Chapter 3:  The Renaissance.

In the first half of the 1500s a series of important archaeological discoveries was made in Rome.  The excavations, begun at the end of the previous century, were part of an on-going strategy by the papacy to restore the Holy City to its former pre-eminence, not just as the centre of the Catholic faith, but of European culture and civilisation itself.  Artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael and Pinturicchio were given access to the sites and encouraged to record and reproduce what they found.  Vasari describes in his Lives of the Artists how Raphael and Udine discovered the ‘grotesque’ stucco duro and fresco decorations in Nero’s Domus Aurea (Golden House) and adapted them for the decoration of the Vatican loggias.  Giovanni da Udine’s re-invention of Roman lime-based stucco began the European revival of ornamental plasterwork, largely absent throughout the Middle Ages (with the notable exception of Moorish Spain).  As the excavations continued they also revealed the extent to which the Roman elites had used coloured and inlaid marbles to decorate their interiors.

News spread quickly, and Rome became an important point of reference, not only for artists and architects, but also their patrons, the crowned heads of Europe, many of whom visited the city as part of their education.  The new humanist ideals under which they had been educated placed great emphasis on knowledge and respect for antiquity; collecting and copying the art and architecture of Ancient Rome was an important way of asserting one’s credentials as a humanist prince.  The coloured marble columns, wall surfaces and pietre dure table tops that they commissioned became the models for the earliest scagliola.

16th century Roman inlaid work 

In Ancient Rome inlaid work was known as opus sectile (from the Latin secare, to cut).  Pliny the Elder identified two types:  sectilia pavimenta, for floors and pavements; incrustationes, for walls and vertical surfaces.  (Pliny himself  was severely critical of the practice among wealthy Romans of using coloured marbles to line the walls of their homes; he saw it as yet further evidence of Rome’s decadence and obsession with luxury – see chapter 1.) 

Many examples of opus sectile had survived from antiquity, buried beneath the modern city.  Throughout the sixteenth century they were brought to light and studied with great interest.  Ancient Roman designs were copied and adapted by the architects of the day for their wealthy clients, and the artefacts themselves were broken up and re-cycled under Papal licence to make Pietre Dure table tops and wall panels.   A distinctive style was evident from the start, as summarised by Dr. Annamaria Giusti, a leading expert on Italian Pietre Dure work, and for many years the director of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence:

‘Although produced by different craftsmen and workshops, Roman tables share a common language that derives from architects’ designs.  The principal elements of this language lie in the expertly used kinds of ancient marble; the focus on a central shape around which the composition is orchestrated; and the predilection for predominantly abstract decorative modules inspired by features of the ancient vocabulary of ornamentation, such as peltae [shields], scrolls and panoplies [military trophies].’

An outstanding example of this style is the Farnese Table (c.1568-73 – now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).  The enormous work (379 cms. x 168 cms.) was commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-1589) from designs made by his architect, Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (1507-1573).  To enhance its classical status, the Cardinal insisted that all the stones used in the table should be ancient; many of them came from the Baths of Caracalla, where he himself had supervised excavations in the 1540s.

Objects like the Farnese Table were talked about throughout the European courts; table tops and ornaments in this new – or rediscovered – art form, with its skilful use of ancient and venerable materials, became hugely desirable for those who could afford them, not only for their beauty, but for the all-important representational value that their ownership bestowed.  From the middle of the century, the Roman workshops were kept busy supplying this elite and status-conscious clientele. 

Marble and hardstone inlays could also be used, as in ancient times, to cover entire wall surfaces.  An early example was the panelled dado section of the Sala Regia in the Vatican, commissioned by Pope Pius IV (r. 1559-65), and formed from large rectangles of alternating antique marble, framed with wide borders incorporating inlays of abstract shield designs and ovals.

In 1585 Pope Sixtus V (r.1585-90) added his own Sistine Chapel (not to be confused with the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Museums) to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, already blessed with a magnificent Cosmatesque floor.  The new chapel, designed by Domenico Fontana (1543-1607), was clad throughout with polychromatic inlaid marble in the most ambitious and elaborate example of its kind to date.  The walls were lined throughout with pilasters, panels and niches in a variety of red, yellow, black and white marbles.  The inset faces of the corner pilasters were inlaid with geometrical designs and religious symbols.  The principal niches, flanked with Verde Antico (antique green) columns, contained monumental memorial statues of Pope Sixtus and his benefactor, Pope Pius V (r.1566-72), carved in white statuary marble.

A second chapel, the Borghese or Pauline Chapel, was added in the early1600’s on the opposite side of the church by Pope Paul V (r.1605-21) for his own tomb and that of his predecessor, Clement VIII (r. 1592-1605).  Similar in design, it was even more sumptuous than the first; the altar and the reredos were made from Lapis Lazuli, one of the most expensive and difficult stones to obtain in such quantity.

Following these imposing examples, wealthy Roman families began to commission their own chapels in many of the city’s churches, using the same expensive style of polychromatic marble work.

Florentine Mosaic. 

If Rome had been the starting point for the late Renaissance manufacture of Pietre Dure work, it was soon eclipsed by Florence, largely due to state intervention from the Medici.

Cosimo I, Duke of Florence and first Grand Duke of Tuscany (r. 1537-74) was an enthusiastic collector of precious stones and marble.  He commissioned inlaid table tops from Rome and had quantities of antique marble and hardstone brought to Florence, where it was catalogued and reworked.  He ordered vases, figurines and cameos carved and engraved from gems and semi-precious hardstones such as Chalcedony, Porphyry, Onyx and Lapis Lazuli; and he commissioned reliquaries and other religious objects made from clear rock crystal.  Cosimo obtained these objects from Milanese craftsmen who specialised in the ‘glyptic’ arts (from the Greek glyphein, to engrave or hollow out).

Glyptic art  had continued in Byzantium from Roman times, and during the Middle Ages there were centres in Venice and Paris, also in Islamic North Africa.  The 15th century ruler of Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent (r. 1469-1492) was a keen collector.  Many of the vases he owned were antiquities, reworked with contemporary mounts.  By the sixteenth century Milan had become the centre in Italy for carving and engraving these extraordinary objects which, once finished, were passed on to gold- and silversmiths to be fitted with extravagant mounts.  

Cosimo’s son Francesco I (r.1574-87) inherited his father’s passion for polished stones, and went one step further by encouraging two families of Milanese stone cutters, the Caroni and the Gaffurri, to move to Florence. They were employed to work alongside the Florentine craftsmen, helping them to perfect the art of Pietre Dure inlay, while continuing to create the vases and other glyptic objects for which they were renowned.  Francesco housed all his court artists and craftsmen in the Casino di San Marco, where the different specialists were encouraged to collaborate on joint projects.

Francesco I was succeeded by his brother Ferdinand I (r.1587-1609) who had previously served as a cardinal in Rome.  While there he had taken a lively interest in the archaeological excavations, and was a keen collector.  He moved the royal workshops to the new Uffizi Palace in 1588, and gave them protected status under the title of the Galleria dei Lavori (Department of Works).  The many artists and craftsmen who had worked for Cosimo and Francesco now became salaried employees, paid to work exclusively for the Medici Royal Court.  This was one of the earliest examples of a state-run artistic enterprise, and it proved highly successful.  Secure employment – unaffected by political and dynastic change – allowed accumulated skills and experience to be passed from generation to generation.   For nearly three hundred years, the Galleria dei Lavori was pre-eminent in the quality and scope of its Pietre Dure work, which became known simply as Florentine mosaic.  The institution still exists today as the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, a world-famous centre for the restoration and conservation of marble and hardstone work (much of it originally produced by the Opificio’s own craftsmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).

Grand Duke Ferdinand was ambitious for the Galleria dei Lavori to go beyond the limits of Roman inlay, which favoured abstract designs whose purpose was to emphasise the antiquity and beauty of the stones themselves.  He encouraged his craftsmen to attempt new schemes that were naturalistic; they were, in effect, to reproduce nature in coloured stone.

As in Rome, the designs for these Florentine pieces were produced by the court architect or artistic director, who arranged for the production of full-size paintings to serve as templates and decided on the individual pieces of marble and hardstone before they were given to the Pietre Dure specialists for cutting and assembling.  Typically they included flower vases and branches of fruit, exotic birds, and scrolling foliage.  Belgian Black marble (known as Paragone) was used for the background, enhancing the colour and brilliance of the virtuoso inlays.  Florentine Pietre Dure work soon became the most admired and sought after in Europe; but it was extremely expensive and took a long time to make.

The Capella dei Principi.

When Ferdinand set up the Galleria dei Lavori he had a project in mind.  In the 1560s his father Cosimo, with the encouragement of his court architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), had laid plans for a family mausoleum, the Cappella dei Principi (Prince’s Chapel), to be built onto the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence beside Michelangelo’s New Sacristy.  Grand mausoleums and extravagant funeral monuments were becoming yet another integral part of royal representation.  (In the 1590s the stuccadore and bronze caster Carlo di Cesare del Palagio, who played an important role in the early history of scagliola, was involved in three such projectssee Chapter 8 part 4).  As a way of honouring Tuscany’s first Grand Duke, Vasari had decided that all the internal wall surfaces of the new chapel should be clad in marble and inlaid Pietre Dure.   Ferdinand gave the go-ahead for the enormous project and work began on the inlaid panels in 1589.

The building itself was not started until 1604, and the project was only  completed at the beginning of the twentieth century (by which time it had long been considered grandiose and outdated); but at the time of its inception, the planned interior of the Capella dei Principi was one of the most extravagant undertaken since Roman times, and it excited tremendous interest throughout the European courts, adding greatly to their obsession with coloured and inlaid marble.

(The first Munich Reiche Kapelle, although conceived on a much smaller scale, was clearly influenced by its design; it was also the first building known to have used scagliola on a grand scale.  See Chapter 6.)

Prague and the Holy Roman Empire 

As well as servicing the Cappella dei Principi and the Medici palaces and villas, Florentine mosaics from the Galleria dei Lavori were regularly sent to the royal courts of Europe as diplomatic gifts.  In this way the fame and status of Florence as a centre of art and culture was kept alive, despite its military, commercial and dynastic decline.  The gift of a table top to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (r. 1576-1612) in 1589 was particularly well received, and proved to be an astute investment which led to a lucrative return order.

In 1583 Rudolph had moved the imperial residence from Vienna to Prague, where he established a dazzling court of artists, philosophers and scientists.  His art collection was one of the largest and finest in Europe.  Devoted to the occult (some suspected him of being a witch), he was a keen alchemist and an obsessive collector of gems and rare stones; these were valued not only for their rarity and beauty, but also their medicinal properties.  It was believed they could be ground up and ingested against a variety of illnesses, and when used to make drinking vessels and serving bowls, they could counteract the effects of poison, an ever-present danger in Renaissance courts.

As a Habsburg prince Rudolph had spent part of his youth at the Spanish court of his uncle, Phillip II, where he encountered Pietre Dure table tops obtained from Rome.  Later he commissioned vases and other glyptic work from Milan, for which he supplied his own stones.   Bohemia was rich in ornamental hardstones, particularly quarz, jasper and agate.  In the fourteenth century, the walls of the Wenceslas Chapel in Prague Cathedral and Saint Catherine’s Chapel in Karlstein Castle had been entirely covered with these stones, in a late medieval precursor to the Roman hardstone inlay of the sixteenth century.

When Rudolph received the Florentine table top, inlaid with Alabaster, Rock Crystal, Lapis Lazuli and other stones, he was so impressed that he arranged with Ferdinand de’ Medici to have another made at his own expense, using Bohemian materials.  The first stones were cut in 1589, and specialist inlay work on the table began in 1590, but it was not completed and delivered to Prague until 1597.  It occupied the central position in Rudolph’s Kunstkammer, the purpose-built range of galleries in which he kept his extensive collections of artificialia (works of art and craft), naturalia (exhibits from the natural world) and scientifica (man-made objects for measuring or affecting the known universe).  The humanist scholar and early mineralogist, Anselmus Boetius de Boodt (1550-1632), was Rudolph’s court physician and curator of his collections.  He described the table as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’.  Unfortunately it has not survived; it was moved to the Palace of Brussels after Rudolph’s death, and subsequently destroyed in a fire in 1731. (For further information on the table see footnote:  Karla Langedijk, The Table in Pietre Dure…).

During the years in which the table top was being made, Rudolph set up his own stone-cutting workshops in Prague, using the expertise of two Italian families: the Castrucci from Florence for Pietre Dure, and the Miseroni (see above) from Milan for glyptic work.  From the 1590’s the Castrucci workshop began to produce a new style of inlay, using locally sourced agates and jaspers to create small, densely detailed landscape pictures.  This style of hardstone inlay was to have a decisive influence on the development of German inlaid scagliola in the late 1620s, when Blasius Pfeiffer’s son Wilhelm began to turn his hand towards pictorial scagliola.

References:  Quotation from Annamaria Giusti, Roman Inlay and Florentine Mosaics in The New Art of Pietre dure in Art of the Royal Court, Treasures in Pietre dure from the Palaces of Europe ed. Wolfram Koeppe, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2008, p. 14.
For Farnese Table see 
Art of the Royal Court ibid.Catalogue No.10.
For Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome see Anthony Blunt:  Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration Hertfordshire 1988  p. 24-5
For Galleria dei Lavori and Capella dei Principi see Annamaria Giusti L’Arte delle Pietre Dure da Firenze all’Europa Florence 2005 p.59 
Rudolf Distelberger, The Castrucci and the Miseroni: Prague, Florence. Milan in Art of the Royal Court, pp. 29-39 Prague.
The history and symbolism of Rudolf’s table is discussed in detail in: Karla Langedijk, The Table in Pietre Dure for the Emperor. A new understanding of Rudolph II as a collector: Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 42. Bd., H. 2/3 (1998), Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut Stable pp.358-382.  (The article is available on Jstor)

Inside the Baths of Caracalla, Rome (blt. 212-217 AD).  Mosaics and rare marbles covered the floors and walls, and hundreds of statues in bronze and marble filled the niches.   Excavated during the 16th century, the enormous site provided rich pickings for late-renaissance architects and collectors, among the latter the powerful Farnese family.

Details of stucchi on a bedroom ceiling of the Roman ‘Villa della Farnesina’ (21 BC).  The villa was excavated from the grounds of the renaissance Villa Farnesina.  (Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome.)

Wall panels (Incrustationes) in Opus Sectile  re-assembled using fragments from the Domus Tiberiana (c. 50 AD).  Palatine Museum, Rome.  (Click on images to enlarge.) 

Pietre Dure table top of typically Roman design, originally made for the Villa Medici in Rome.  It has a large central panel set within abstract geometrical shapes.  Pitti Palace, Florence. (Rome 16th Century.)

The Farnese Table, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
(Image available through Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Farnese_Table_MET_DP101975.jpg) 

Inlaid marble wall surfaces in the Sistine Chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.  (c. 1590)

Examples of  glyptic carving from the Milanese workshop of Gasparo Miseroni (1518-1573).  Prase (green quartz) and Lapis Lazuli vessels with elaborate gold and jewel studded mounts.  (Milan c. 1550).  The Miseroni family supplied glyptic art to  several European courts including Florence and Madrid, and most famously, that of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague – see later section.  (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

Florentine Pietre Dure over three centuries.  (The pieces are from the ‘Pietre Colorate Molto Vaghe e Belle’ exhibiton of Florentine Pietre Dure work at the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua 2018/19.) 

Small panel and frame depicting a vase of flowers formed in Pietre Tenere (Soft Stones).  Among experts the distinction is made between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ stones, the latter being less valuable, more commonly available, and of course softer.  (Grand Ducal Workshops, 17th Century)

Small panel depicting a bunch of flowers.  The naturalness and subtlety of shading make a striking contrast with the earlier piece. (Grand Ducal Workshops, 18th Century.)

Part of a table top with musical instruments, floral swags and birds in flight.  (Grand Ducal Workshops, 19th Century.)

The Capella dei Principi, Florence.  The original designs by Vasari were altered many times over the three centuries it took to complete the building.  The enormous sarcofogi in the niches, each dedicated to a Medici Grand Duke, are in fact empty.  The remains of their intended occupants are buried in the crypt below the chapel. (Click on images to enlarge.)

A section of the Wenceslas Chapel in the cathedral of St. Vitus, Prague.  The lower walls of the chapel, the main altar and the door surrounds are faced with Bohemian hardstones and gold jointing. (14th century) 

Display cases of glyptic art.  Most of the exhibits were made in Prague for Rudolph II by the workshop of Ottavio Miseroni (1567-1620) during the twenty years spanning the turn of the seventeenth century.  The Netherlandish goldsmith Jan Vermeyen (1559-1608) supplied many of the mounts.  (Kunstkammer, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.)

Pietre Dure landscape by Giovanni Castrucci workshop (active in Prague 1598-1615).  Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague.

Chapter 3:  The Renaissance.

In the first half of the 1500s a series of important archaeological discoveries was made in Rome.  The excavations, begun at the end of the previous century, were part of an on-going strategy by the papacy to restore the Holy City to its former pre-eminence, not just as the centre of the Catholic faith, but of European culture and civilisation itself.  Artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael and Pinturicchio were given access to the sites and encouraged to record and reproduce what they found.  Vasari describes in his Lives of the Artists how Raphael and Udine discovered the ‘grotesque’ stucco duro and fresco decorations in Nero’s Domus Aurea (Golden House) and adapted them for the decoration of the Vatican loggias.  Giovanni da Udine’s re-invention of Roman lime-based stucco began the European revival of ornamental plasterwork, largely absent throughout the Middle Ages (with the notable exception of Moorish Spain).  As the excavations continued they also revealed the extent to which the Roman elites had used coloured and inlaid marbles to decorate their interiors.

Inside the Baths of Caracalla, Rome (blt. 212-217 AD).  Mosaics and rare marbles covered the floors and walls, and hundreds of statues in bronze and marble filled the niches.   Excavated during the 16th century, the enormous site provided rich pickings for late-renaissance architects and collectors, among the latter the powerful Farnese family.

Details of stucchi on a bedroom ceiling of the Roman ‘Villa della Farnesina’ (21 BC).  The villa was excavated from the grounds of the renaissance Villa Farnesina.  (Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome.)

News spread quickly, and Rome became an important point of reference, not only for artists and architects, but also their patrons, the crowned heads of Europe, many of whom visited the city as part of their education.  The new humanist ideals under which they had been educated placed great emphasis on knowledge and respect for antiquity; collecting and copying the art and architecture of Ancient Rome was an important way of asserting one’s credentials as a humanist prince.  The coloured marble columns, wall surfaces and pietre dure table tops that they commissioned became the models for the earliest scagliola.

16th century Roman inlaid work 

In Ancient Rome inlaid work was known as opus sectile (from the Latin secare, to cut).  Pliny the Elder identified two types:  sectilia pavimenta, for floors and pavements; incrustationes, for walls and vertical surfaces.  (Pliny himself  was severely critical of the practice among wealthy Romans of using coloured marbles to line the walls of their homes; he saw it as yet further evidence of Rome’s decadence and obsession with luxury – see chapter 1.) 

Wall panels (Incrustationes) in Opus Sectile  re-assembled using fragments from the Domus Tiberiana (c. 50 AD).  Palatine Museum, Rome.  

Many examples of opus sectile had survived from antiquity, buried beneath the modern city.  Throughout the sixteenth century they were brought to light and studied with great interest.  Ancient Roman designs were copied and adapted by the architects of the day for their wealthy clients, and the artefacts themselves were broken up and re-cycled under Papal licence to make Pietre Dure table tops and wall panels.   

Pietre Dure table top of typically Roman design, originally made for the Villa Medici in Rome.  It has a large central panel set within abstract geometrical shapes.  Pitti Palace, Florence. (Rome 16th Century.)

A distinctive style was evident from the start, as summarised by Dr. Annamaria Giusti, a leading expert on Italian Pietre Dure work, and for many years the director of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence:

‘Although produced by different craftsmen and workshops, Roman tables share a common language that derives from architects’ designs.  The principal elements of this language lie in the expertly used kinds of ancient marble; the focus on a central shape around which the composition is orchestrated; and the predilection for predominantly abstract decorative modules inspired by features of the ancient vocabulary of ornamentation, such as peltae [shields], scrolls and panoplies [military trophies].’

An outstanding example of this style is the Farnese Table (c.1568-73 – now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).  The enormous work (379 cms. x 168 cms.) was commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-1589) from designs made by his architect, Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (1507-1573).  To enhance its classical status, the Cardinal insisted that all the stones used in the table should be ancient; many of them came from the Baths of Caracalla, where he himself had supervised excavations in the 1540s.

The Farnese Table, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  (Image available through Wikimedia Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Farnese_Table_MET_DP101975.jpg)

Objects like the Farnese Table were talked about throughout the European courts; table tops and ornaments in this new – or rediscovered – art form, with its skilful use of ancient and venerable materials, became hugely desirable for those who could afford them, not only for their beauty, but for the all-important representational value that their ownership bestowed.  From the middle of the century, the Roman workshops were kept busy supplying this elite and status-conscious clientele. 

Marble and hardstone inlays could also be used, as in ancient times, to cover entire wall surfaces.  An early example was the panelled dado section of the Sala Regia in the Vatican, commissioned by Pope Pius IV (r. 1559-65), and formed from large rectangles of alternating antique marble, framed with wide borders incorporating inlays of abstract shield designs and ovals.

In 1585 Pope Sixtus V (r.1585-90) added his own Sistine Chapel (not to be confused with the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Museums) to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, already blessed with a magnificent Cosmatesque floor.  The new chapel, designed by Domenico Fontana (1543-1607), was clad throughout with polychromatic inlaid marble in the most ambitious and elaborate example of its kind to date.  The walls were lined throughout with pilasters, panels and niches in a variety of red, yellow, black and white marbles.  The inset faces of the corner pilasters were inlaid with geometrical designs and religious symbols.  The principal niches, flanked with Verde Antico (antique green) columns, contained monumental memorial statues of Pope Sixtus and his benefactor, Pope Pius V (r.1566-72), carved in white statuary marble.

Inlaid marble wall surfaces in the Sistine Chapel of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.  (c. 1590)

A second chapel, the Borghese or Pauline Chapel, was added in the early1600’s on the opposite side of the church by Pope Paul V (r.1605-21) for his own tomb and that of his predecessor, Clement VIII (r. 1592-1605). Similar in design, it was even more sumptuous than the first; the altar and the reredos were made from Lapis Lazuli, one of the most expensive and difficult stones to obtain in such quantity. 

Lapis Lazuli altar and reredos in the Borghese Chapel, Santa Maria Maggiore.  (Rome early 1600s)

Following these imposing examples, wealthy Roman families began to commission their own chapels in many of the city’s churches, using the same expensive style of polychromatic marble work.

Florentine Mosaic. 

If Rome had been the starting point for the late Renaissance manufacture of Pietre Dure work, it was soon eclipsed by Florence, largely due to state intervention from the Medici.

Cosimo I, Duke of Florence and first Grand Duke of Tuscany (r. 1537-74) was an enthusiastic collector of precious stones and marble.  He commissioned inlaid table tops from Rome and had quantities of antique marble and hardstone brought to Florence, where it was catalogued and reworked.  He ordered vases, figurines and cameos carved and engraved from gems and semi-precious hardstones such as Chalcedony, Porphyry, Onyx and Lapis Lazuli; and he commissioned reliquaries and other religious objects made from clear rock crystal.  Cosimo obtained these objects from Milanese craftsmen who specialised in the ‘glyptic’ arts (from the Greek glyphein, to engrave or hollow out).

Glyptic art  had continued in Byzantium from Roman times, and during the Middle Ages there were centres in Venice and Paris, also in Islamic North Africa.  The 15th century ruler of Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent (r. 1469-1492) was a keen collector.  Many of the vases he owned were antiquities, reworked with contemporary mounts.  By the sixteenth century Milan had become the centre in Italy for carving and engraving these extraordinary objects which, once finished, were passed on to gold- and silversmiths to be fitted with extravagant mounts.  

Examples of  glyptic carving from the Milanese workshop of Gasparo Miseroni (1518-1573).  Prase (green quartz) and Lapis Lazuli vessels with elaborate gold and jewel studded mounts.  (Milan c. 1550).  The Miseroni family supplied glyptic art to  several European courts including Florence and Madrid, and most famously, that of Emperor Rudolph II in Prague – see later section.  (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

Cosimo’s son Francesco I (r.1574-87) inherited his father’s passion for polished stones, and went one step further by encouraging two families of Milanese stone cutters, the Caroni and the Gaffurri, to move to Florence. They were employed to work alongside the Florentine craftsmen, helping them to perfect the art of Pietre Dure inlay, while continuing to create the vases and other glyptic objects for which they were renowned.  Francesco housed all his court artists and craftsmen in the Casino di San Marco, where the different specialists were encouraged to collaborate on joint projects.

Francesco I was succeeded by his brother Ferdinand I (r.1587-1609) who had previously served as a cardinal in Rome.  While there he had taken a lively interest in the archaeological excavations, and was a keen collector.  He moved the royal workshops to the new Uffizi Palace in 1588, and gave them protected status under the title of the Galleria dei Lavori (Department of Works).  The many artists and craftsmen who had worked for Cosimo and Francesco now became salaried employees, paid to work exclusively for the Medici Royal Court.  This was one of the earliest examples of a state-run artistic enterprise, and it proved highly successful.  Secure employment – unaffected by political and dynastic change – allowed accumulated skills and experience to be passed from generation to generation.   For nearly three hundred years, the Galleria dei Lavori was pre-eminent in the quality and scope of its Pietre Dure work, which became known simply as Florentine mosaic.  The institution still exists today as the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, a world-famous centre for the restoration and conservation of marble and hardstone work (much of it originally produced by the Opificio’s own craftsmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).

Grand Duke Ferdinand was ambitious for the Galleria dei Lavori to go beyond the limits of Roman inlay, which favoured abstract designs whose purpose was to emphasise the antiquity and beauty of the stones themselves.  He encouraged his craftsmen to attempt new schemes that were naturalistic; they were, in effect, to reproduce nature in coloured stone.

As in Rome, the designs for these Florentine pieces were produced by the court architect or artistic director, who arranged for the production of full-size paintings to serve as templates and decided on the individual pieces of marble and hardstone before they were given to the Pietre Dure specialists for cutting and assembling.  Typically they included flower vases and branches of fruit, exotic birds, and scrolling foliage.  Belgian Black marble (known as Paragone) was used for the background, enhancing the colour and brilliance of the inlays.  Florentine Pietre Dure work soon became the most admired and sought after in Europe; but it was extremely expensive and took a long time to make.

Florentine Pietre Dure over three centuries.  (The pieces are from the ‘Pietre Colorate Molto Vaghe e Belle’ exhibiton of Florentine Pietre Dure work at the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua 2018/19.) 

Small panel and frame depicting a vase of flowers formed in Pietre Tenere (Soft Stones).  Among experts the distinction is made between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ stones, the latter being less valuable, more commonly available, and of course softer.  (Grand Ducal Workshops, 17th Century)

Small panel depicting a bunch of flowers.  The naturalness and subtlety of shading make a striking contrast with the earlier piece. (Grand Ducal Workshops, 18th Century.)

Part of a table top with musical instruments, floral swags and birds in flight.  (Grand Ducal Workshops, 19th Century.)

The Capella dei Principi.

When Ferdinand set up the Galleria dei Lavori he had a project in mind.  In the 1560s his father Cosimo, with the encouragement of his court architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), had laid plans for a family mausoleum, the Cappella dei Principi (Prince’s Chapel), to be built onto the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence beside Michelangelo’s New Sacristy.  Grand mausoleums and extravagant funeral monuments were becoming yet another integral part of royal representation.  (In the 1590s the stuccadore and bronze caster Carlo di Cesare del Palagio, who also played an important role in the early history of scagliola,  was involved in three such projects – see Chapter 8 part 4).  As a way of honouring Tuscany’s first Grand Duke, Vasari had decided that all the internal wall surfaces of the new chapel should be clad in marble and inlaid Pietre Dure.  Ferdinand gave the go-ahead for the enormous project and work began on the inlaid panels in 1589.  

The Capella dei Principi, Florence.  The original designs by Vasari were altered many times over the three centuries it took to complete the building.  The enormous sarcofogi in the niches, each dedicated to a Medici Grand Duke, are in fact empty.  The remains of their intended occupants are buried in the crypt below the chapel. 

The building itself was started in 1604, but the project was only completed at the beginning of the twentieth century (by which time it had long been considered grandiose and outdated); but at the time of its inception, the planned interior of the Capella dei Principi was one of the most extravagant undertaken since Roman times, and it excited tremendous interest throughout the European courts, adding greatly to their obsession with coloured and inlaid marble.

(The first Munich Reiche Kapelle, although conceived on a much smaller scale, was clearly influenced by its design; it was also the first building known to have used scagliola on a grand scale.  See Chapter 6.)

Prague and the Holy Roman Empire 

As well as servicing the Cappella dei Principi and the Medici palaces and villas, Florentine mosaics from the Galleria dei Lavori were regularly sent to the royal courts of Europe as diplomatic gifts.  In this way the fame and status of Florence as a centre of art and culture was kept alive, despite its military, commercial and dynastic decline. 

Detail of a Florentine Pietre Dure tabletop comissioned or received as a gift by Duke Maximilian I of Bavaria c. 1620.  The design is typical of Jacopo Ligozzi (see chapter 3 part 3)  Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich.

The gift of a table top to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II (r. 1576-1612) in 1589 was particularly well received, and proved to be an astute investment which led to a lucrative return order.

In 1583 Rudolph had moved the imperial residence from Vienna to Prague, where he established a dazzling court of artists, philosophers and scientists.  His art collection was one of the largest and finest in Europe.  Devoted to the occult (some suspected him of being a witch), he was a keen alchemist and an obsessive collector of gems and rare stones; these were valued not only for their rarity and beauty, but also their medicinal properties.  It was believed they could be ground up and ingested against a variety of illnesses, and when used to make drinking vessels and serving bowls, they could counteract the effects of poison, an ever-present danger in Renaissance courts.

As a Habsburg prince Rudolph had spent part of his youth at the Spanish court of his uncle, Phillip II, where he encountered Pietre Dure table tops obtained from Rome.  Later he commissioned vases and other glyptic work from Milan, for which he supplied his own stones.   Bohemia was rich in ornamental hardstones, particularly quarz, jasper and agate.  In the fourteenth century, the walls of the Wenceslas Chapel in Prague Cathedral and Saint Catherine’s Chapel in Karlstein Castle had been entirely covered with these stones, in a late medieval precursor to the Roman hardstone inlay of the sixteenth century.

A section of the Wenceslas Chapel in the cathedral of St. Vitus, Prague.  The lower walls of the chapel, the main altar and the door surrounds are faced with Bohemian hardstones and gold jointing. (14th century.) 

When Rudolph received the Florentine table top, inlaid with Alabaster, Rock Crystal, Lapis Lazuli and other stones, he was so impressed that he arranged with Ferdinand de’ Medici to have another made at his own expense, using Bohemian materials.  The first stones were cut in 1589, and specialist inlay work on the table began in 1590, but it was not completed and delivered to Prague until 1597.  It occupied the central position in Rudolph’s Kunstkammer, the purpose-built range of galleries in which he kept his extensive collections of artificialia (works of art and craft), naturalia (exhibits from the natural world) and scientifica (man-made objects for measuring or affecting the known universe).  The humanist scholar and early mineralogist, Anselmus Boetius de Boodt (1550-1632), was Rudolph’s court physician and curator of his collections.  He described the table as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’.  Unfortunately it has not survived; it was moved to the Palace of Brussels after Rudolph’s death, and subsequently destroyed in a fire in 1731. (For further information on the table see footnote:  Karla Langedijk, The Table in Pietre Dure…).

During the years in which the table top was being made, Rudolph set up his own stone-cutting workshops in Prague, using the expertise of two Italian families: the Castrucci from Florence for Pietre Dure, and the Miseroni (see above) from Milan for glyptic work.  From the 1590’s the Castrucci workshop began to produce a new style of inlay, using locally sourced agates and jaspers to create small, densely detailed landscape pictures.  This style of hardstone inlay was to have a decisive influence on the development of German inlaid scagliola in the late 1620s, when Blasius Pfeiffer’s son Wilhelm began to turn his hand towards pictorial scagliola.

Display cases of glyptic art.  Most of the exhibits were made in Prague for Rudolph II by the workshop of Ottavio Miseroni (1567-1620) during the twenty years spanning the turn of the seventeenth century.  The Netherlandish goldsmith Jan Vermeyen (1559-1608) supplied many of the mounts.  (Kunstkammer, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.)

Pietre Dure landscape by Giovanni Castrucci workshop (active in Prague 1598-1615).  Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague.

References:  Quotation from Annamaria Giusti, Roman Inlay and Florentine Mosaics in The New Art of Pietre dure in Art of the Royal Court, Treasures in Pietre dure from the Palaces of Europe ed. Wolfram Koeppe, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2008, p. 14.
For Farnese Table see 
Art of the Royal Court ibid.Catalogue No.10.
For Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome see Anthony Blunt:  Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration Hertfordshire 1988  p. 24-5
For Galleria dei Lavori and Capella dei Principi see Annamaria Giusti L’Arte delle Pietre Dure da Firenze all’Europa Florence 2005 p.59 
Rudolf Distelberger, The Castrucci and the Miseroni: Prague, Florence. Milan in Art of the Royal Court, pp. 29-39 Prague.
The history and symbolism of Rudolf’s table is discussed in detail in: Karla Langedijk, The Table in Pietre Dure for the Emperor. A new understanding of Rudolph II as a collector: Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 42. Bd., H. 2/3 (1998), Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut Stable pp.358-382.  (The article is available on Jstor)

Next.  Section II.  Changes in Architecture and Decoration.