Humanist Horticulture: Twelve Agricultural Months and Twelve Categories of Books in Piero de’ Medici’s Studiolo

Abstract

“Humanist Horticulture: Twelve Agricultural Months and Twelve Categories of Books in Piero de’ Medici’s Studiolo.” Piero de’ Medici’s design of his studiolo in the Palazzo Medici, Via Larga, in the 1450s and 1460s is early evidence of the taste for vegetative symbolism within the Medici dynasty. The vaulted ceiling roundels of calendar months by Luca della Robbia, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, highlight productive individual labor both in agricultural fields and in the learned fields of Piero’s twelve categories of manuscripts arranged on desks below. Creating visual cues to his collection, Piero aids observers in finding a subject with his two catalogues, color-coded to match bindings, as well as by a subject’s location under a specific month. The texts of Seneca, Quintilian, Virgil, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, and Battista Guarino help elucidate the analogy between horticulture and culture apparent in Piero’s association of working vineyards with studying objects of antiquity. Filarete honors Piero by describing Piero’s weekly and monthly cyclical ritual of examining his ornamented manuscripts, his effigies of emperors, his jewels and engraved stones, his vases, and his arms and other treasures. Sculpted by Mino da Fiesole in a floral garment, and hiring illustrators to illuminate manuscript pages in vine-stem border and later in a green-tendril border, Piero imitates Pliny the Younger in withdrawing to a rural retreat, granted that it is one in an urban villa as artificial as the perspective intarsia designs of his influential cabinetry. In bequeathing to his son Lorenzo the studiolo with its collection of arts and letters, Piero contributes to the image of Lorenzo bringing about a springtime of arts and letters.