Research and conservation of pietre dure tabletops

The academic context: the development of botany as a science and its reflection in pietre dure mosaics.

The humanist values of the Renaissance gave rise to humankind's thirst for knowledge of the world, and the laws of nature. By the end of the 15th century, natural science was becoming a source of freethinking and strengthening the realistic trends in understanding the world. During this period, as an independent science, botany began to form; there were many prerequisites for this.

Till the 15th century, exotic plants got to Europe and, in particular, to the Apennine Peninsula with caravans following the Great Silk Road, which for over one and a half thousand years connected Europe and the great civilizations of the Old World: China, India and the Middle East. From South and South-East Asia traders brought to Europe not only spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, ginger, cardamom), but also seeds of unknown plants. Not all of them found their second home in Europe: many died in the germ state, as the seeds could not stand the long journey and lost their germination. This plant expansion was mutual: for example, grapes, pomegranate, alfalfa, beans, onions, carrots, and lavender were brought to China from the Mediterranean and West and Central Asian countries. And in the Mediterranean, there were cucumbers, buckwheat, saffron and basil brought from India, from India and Persia there were roses; from China there were peonies, mulberries, flax, millet, eggplant, medlar, peach, apricot, persimmon and peppermint. Citrus fruits entered the Mediterranean initially from India, and later some more species from China; fig trees came from Asia Minor. Cloves were brought from China, Korea and Japan. In the 16th century, this land trade route practically ceased to exist, which was due to the development of merchant shipping, a safer and faster way to transport goods.

At the turn of the 15th-16th centuries, the era of great geographical discoveries began, which was caused by... plants, namely spices. Europe discovered North and South America, colonization of Africa and South-East Asia began. It was due to the great geographical discoveries that strange plants from other parts of the world began to get to Europe. This process involved sailors, missionaries, traders and natural scientists accompanying the ships of the colonizers. It was also the time when botanical illustrations flourished — those atlases depicted plants that had never been seen before. As a result of the "Columbus exchange" there was a grand movement of plants and animals from the New World to the Old World and back. Europe discovered such overseas curiosities as potatoes, tomatoes, sweet pepper, sunflower, pineapple, vanilla, tobacco, papaya, manioc, pecan. Most of them successfully takook root and started to be cultivated in Mediterranean countries.

At the same time, in this period on the Apennine peninsula, the Italian wars, the cause of which was the struggle for dominance in Western Europe and in particular in the Mediterranean, between the largest European countries were going for several decades. In the first half of the 17th century, part of Italy fell under the Spanish rule, but the Duchy of Tuscany, with its center in Florence, managed to maintain independence. In spite of occasionally escalating conflicts, sciences and education in this period flourished. It was in Italy that the world's first botanical gardens were opened at universities: in Pisa in 1543, and in 1545 in Padua and Florence. The Medici family donated money to create a botanical garden in Florence. The plants were selected by the Italian botanist Luca Ghini (1490-1556). The first collections were local medicinal plants as well as herbs from other regions, which served as visual material for medical students. Later, the garden collection was enriched with exotic plants from other continents.

Luca Ghini was not only famous as the founder of botanical gardens in Tuscany. He was the first to propose a new technique for preserving and collecting plants: the herbarium. Living plants were dried in a special way, mounted either on separate sheets of paper (or cardboard), or sheets which were sewn together in books (excerpts). Herbarium materials could be stored for a long time, thus the herbarium made by Ghini's students in the late 16th century survived to our days. Thematic herbaria sewn together in separate editions (for example, plants of a certain area) could be sent to scientists around the world.

During this period, the Italian nobility had another hobby: creating private botanical gardens in villas, competing not only in the elegance of landscape architecture, but also in the composition of exotic plants, the number of their varieties and hybrids. Galleries of "portraits" of plants were commissioned for universities, schools of gardeners, and private collections.

One of the landscape masterpieces of the Renaissance is the Boboli Gardens, located on a hill in central Florence, behind the Pitti Palace, the residence of the Medici family. The gardens were founded in the middle of the 16th century, but were only opened to the public 200 years later. A huge number of onion plants, citrus plants in tubs, and camellias were planted there. It was there that one of Florence's first menageries was created: cages with exotic animals, including a large number of brightly coloured foreign birds and songbirds.

The art of stone mosaic was born in Florence in the middle of the 16th century and was actively supported by the Medici family. The images on the mosaics of stones are quite realistic. Floristic motifs (flowers, branches with fruit, leaf patterns, flower compositions) are skillfully intertwined with birds, insects, reptiles. Artists got access not only to atlases with images of curious plants and animals, but also to the closed to the public gardens of Boboli, where they made sketches necessary for their work. That is why today we can see in these mosaics both wild plants of the Mediterranean and the ones cultivated in the gardens of Florence in the 16th and 17th centuries, and a variety of species from other countries, which were depicted in the botanical atlases by scientists accompanying the ships of colonizers. The same is true for animals.