Works on Paper 2019 - Jean Luc Baroni

Central Italian School, 15 th Century
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A Pair of Trompe L’œil Decorative Designs for Imprese with Motifs of Torchères, Anchors and
Caskets Held by Ostriches for the first and Powder Horns, Anchors and Caskets Held by
Ostriches for the second
Gouache, drawn on sheets of paper from an accounts book, bearing extensive inscriptions and numbering
133 x 294 mm (5 1 /3 x 11 1 /2 in.) and 142 x 293 mm (5 1 /2 x 11 1 /2 in.)
Painted in gouache on two sheets from an accounts
book and bearing annotations of the 15th century,
these elegant drawings illustrate alternative or
complementary designs for imprese. Two birds flank
each composition, holding anchors or fishhooks
in their beaks on which hang locked caskets. The
combinations of objects are completed by powder
horns and torchères.
Imprese are emblems or symbolic devices used
for texts or decoration starting from the fourteenth
century. They were used for interior decorations,
boiseries, furniture or tapestry borders. They
developed a symbolic language that was also used
in heraldry and in ephemeral decorations created
on important occasions. They sometimes contained
writing. This symbolic language was sometimes
used on the back of panel paintings, such as, for
example, the trompe-l’œil painted in in grisaille on
the verso of the Holy Family by Benvenuto Tisi, called
il Garofalo (1481-1559) which shows scrolling leaf
and bird decoration around a mask 1 . The present
gouaches, which were originally laid on panels,
may have been created as furniture decoration, for
example, as lateral panels of a chest or a cabinet.
The birds here represented are ostriches. Flightless
and the world’s largest living birds, they have long
necks, thick plumage and muscular legs and were
variedly used as symbols in art. Pliny the Elder
describes them negatively as having “the marvellous
property of being able to digest every substance
without distinction, but their stupidity is no less
remarkable; for although the rest of their body is
so large, they imagine, when hey have thrust their
head and neck into a bush, that the whole of the
body is concealed” (The Natural History, book X,
I). However, with time they will be invested with
a positive connotation based on the symbolical
interpretation of some of their habits. Thus in the
Middle Ages the ostrich became the symbol of the
contemplation of God as it abandons its eggs in hot
sand upon seeing the rising of a star that the ancient
called Virgile or Vigiliae 2 . It also became the symbol
of vigilance and justice. As for the anchor, it always
represents peace, firmness and hope in christian art.
An ostrich appears in association with a bird in the
illustrations to Poliphilio’s Strife of Love in a Dream
(Hypnerotomachia Poliphili), an early and arcane
romance published in Venice in 1499, as a symbol
of the subjection of the human soul to God.
Although the precise symbolic meaning of the
present emblems, taken out of their context, is
difficult to establish, the combination of ostriches,
anchors and caskets evoke vigilance, safety and
firmness – qualities required for a commercial
or financial activity. – and it is therefore possible
that its patron would have been involved in such
activity.
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