The presence of so many unnatural features in Chinese gardens tended to give them a rococo quality, which Zen artists were careful to avoid, and the hemispherical, symmetrical motif of Chinese gardens was transformed into the angular, asymmetrical style that suited Zen aesthetic theory. The fundamental impression a Chinese garden gives is that of skilled artifice, of being a magical, slightly fabulous landscape of dreams. Zen artists transformed this into a symbolic experience of the world at large, distilled into a controlled space but suggesting the infinite. The result was to change a form that has been essentially decorative into something as near to pure art as can be wrought with the primeval elements of tree, water, and stone. Gardens had been used before to approximate this or that monarch's conception of paradise, but never before had they been employed to express an otherwise ineffable understanding of the moral authority of the natural world. Zen gardens differ even more greatly from Western garden design. The geometrical creations of Europe, such as the palace garden at Versailles, were fashioned to provide wide-open vistas reaching toward the horizon, while the naturalistic Zen garden is closed in upon itself like a form of curved space, producing the illusion of an infinite wilderness in a few acres. It is intended primarily for viewing; there are no grassy dells for loitering. It is expected to serve functions ordinarily reserved for art in the West: it both abstracts and intensifies reality, being at once symbolic and explicit in design, and the emotion it evokes in the viewer gives him a deeper understanding of his own consciousness. The four gardens in Kyoto that perhaps best demonstrate the principles of early Zen landscape were all constructed under the patronage of the Ashikaga: the first two, Saiho-ji (ca. 1339) and Tenryu-ji (ca. 1343), were designed by the Zen monk Muso under the reign of Takauji; the garden of the Golden Pavilion (1397) was executed under the influence of Yoshimitsu; and the garden of the Silver Pavilion (1484) was guided by Yoshimasa. All four were created on the sites of earlier gardens dating from the Heian or Kamakura eras which Zen artists both purified and modified, making changes roughly analogous to the reworking of a rococo marble statue of a rotund courtier into a free-standing muscular nude. It is also illustrative of the age that these one-time private estates were transformed into what were to become essentially public parks, albeit under the management of Zen temples.