Botanical art in Renaissance Italy - Current and Coming - National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, March, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

During the Italian Renaissance, under the enlightened patronage of several generations of the Medici family, an interest in science in general and botany in particular, led to the flourishing of a genre of painting we now call botanical art. The introduction into Italy of hundreds of previously unknown plant species brought from the far corners of the globe gave rise not only to the creation by the nobility of elaborate gardens comprised of useful and ornamental plants, but also to an interest in depicting flora in paintings, watercolors, textiles, manuscripts, mosaic panels, and furniture ornamented with panels of pietre dure (inlays of semiprecious stones). Each of these forms is represented in a beautiful exhibition on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C., from March 3 to May 27. The show is entitled The Flowering of Florence: Botanical Art for the Medici, and includes sixty-eight works dating from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, many of which have never been on view in the United States.

The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue explore the contributions of members of the Medici family beginning with Cosimo I the Elder (1389-1464). It also concentrates on the work of three artists: Jocopo Ligozzi, Giovanna Garzoni, and Bartolomeo Bimbi. The Medicis were responsible for building or renovating a number of splendid Tuscan villas and palaces and their remarkably innovative gardens. In the Middle Ages plants valued for their medicinal and culinary properties were cultivated, but under the Medicis, gardens took on more value as restful places for contemplation where plants could be studied in their various growth cycles. Cosimo I sought out copies of classical treatises on botanical subjects, and in the l540s he sponsored the construction of botanical gardens in Pisa and Florence, which were among the first of their type in Europe.

Francesco I, Cosimo's son and the second grand duke of Tuscany, was deeply interested in botany and invited the artist Jacopo Ligozzi to his court in 1577, where he remained until his death in 1626. Under Francesco's patronage, Ligozzi produced astonishingly realistic botanical and zoological works.

Upon Francesco's death his brother Ferdinando I, a cardinal then living in Rome, moved to Florence to become the third grand duke of Tuscany. In 1598 and 1599 Ferdinando I commissioned the artist Giusto Utens to paint a series of fourteen works depicting the family's villas and palaces. Utens's bird's-eye views (one of which is illustrated here) provide an important record of the enormous advances that had been achieved in garden design by the end of the sixteenth century. In 1588 Ferdinando officially established the Galleria dei Lavori in the Uffizi, naming Ligozzi the director. There artists and craftsmen produced everything from metalwork and furniture to embroideries and mosaics. It was also where the art of pietra dura was perfected. Not surprisingly, Ligozzi supplied designs for several pietre dure floral panels and tabletops as well as for embroideries.

Ferdinando II, the son of Cosimo II and fifth grand duke, was attracted by all aspects of the scientific world, and during his lifetime devices such as the microscope and thermometer were invented. Ferdinando II greatly improved the Boboli Garden behind the Pitti Palace in Florence and was a frequent patron of Giovanna Garzoni, a gifted painter who excelled at botanical subjects and still lifes. The sixth grand duke, Cosimo III, and his preferred artist Bartolomeo Bimbi are the last to be profiled in this exhibition. Bimbi painted exquisite still lifes and recorded oddities of nature on canvas. For example, Bimbi painted one composition of 115 types of pears (all appropriately labeled and identified), another that shows 34 varieties of cherries, and one of a cauliflower that weighed eighteen pounds.

The catalogue of this exhibition, written by Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, the guest curator, and Gretchen A. Hirschauer, is available by telephoning 800-288-2129.