Renaissance Studies Vol. 20 No. 5

© 2006 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2006 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKRESTRenaissance Studies0269-1213© 2006 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.XXXOriginal Article

The Renaissance studyMaria Ruvoldt

Key words

:carpets, collecting, inspiration, portraits, studiolo

Sacred to secular, east to west: the Renaissance study and strategies of display

Maria Ruvoldt

The emergence of the study, a private retreat for contemplation that alsoserved as a public display of inner virtue and exquisite taste, has long beenrecognized as one of the most significant developments in the Italian Ren-aissance interior.

1

Indeed, the study is perhaps the quintessential Renaissancespace. Designed to accommodate the secular scholarly pursuits associatedwith the rise of humanism, the study also served as a visible manifestation ofthe culture of consumption, housing leather-bound books, small bronzes,glass, medals and other collectibles.

2

A room devoted to the exclusive use ofone person, the study was a signature space in an age increasingly obsessedwith the fashioning and presentation of the self.

Whether the lavishly decorated

studiolo

of a prince, specially designed andconstructed from floor to ceiling, or the more modest space carved out of amerchant’s home, the study functioned as an expression of the individual,revealing through its contents a sense of its owner’s ideal self.

3

Correctly seenas a precursor of the

kunst-

and

wunderkammer

, the study was also an importanttransitional site from sacred to secular space. The most obvious parallels arethe cells and scriptoria of monastic life with their devotional and scholarlyfunctions, but the study significantly inherited a tradition of display fromchurches, where the faithful might come to see not only relics and otherobjects of religious veneration, but also precious gems and wonders of the

I presented an earlier version of this paper at the symposium ‘Novelty, Trade and Exchange in the Renais-sance Interior’, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, June 2003. I am grateful to Marta Ajmar,Flora Dennis and Ann Matchette for the opportunity to participate and to all of the conference’s contributorsand attendees, in particular Rosamond Mack and Luke Syson, whose comments and queries helped developthis paper.

1

The essential histories of the study are Wolfgang Liebenwein,

Studiolo: Die Entstehung eines Raumtyps undseine Entwicklung bis um 1600

(Berlin, 1977), which focuses primarily on the princely

studiolo

; and DoraThornton,

The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy

(New Haven and London,1997), which concentrates on the studies of the urban elite. I am deeply indebted to Thornton’s book;although my focus on the inspirational and symbolic effects of the study’s contents differs from hers, muchof the evidence I employ derives from Thornton’s work.

2

For the Renaissance culture of consumption, see Richard A. Goldthwaite,

Wealth and the Demand for Art inItaly 1300–1600

(Baltimore and London, 1993).

3

See Thornton,

The Scholar in His Study,

and Paula Findlen,

Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting andScientific Culture in Early Modern Italy

(Berkeley, 1994), esp. 293–345.

The Renaissance study

641

natural world, such as crocodiles or ostrich eggs.

4

The studies of Renaissanceprinces and merchants alike were furnished with objects that in previousgenerations had decorated and been displayed in churches.

This paper will consider how this shift from sacred to secular intersectedwith Renaissance conceptions of scholarly identity. What can the secularappropriation of sacred decorative vocabulary and collecting practices tell usabout Renaissance perceptions of scholarly identity? My aim is to examinethe role that the objects collected and displayed in studies – in particularthose of non-European origin – played in articulating and enhancing theexperience of the scholarly self. In addition to displaying relics and

naturalia

,Early Renaissance churches had used Islamic rock crystal containers to houserelics, attached Hispano-Moresque ceramics to their façades and laid Orientalcarpets on their floors long before such luxury goods had become hallmarksof the fashionable scholarly interior.

5

When these objects moved into domesticspace, how did they contribute to the study and its purpose? And what doesthe Renaissance construction of ‘the intellectual’ tell us in return about themeaning and functions of material objects?

The migration of decorative strategies from the church to the privatedomestic sphere points to the privileged nature of the study. In the contextof Renaissance domestic space, the study was a truly exceptional place,affording its occupant an unprecedented degree of privacy.

6

As early as 1434,Leon Battista Alberti described the study as a

sanctum sanctorum

that only thehead of household could enter. There, safe from the prying eyes of hisservants and his wife, he could peruse his most precious possessions atleisure, treating his books and family documents ‘almost like sacred andreligious things’.

7

Later in the period, Juan Luis Vives advised aspiring scholarsto begin any session of study with a prayer, in imitation of ‘St Thomas Aquinasand many other holy men’, acknowledging the sacred nature of even secularintellectual pursuits, and establishing the scholar-saints as exemplars.

8

Thereligious genealogy of the study is made manifest in decorative programmessuch as Luca della Robbia’s

Labours of the Months

, made for the study of Piero

4

See Giuseppe Olmi, ‘Dal “Teatro del mondo” ai mondi inventariati. Aspetti e forme del collezionismonell’età moderna’, in

Gli Uffizi: Quattro secoli di una galleria. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Firenze 20–24 settembre 1982)

, ed. Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Ragionieri, 2 vols. (Florence, 1983), Vol. 1, 233–69; andClaudia Cieri Via, ‘Il tema degli studioli nell’interpretazione del Rinascimento’, in

Renaissance: Diskursstruk-turen und epistemologische Voraussetzungen, Literatur, Philosophie, Bildende Kunst

, ed. Klaus W. Hempfer (Stuttgart,1993), 177–93.

5

See Rosamond E. Mack,

Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art 1300–1600

(Berkeley and LosAngeles, 2002), esp. 5–6 for religious display of Islamic artifacts. For East/West exchange, see also Lisa Jardineand Jerry Brotton,

Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West

(London, 2000).

6

For the multi-purpose spaces of the Renaissance home, see Peter Thornton,

The Italian Renaissance Interior1400–1600

(London, 1991).

7

Leon Battista Alberti,

I libri della famiglia

, in

Opere volgari

, ed. Cecil Grayson, 3 vols. (Bari, 1960), Vol. 1, 219.

8

Juan Luis Vives,

Vives: On Education, A Translation of the De Tradendis disciplinis of Juan Luis Vives

, trans.Foster Watson (Cambridge, 1913), 276.

642

Maria Ruvoldt

de’Medici.

9

Della Robbia’s glazed terracotta roundels of agrarian labour notonly bring the classicizing ideal of the pastoral into the urban

palazzo

, butalso recall the decorative programmes of medieval churches and books ofhours, enveloping the study in both antique and Christian references. Likewise,the illusionistic intarsias of Federigo da Montefeltro’s

studioli

at Urbino andGubbio refer pointedly to the decoration of choir stalls and sacristies in bothform and content.

10

Granting pride of place to the personifications of thetheological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity, the Urbino

studiolo

’s décor inparticular imbues Federigo’s worldly interests with a decidedly religious air.

Decorative strategies such as these stress the study’s continuity and com-patibility with Christian precedents even as it becomes the site for the revivalof classical culture. But they also signal a new conception of the life of themind. Concurrent with the development of the study, we see the adoption ofa new model of inspiration, rooted in Platonic philosophy and filteredthrough early Christian thought, that emphasized the irrational and emotionalrapture of divine union. Traditionally reserved for the prophets and evangelists,the privilege of divine inspiration was extended to philosophers, poets andscholars through the efforts of Marsilio Ficino and his circle.

11

Drawing onthe Platonic theory of divine inspiration, Ficino proposed a new model forthe acquisition of

all types

of knowledge, not just religious revelation, infuseddirectly into the soul in moments of transcendence. He attributed thesuperior knowledge of philosophers and prophets alike to

vacatio

, a form ofecstasy in which the soul separates from the body to commune with thedivine intelligence.

12

The philosopher’s soul, Ficino claimed, ‘called away[ . . . ] from its own body, is made in the highest degree both a neighbor tothe divine and an instrument of the divine’.

13

Giovanni Pico della Mirandolalikewise argued that, through study and contemplation, a scholar might findunion with God.

14

Pico further suggested that his own studies were guided bya divine hand. Writing to Ficino, his most sympathetic audience, he creditedhis acquisition of certain books to ‘God’s decision, and that of a certaindivinity that favors my studies’.

15

9

For the study of Piero de’Medici, see Liebenwein,

Studiolo

, 74–5; and Rab Hatfield, ‘Some UnknownDescriptions of the Medici Palace in 1459’,

Art Bulletin

, 52 (1970), 232–49. For the Della Robbia roundels,now preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, see John Pope-Hennessy and R. W. Lightbown,

Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum

, 3 vols. (London, 1964), Vol. 1, 704–8.

10

See Luciano Cheles,

The Studiolo of Urbino: An Iconographic Investigation

(Wiesbaden, 1986), esp. 54–6; andOlga Raggio,

The Gubbio Studiolo and Its Conservation

, 2 vols. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999),esp. Vol. 1, 105–10, with extensive bibliography on Federigo’s

studioli

.

11

For Ficino’s theory of divine inspiration, see Marsilio Ficino,

The Letters of Marsilio Ficino

, trans. Membersof the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, 5 vols. (London, 1975–1994), Vol. 1, 42–3;idem,

El libro dell’Amore

, ed. Sandra Niccoli (Florence, 1987). See also Paul Oskar Kristeller,

The Philosophy ofMarsilio Ficino

, trans. Virginia Conant (Gloucester, MA, 1964).

12

For

vacatio

, see Marsilio Ficino,

Théologie platonicienne de l’immortalité des ames

, ed. and trans. RaymondMarcel, 3 vols. (Paris, 1964–1970), Vol. 2, 214.

13

Marsilio Ficino,

Three Books on Life

, ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton, 1989), 123.

14

Anthony Grafton,

Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers

(Ann Arbor, 1997), 93–4.

15

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola to Marsilio Ficino, as cited by Grafton,

Commerce with the Classics

, 107.

The Renaissance study

643

Not simply the stuff of high philosophical discourse, the image of thedivinely inspired scholar meditating in his study was popular enough to meritparody. In 1506, Giovanni Filoteo Achillini offered a mocking description ofa scholar’s study where, upon entrance, ‘the human soul is immediately filledwith the entity of a divine, magical spirit, which with its otherworldly andsupernatural and metaphysical powers transports the mind in an ecstaticvision’, which allows it complete and perfect knowledge of all things in thisworld and beyond.

16

Such mystical transports, whether treated with Ficino’sgravity or Achillini’s irreverence, claimed for the secular intellectual thesame status as that enjoyed by the inspired prophets, an elision of identitymirrored by the adoption of religious décor in the study.

The study and its décor reflect the faith that Ficino and his contemporariesput in the potential of spaces and objects to encourage and enhance thetransformative experience of divine inspiration. In an oft-quoted passage,Niccolò Machiavelli offers perhaps the most eloquent description of thestudy’s metamorphic powers:

When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the thresh-old, I strip off my muddy, sweaty, workday clothes and put on the robes ofcourt and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of theancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that aloneis mine, for which I was born. There I make bold to speak to them andask the motives for their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply tome. And for the space of four hours I forget the world, remember novexations, fear poverty no more, tremble no more at death: I pass intotheir world.

17

Machiavelli’s communion with the ancients is precisely the kind of experi-ence Ficino envisioned for the scholar/philosopher. Machiavelli speaks of‘pass[ing] into their world’, as if he has truly been transported to anotherplace. It is worthy of note that Machiavelli’s experience begins with a changeof clothes. He prepares himself for intellectual communion by putting on‘the robes of court and palace’, and thus attired enters not his study, but‘the antique courts of the ancients’. His interior journey is mediated by hisexterior garb. We should not imagine that Machiavelli was unique in suchpractices. The household expenses of Bernardo di Stoldo Rinieri, a fifteenth-century Florentine merchant, include 3 gold florins for a fur lining for a coatspecifically to wear in his study.

18

Such a garment arguably did more than

16

Giovanni Filoteo Achillini,

Epistole

, in Claudio Franzoni, ‘Le raccolte del

Theatro

di Ombrone e il viaggoin Oriente del pittore: Le

Epistole

di Giovanni Filoteo Achillini’,

Rivista di letteratura italiana

, 8 (1990), 287–335. For this passage, see p. 312.

17

Niccolò Machiavelli,

The Literary Works of Machiavelli

, ed. John Hale (Oxford, 1961), 139.

18

John Kent Lydecker, ‘The Domestic Setting of the Arts in Renaissance Florence’ (unpublished Ph.D.diss., The Johns Hopkins University, 1987), 270.

644

Maria Ruvoldt

protect its owner from draughts; it would have conferred upon him a senseof dignity appropriate to his tasks in the study, and enhanced his imaginativeretreat from the everyday.

The almost magical power of a garment begins to suggest the role thatmaterial goods played in the workings of the study. Even those who couldnot afford an elaborate decorative programme could experience the study asa mystical space through the power of the objects it contained.

19

The writtenevidence, ranging from inventories to literary fantasies of ideal studies,catalogues the seemingly infinite variety of things to be found there.

20

In1532, Marcantonio Michiel visited the collector Andrea Odoni’s ‘little study’,where he saw carved

tazze

of porphyry, crystal and petrified wood, vases ofsemi-precious stones, ‘porcelain vases and bowls, [ . . . ] antique vases and medalsand natural things, i.e. the crabs, fishes, petrified snakes, a dried chameleon,small rare seashells, crocodiles and strange fish’.

21

More than a decade later,the Venetian nobleman Gabriele Vendramin described the contents of his own‘little room’, which included contemporary drawings and prints, antiquities,medals both ancient and modern, hardstone vessels and

naturalia

andcuriosities including ‘Animals’ horns and diverse other things [ . . . ] like theskull carved in the round on a very small cameo, and other things that itwould take too long to relate’.

22

There is a remarkable consistency to thetypes of things considered appropriate for a study: in addition to books,treasures and wonders, both man-made and natural, formed the basis ofprivate and princely collections alike and placed the study at a crucialmoment in the history of collecting, looking back to the church and forwardto the modern museum as sites of display.

23

The collectibles that graced the study served several important complemen-tary functions. At the most basic level, the display of a collection embellishedthe domestic space. Collecting was, as Dora Thornton points out, ‘a form ofinterior decoration [ . . . ] not merely [ . . . ] an activity for its own sake’.

24

Butit was interior decoration with a very specific aim: the objects displayed in astudy were expressions of the self, material manifestations of the variety of

19

The concept of the study was flexible enough to encompass not only a dedicated room, but its owner’scollection of objects. See the will of Jacopo Contareno: ‘By the study I mean not only the room in which thebooks are to be found, but

all those things

contained in the four mezzanine rooms in which I ordinarily live’.Cited by Thornton,

The Scholar in His Study

, 113. Emphasis added.

20

Thornton,

The Scholar in His Study

, makes masterful use of inventories and other documents to recon-struct and evaluate the significance of the objects contained in Renaissance studies.

21

Marcantonio Michiel,

Notizie di opere di disegno

, ed. Jacopo Morelli (Bassano, 1880), 60–1. Translationfrom

Venice: A Documentary History 1450–1630

, ed. David Chambers and Brian Pullan with Jennifer Fletcher(Toronto, 2001), 425.

22

3 January 1548, from the acts of the notary A. Marsilio: Archivio di Stato, Venice, Archivio Notarile 1208,fol. 403, as cited and translated in

Venice: A Documentary History

, 428–9.

23

See Findlen,

Possessing Nature

; idem, ‘The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy’,

Journal of the History of Collections

, 1 (1989), 59–78; and

The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities inSixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe

, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford, 1985).

24

Thornton,

The Scholar in His Study, 74. For modes of display, see 101–5.

The Renaissance study 645

their owner’s interests and, by extension, evidence of his virtue.25 In hisRicordi Fra Sabba da Castiglione suggests appropriate ornaments for a study,listing the items we now come to expect, including musical instruments,antiquities, gems, medals, arms, mirrors, and sculptures by Donatello andother accomplished artists, in addition to well-chosen books.26 The standard-ization of acceptable objects for display indicates that they functionedas attributes, signalling their owner’s membership in the class of learnedcollectors. Sabba goes on to urge gentlemen to select objects for their ownstudies ‘according to the variety and diversity of their ingegni and fantasie’.27

The study’s occupant is thus transformed into a kind of artist, who shapes hisown self-portrait through the careful selection of objects for display.

But the function of the objects in the study went well beyond the merelydecorative or symbolic. Sabba points out that antique coins provide a tangibleconnection to the great men of the past, musical instruments recall theharmony of the spheres, and mirrors reflect the truth.28 It seems plausiblethat, just as a change of clothes signalled the transition from one world toanother, the objects collected in a study were meant to serve as aids tocontemplation, enhancing the consideration of ancient texts. In a cultureaccustomed to using images in religious practice to focus the mind andintensify fervour, these objects would have functioned as the secular equiva-lents of devotional images.29 It is possible to apply the Renaissance paragoneof painting and poetry to the contents of the study. Although artists weremore likely than writers to promote the supremacy of painting, the Ferraresehumanist Lelio Giraldi nevertheless admitted that images may ‘present theforms of things more clearly and more truthfully than letters do’.30 Thisassessment of the power of images might easily extend to the small collectibleshoused in the study. These precious objects were meant not only to be gazed

25 See Luke Syson and Dora Thornton, Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy (Los Angeles, 2001), esp.12–36. Of course anyone with the means to do so could accumulate and display the standard objects, regard-less of his own virtue. See Sabba da Castiglione, Ricordi, overo ammaestramenti di Monsignor Sabba CastiglioneCavalier Gierosolimitano, ne’ quali con prudenti, e Christiani discorsi si ragiona di tutte le materie honorate, che siricercano a un vero gentil’huomo (Venice, 1562), fol. 118r-v, for a critique of an ignorant collector passionatelyattached to ancient coins depicting villainous men.

26 Sabba, Ricordi, fol. 114r.27 Ibid.28 Sabba, Ricordi, fol. 119r-v. For mirrors in studies, see also Findlen, Possessing Nature, 298–303; and Thornton,

Scholar in His Study, 167–74.29 Stephen Campbell has demonstrated how the unique conditions of viewing and interpretation created

by ‘studiolo culture’ aid in reading enigmatic pictures. See Stephen J. Campbell, ‘Mantegna’s Parnassus: Read-ing, Collecting and the Studiolo’, in Revaluing Renaissance Art, ed. Gabriele Neher and Rupert Shepherd(Aldershot, 2000), 69–87; and idem, ‘Giorgione’s Tempest, Studiolo Culture and the Renaissance Lucretius’,Renaissance Quarterly, 56 (2003), 299–332. For the sleeping female nude as a ‘secular devotional image’, seeMaria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration: Metaphors of Sex, Sleep, and Dreams (Cambridge,2004), 86–121.

30 Lelio Giraldi, Progymnasma adversus litteras et litteratos, 333, as cited by Campbell, ‘Giorgione’s Tempest’,302, n. 9, with reference to Franco Bacchelli, ‘Science, Cosmology, and Religion in Ferrara, 1520–1550’, inDosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy, ed. Luisa Ciammitti, Steven F. Ostrow, and SalvatoreSettis (Los Angeles, 1998), 333–54.

646 Maria Ruvoldt

at, but to be handled and meditated upon in a very intimate way. Thehumanist Paolo Manuzio described the effects of ‘looking intently at’ anti-quities: ‘one gathers in the mind as much knowledge in a short span of hoursas one does after years of reading Livy and Polybius, and all the ancienthistorians together’.31 As a mode of viewing, this kind of concentratedattention relates to the assiduous contemplation Ficino recommends to freethe soul for divine union.32

Written sources offer an incredibly rich resource to interpret the study andits significance. But we can also trace the fluidity of the boundaries betweensacred and secular in a host of images depicting the scholar-saints at work intheir studies. The pendant images of St Augustine and St Jerome by SandroBotticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio, respectively (Figs. 1 and 2), belong to

31 Paolo Manuzio, Lettere volgari (Venice, 1560), fols. 72r-v, as cited by Campbell, ‘Giorgione’s Tempest’, 303–4, with reference to Monika Schmitter, ‘The Display of Distinction: Art Collecting and Social Status in EarlySixteenth Century Venice’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, The University of Michigan, 1997).

32 See Ficino, Three Books on Life.

Fig. 1 Sandro Botticelli, Saint Augustine. Florence, Chiesa di Ognissanti. (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

The Renaissance study 647

a tradition that situates the early Christian saints in the contemporary spaceof the study.33 Although these are images of saints created for display in achurch, they speak the language of the contemporary domestic interior.Both saints work in well-equipped studies, provided with slanted writingdesks, ledges for the display of books and other ornaments that testify totheir scholarly interests. St Augustine possesses an armillary sphere, a clock,and a treatise on geometry in addition to his quill pen and bejewelledbishop’s mitre. St Jerome’s study features all of the necessary tools for hiswork as a writer and translator, including inkwells for black and red ink, textsin Greek and Hebrew, spectacles, and scissors. But the collection of objectsgathered around the uppermost ledge of his chamber does not bear thesymbolic weight of Augustine’s possessions. Instead, Jerome’s study is that of

33 See Eugene Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore and London, 1985); Claudia Cieri Via, ‘Il temadegli studioli ’; and Penny Howell Jolly, ‘Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study: An IconographicalAnalysis’, Art Bulletin, 65 (1983), 238–53.

Fig. 2 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Saint Jerome. Florence, Chiesa di Ognissanti. (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

648 Maria Ruvoldt

a collector, embellished with maiolica albarelli, a crystal vase half filled withwater, and citrus fruits, anticipating by almost a century Rafaello Borghini’sdescription of Bernardo Vecchietti’s study, which contained, among otherthings, ‘vases of porcelain and crystal, fruits, [ . . . ] and distilled water’.34 GracingJerome’s tabletop is a fine Turkish carpet, its pattern lovingly described byGhirlandaio, an example of the type of ‘new and rare thing [ . . . ] from Turkey’that would eventually also adorn Vecchietti’s study and others like it.35

In addition to delighting the eye, such objects may have served a practicalpurpose. Jerome rests his head on his hand in the conventional pose ofmelancholic meditation, suggesting that his study may reflect Ficino’s recom-mendation to alleviate the ill-effects of melancholy with ‘pleasant smells [ . . . ]the leaves of the citron or of the orange, and fragrant fruits’.36 Ficino’s textfurther suggests why crystal vases of water would be desirable in the study,promoting the ‘frequent viewing of shining water’ for its restorative effectson the eye.37 Laced with suggestions for appropriate visual stimulants to tempermelancholia and encourage contemplation, such as mirrors, generous dosesof the colour green and views of landscapes, Ficino’s text might easily haveserved as a handbook for scholarly décor.

Contemporary accounts of the environs of the study lead us to expectprecisely the kind of display we find in images of the scholar-saints. But theseimages are exceptional as visual documents. With the notable exception ofauthor-portraits in manuscripts and books, the pictorial evidence in Italianart does not match the written record of the wealth of objects characteristicof the study.38 It is only in the most informal renderings, such as a series ofsketches by Vittore Carpaccio or Lorenzo Lotto’s sketch of a cleric in hisbedchamber (Fig. 3), that we get a sense of the abundance that characterizedthe study. The very informality of such images grants them a liveliness andverisimilitude that idealized depictions of saints in their studies cannotapproach, even if the contents of St Jerome’s study are mercifully legible.

Instead, formal presentations of men of scholarly aspiration emphasizemodesty and sobriety, with a few choice objects serving as signs of the rangeof an individual’s interests. It is possible to identify a portrait type for theman of letters, in which he appears in half- or three-quarter length, soberlybut expensively dressed, seated or standing near a table which holds the

34 Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo [1584], 3 vols. (Milan, 1807), Vol. 1, 15–16.35 Ibid., Vol. 1, 15.36 Ficino, Three Books on Life, 135. Jerome’s pose and the objects in his study clearly reflect the influence of

the Saint Jerome (Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts) from the workshop of Jan van Eyck, which belonged toPiero de’Medici and inspired many Italian imitations. See Annarosa Garzelli, ‘Sulla fortuna del Gerolamomediceo del van Eyck nell’arte fiorentina del Quattrocento’, in Scritti di storia dell’arte in onore di Roberto Salvini,ed. Cristina De Benedictis (Florence, 1984), 347–53.

37 Ficino, Three Books on Life, 135.38 See Garzelli, ‘Sulla fortuna del Gerolamo’. We have to look to Northern examples, such as Hans Holbein’s

Ambassadors (London, National Gallery), to see the visual equivalent of the kind of display the inventories andother sources lead us to expect.

The Renaissance study 649

objects that function as his attributes (for example, Figs. 4 to 7). Consideringthe variety of things a study might contain, the relatively limited repertoireof objects that appear in portraits is somewhat surprising, but neverthelessan effective means to convey the key elements of identity. Books or papersof some sort are absolutely essential, demonstrating literacy, engagementwith the outside world in the form of correspondence, and, in the case ofPierfrancesco Foschi’s portrait of Cardinal Antonio Pucci (Fig. 4), a taste forexpensive bookbinding. Small bronzes, such as Pucci’s inkstand replica ofthe Spinario, or antique coins and medals indicate an interest in classicalantiquity, and hint at a larger collection.

Limiting the number of items on display negotiates the difficult terrainbetween virtuous collecting and the vice of materialism. As Stephen Campbellhas demonstrated, the culture of collecting ran contrary to ‘a long-standinghumanist polemic against the vanity of any profession of virtue or distinctionthrough the ownership of things’.39 Moretto da Brescia’s portrait of a youngman (Fig. 6) suggests the very fine line that aspiring intellectuals had totread between virtuous display and vulgar excess. Resting his head on hishand in the conventional posture of melancholic meditation, Moretto’syoung man gazes longingly into the distance, the Greek motto on his hat

39 Campbell, ‘Giorgione’s Tempest’, 303. See also Syson and Thornton, Objects of Virtue, 23–36.

Fig. 3 Lorenzo Lotto, An ecclesiastic in his bedchamber. London, The British Museum. (photo: © The Trusteesof the British Museum)

650 Maria Ruvoldt

badge declaring both his erudition and his dilemma: ‘Alas, I desire toomuch’.40 Set off by a sumptuous drape, his fur-lined velvet coat, rich satinsleeves, silken study cushions and crushed velvet chair threaten to overwhelmthe scattering of ancient coins and antique-inspired bronze oil lamp on histable, the attributes that signal his interest in classical antiquity. The attentionlavished on the description of his garments testifies not only to his wealthand taste, but to the nobility of his intellectual pursuits. But his languid pose,expression of ennui, and motto suggest the perils of excess meditation as well.Ficino warns aspiring scholars that they may be overcome by melancholy:‘the more they apply their mind to incorporeal truth, the more they arecompelled to disjoin it from the body. Hence their body is often renderedas if it were half-alive’.41

Among the characteristic accoutrements of the study we see in theseportraits are prominently displayed table carpets.42 In her important study

40 See Nicholas Penny, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume I: Paintingsfrom Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona (London, 2004), 172–81.

41 Ficino, Three Books on Life, 115.42 The motif of the carpet-covered table may originate with Sebastiano del Piombo’s portrait of Ferry

Carondelet with Two Companions (Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza). See Elizabeth Pilliod, ‘“In temporepoenitentiae”: Pierfrancesco Foschi’s Portrait of Cardinal Antonio Pucci’, The Burlington Magazine, 130 (1988),679–87.

Fig. 4 Pierfrancesco Foschi, Cardinal Antonio Pucci. Florence, Galleria Corsini. (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

The Renaissance study 651

of Islamic trade and Italian art, Rosamond Mack charts the history of theOriental carpet in Italian paintings, from its initial appearance in the earlyfourteenth century to its peak during the first quarter of the sixteenthcentury, tracing the migration of the carpet from the floor to the tabletopand from sacred to secular contexts.43 She demonstrates the role that carpetsplay as signifiers of status, whether denoting the exalted realm of the divineor the material wealth of a patrician family. The appearance of a fine tablecarpet in a portrait signals the sitter’s affluence as clearly as his fur-linedcloak or precious antiquities, and carpets are a recurring feature in this typeof portrait. Carpet historians have been able to learn much from paintingsabout the types of carpets that were available to Italian Renaissance consumers,including their countries of origin and uses, but their efforts understandablyhave been focused on carpets as objects in trade and practical issues of their

43 Mack uses the term ‘Oriental’ to reflect the Renaissance perception of the origin of these goods:‘[Renaissance] Italians understood little about the different geographic and artistic origins of the foreignobjects they admired. In the contemporary context, therefore, the term “Oriental” for all the art objectscoming to the Italian market from Islamic lands and Asia continues to have some merit because of itsimprecision’. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza, 1.

Fig. 5 North Italian, The Protonotary Apostolic Giovanni Giuliano. London, The National Gallery. (photo:© 2000 The National Gallery, London)

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use and display.44 My intention is to put aside the distinctions that can bedrawn between types of carpets and approach them instead as a category ofobject. As a recurring presence in portraits of men of letters, what symbolicvalue do Oriental carpets carry?

First and foremost, of course, these carpets are luxury goods, tangiblesigns of wealth. They complement the expensive clothing, fine furniture, andprecious collectibles featured alongside them. By placing the luxurious carpetat a slight remove from the body, they help the sitter achieve the ideal balanceof sumptuousness and sobriety that collectors admired.

On the symbolic level, carpets may function in much the same way as theother objects in a portrait do, as signs both of a particular interest and

44 Julian Raby, ‘Exotica from Islam’, in The Origins of Museums, 251–58; Julian Raby, ‘Court and Export: Part1. Market Demands in Ottoman Carpets 1450–1550’, in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies II: Carpets of theMediterranean Countries 1400–1600, ed. Robert Pinner and Walter B. Denny (London, 1986), 29–38; John Mills,‘Near Eastern Carpets in Italian Paintings’, in ibid., 109–21; Michael Rogers, ‘Carpets in the MediterraneanCountries 1450–1550: Some Historical Observations’, in ibid., 13–28; John Mills, Carpets in Pictures: Themes andPainters in the National Gallery, Ser. 2, No. 1 (London, 1975); and John Mills, ‘The Coming of the Carpet tothe West’, in The Eastern Carpet in the Western World from the Fifteenth to the Twentieth Century, exh. cat. HaywardGallery, London 20 May–10 July 1983, selected and arranged by Donald King and David Sylvester (London,1983), 11–23.

Fig. 6 Moretto da Brescia, Portrait of a young man (Count Fortunato Martinengo Cesaresco?). London, TheNational Gallery. (photo: © The National Gallery, London)

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potentially of a larger collection. Just as bronze inkstands and oil lamps standfor ‘antique things’, might carpets not signal ‘Oriental things’? A single bookor a handful of coins surely hints at other treasures, might a carpet do thesame? We know from the written evidence that objects of Eastern origin werecollected and displayed in studies along with antiquities and other valuables.Sabba discusses those who adorn their rooms with ‘all sorts of [ . . . ] new,fantastic, and bizarre but ingenious things from the Levant’, including‘tapetti turcheschi’, and ‘spalliere barbareschi’, praising such ornaments asdemonstrations of ingenuity and civility.45 In his own study, one of his mostprized possessions was ‘an antique Oriental alabaster urn’, which he lovinglyclaims is the finest example of its type he has ever seen and, he assures us, hehas seen ‘molti’.46 The collector Gabriele Vendramin enumerates the ‘many[ . . . ] works in metal, damascened’ that his study contained,47 and RafaelloBorghini describes one study that contains ‘so many new and rare thingsfrom India and Turkey that whoever sees them is amazed’, and another that

45 Sabba, Ricordi, 119v.46 Ibid.47 As cited in Venice: A Documentary History, 428. Whether or not Vendramin’s metal goods were of Oriental

origin is impossible to say, but at the very least, damascening was an emulation of Eastern style.

Fig. 7 Dosso Dossi, Potrait of a Gentleman. Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. (photo: Alinari/ArtResource, NY)

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houses Oriental metalwork, including knives and scimitars.48 Even the inventoryof the artist Sodoma’s studio mentions ‘many Turkish things’.49 Whether amerchant’s souvenirs from Constantinople, an antiquarian’s prized alabasterurn, a condottiere’s damascened weapon or a connoisseur’s fine carpet, objectsfrom the East were just as integral to the study as were antiquities and books.

Rarity was of paramount value in choosing objects for a study, a criterionthat Eastern objects, and carpets in particular, could easily meet. In the Bookof the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione praised Federigo da Montefeltro forfurnishing his palace ‘not only with what is customary [ . . . ] but for ornament headded countless ancient statues [ . . . ] rare paintings, and musical instrumentsof every sort; nor did he wish to have anything there that was not the mostrare and excellent’.50 Though only a self-described ‘poor cavaliere’, Sabbamaintained the very same standard for his own study, recording in detail theexemplary objects in his collection, and passing over in tactful silence thosethings that did not match the ‘dignity and excellence’ of his showpieces.51

Such high standards for display are in keeping with Leon Battista Alberti’sadvice that a home should provide ‘a spiritual atmosphere appropriate to [itsowner’s] highest activities’.52 The acquisition and display of fine objects gavevisible form to the nobility of a study’s purpose, and the presence of uniqueand outstanding things created a rarefied atmosphere that must haveencouraged contemplation. Perhaps the single most expensive import fromthe East, carpets were difficult to come by, and would have demonstratedtheir owner’s ability to obtain the ‘most rare and excellent’ ornament for hishome. Displayed proudly in portraits alongside the remains of classical antiquity,carpets enhanced the sitter’s identity as a connoisseur and collector.

Many of the Eastern artefacts kept in studies had, as mentioned above,found homes earlier in churches. Together with the tradition of using carpetsto denote sacred or otherwise privileged space, this suggests that Easternobjects, and carpets in particular, would have carried sacred associations thatwould have fitted in quite nicely with the other aspects of display that claimreligious heritage for the study and divinely inspired status for its owner. Theformula of carpet-covered table in the foreground of a portrait certainlyechoes precedents in religious painting, inserting the scholar into an estab-lished tradition where the carpet signifies an ideal realm, an apt definitionof the study itself (Figs. 4 and 5).

This raises the question of whether Oriental carpets were perceived asprayer rugs by their Italian owners. Rosamond Mack points out that we do

48 Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo [1584], 3 vols. (Milan, 1807), 1:15.49 For Sodoma’s inventory, see Claudio Franzoni, ‘“Rimembranze d’infinite cose”: Le collezioni rinascimentali

di antichità’, in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, ed. Salvatore Settis, 2 vols. (Turin, 1984), Vol. 1, 299–360.For Eastern artefacts in the study, see also Thornton, The Scholar in His Study, 78–82.

50 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York, 1959), 13–14.51 Sabba, Ricordi, fol. 119v.52 Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art, 224.

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not know if these carpets had religious meaning for Renaissance consumers,but the term ‘mosque carpet’ does appear frequently in sixteenth-centuryinventories, suggesting an awareness of this aspect of a carpet’s use.53 WhileI would not argue that the sitters in these portraits mean to ally themselvesin any meaningful way with the beliefs and practices of Islam, it does seempossible that the carpet’s function as a tool for prayer might have had resonancefor the study as a site of contemplation. The carpet and other Eastern goodswould also carry the allure of the East, perhaps providing, just as Machiavelli’srobes did, an imaginary gateway to a distant and exotic locale.

The imported ceramics, metalwork, leather bookbinding and other Easterngoods that graced the study soon generated Italian imitations and adaptations,and were ultimately replaced by items of Italian manufacture. But, unliketheir counterparts in Flanders, Spain, and England, Italian craftsmen did notendeavour to imitate Oriental carpets. Other goods, as Deborah Howardrecently observed, might have lost ‘their specific connection to the time andplace of manufacture’, but carpets escaped this fate.54 They retained a ‘foreign’identity and authenticity that must have contributed to their value. In sacredcontexts, carpets with an Oriental pedigree functioned as signs of the HolyLand, as tangible connections to the Church’s origins in the East. How might‘foreignness’ and ‘authenticity’ function in the secular interior?

I would suggest that, just as carpets signalled the religious heritage ofChristianity in churches, they also might have served to signify the secularintellectual heritage of Renaissance scholars in studies. The intellectualfoundations of Renaissance humanism owed a great deal to the Arab tradition.Largely through Arabic translations and commentaries, the corpus of Aristotle’sworks was preserved and, through Latin translations in the early modernperiod, re-entered the Western tradition.55 The philosophers Avicenna andAverroes, commentators on Aristotle, were touchstones for Renaissancehumanists, and helped to shape not only understanding of the Greek philos-opher, but also growing interest in the sciences at large. Arabic sources influ-enced medicine and mathematics, as well as the more experimental side ofRenaissance philosophy, encompassing alchemy and astrology, and suchbeliefs as the ‘world soul’ or affinities among celestial bodies.56 Renaissancescholarship was marked by a sustained interest in the intellectual heritage ofthe East as a complement to the Latin tradition. Ficino frequently cited theauthority of Arabic sources, often generically, and referred to Avicenna as‘Avicennam nostrum’, an honorific title that mirrors his use of ‘Plato noster’.57

53 Rosamond Mack, ‘Lotto: A Carpet Connoisseur’, in Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance, ed.David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey, and Mauro Lucco (Washington, DC, New Haven and London, 1997), 59–67.

54 Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture (New Haven,2000), 60.

55 See Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York, 1979).56 Ibid., 60.57 Ficino, Three Books on Life, 222.

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In 1487, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola journeyed to Rome to offer publiclectures on 900 theses, among them that the ‘sages of ancient Persia andEgypt [ . . . ] had grasped and taught the basic truths of Christianity’.58 Pico’sprimary source was the Corpus Hermeticum, a pseudo-Egyptian text that wastremendously popular among Renaissance Neoplatonists. His devotion toEastern sources was exemplary, leading him to study Arabic so that he mightread the Koran in the original. His intellectual interests manifested them-selves in both the contents and the décor of his remarkable library, whichcontained over 1,100 books, including 124 in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabicand was adorned with frescoes by Cosimo Tura depicting a series of uominifamosi that included Zoroaster, shown in ‘Persian dress’.59 Nor was Pico thefirst to assert the significance of the Eastern tradition and its compatibilitywith Christian thought. In 1460, Nicholas Cusanus had written his Scrutiny ofthe Koran, an attempt to demonstrate the compatibility of the Christian andIslamic faiths.60 Intended to persuade the sultan to convert, the Scrutiny’sagenda was far from innocent, but its careful examination of Eastern thoughtreflects a larger tradition of, at the very least, respectful consideration. It ispossible to see the popularity of Mamluk-style bookbindings, damascenedmetalwork, and other Oriental goods through the lens of this appreciationof Eastern culture, as a means of declaring allegiance to, or at least awarenessof, an intellectual tradition that had preserved the knowledge of classicalantiquity and contributed insights of its own to the study of the naturalworld. Just as antiquities gave the scholar a tangible connection to the classicalpast, Eastern artefacts may have served to remind him of, in Pico’s words, the‘firm and stable Averroes’, the ‘profound and well-considered’ Alfarabi, andthe ‘divine and Platonic’ Avicenna.61

In the portraits gathered here, just a few token items – a book, a smallbronze, a carpet – convey the range of interests encompassed by the study,whether real or imagined. Dressed in fine clothes, the sitters often lay a handon their possessions while looking off into the distance, their gazes indicativeof deep thought, their gestures of proud ownership. There is a play betweenthe touch of the hand and the faraway look that speaks of the role that theseobjects played in the interior lives of their owners. Just as the scholar-saintsinhabit ideal, imagined spaces, so too do the spaces in these portraits reflectan idealization of the study. It is presented as a state of mind, even more thanas a place. Each of the artists represented here, though working in his own

58 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Opera omnia (Basel, 1572), reprinted as Opera Omnia, ed. Eugenio Garin(Turin, 1971), Vol. 1, 63–113, as cited by Grafton, Commerce with the Classics, 93.

59 Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, Historiae poetarum tam Graecorum quam Latinorum dialogi decem, Operum quae extantomnium tomus secundus (Basel, 1580), 59, as cited by Grafton, Commerce with the Classics, 101.

60 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (New York, 1968), p. 228 n. 33.61 ‘Among the Arabs there is in Avveroës something firm and stable [ . . . ] in Alfarabi something profound

and well considered, in Avicenna, something divine and Platonic’. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Discorsosulla dignità dell’uomo, ed. Giuseppe Tognon, trans. Eugenio Garin (Brescia, 1987), 38–40, as cited by Grafton,Commerce with the Classics, 99.

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pictorial idiom, nevertheless depicts his sitter in a tightly compressed spacewith a window, often affording a distant landscape view, the table displayinghis treasures pressed up against the picture plane, simultaneously making itscontents visible to the viewer and preventing access to the sitter, as if to asserthis presence in a world separate from our own.

As the ranks of the divinely inspired grew to include not only the prophetsand evangelists but philosophers, poets, and scholars, these secular individualsborrowed decorative formulas from sacred contexts to assert the privilegednature of their own activities, treating the remains of classical antiquity andtraces of the East with the same reverence accorded to holy relics, and, I wouldargue, attributing to them similar powers of intercession and communionwith another world. The decorative strategies employed in the Renaissancestudy speak of the complex heritage of humanism, rooted in Classical, Chris-tian, and Eastern traditions. Through the acquisition and display of carefullyselected, ‘rare and excellent’ objects, the owner of the study – whether trulya scholar or merely an aspiring intellectual – is located at the crossroads ofthe sacred and the secular, of East and West.

Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Masters Program