"Stourhead was the perfect realization of the eighteenth-century yearning for a Vergilian and Claudian Arcady. The Stourhead park was created in a luxuriant valley, which Flitcroft made into a lake with a path around it that provided a sequence of Picturesque views and encounters with temples, statuary, springs and grotto, all involving layers of visual, literary, and even personal allusion. One of the principal Picturesque views at Stourhead is known to reflect Claude Lorrain's Coast View of Delos with Aeneas and the passage from Vergil on which it was based, relating Aeneas's account of his experience in the Temple of Apollo at Delos...The architectural set-pieces, each in a Picturesque location, include a Temple of Apollo, a Temple of Flora, a Pantheon (from the Claude painting), and a Palladian bridge."

—Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p403-4.