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

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 ...