand it makes it possible to grasp and to summarise the characteristic features of the tree (the size and shape of the trunk, the ramifications, their size and frequency, the composition of the foliage) through an interpretative process which rarely consists in the mere copying of the photographic image; on the other, it allows the tree to be isolated from the landscape.The selection criteria are fundamental here: since a tree may be of different sizes on the basis of its age, position, climate or the surrounding nature, mature exemplars were chosen of a representative size.The same thing goes for the shape, also subject to countless variables. In particular, pruned exemplars were avoided, because the positioning of the branches is thereby altered, and the tree loses its characteristic form.