For Le Notre, one could say the same thing. Every shape and form he used exists in seventeenth-century pattern books and in the sixteenth-century Italian and French gar- dens which he knew as a child and young adult. What then is so special and creative about his work? Like Andrea Palladio in his work at Il Redentore or the Villa Rotunda at Capra, he is working in a tradition, usingstandard elements, yet the results are more than a skillful or interesting repetition, more than traditional. He was highly original.