God, that is Nature superior, interrupted this dispute;
For she separated the land from the sky and the waves from the land
And split the blue sky from the misty air.
And having rolled them out and extracted them from their grim pile,
Bound them in their separate zones in blissful peace.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.21–5
Pliny did not need a shower of thunderbolts to chase him to the countryside or a storm to confine him to a study. He liked to hide himself away. If it was easier to be tucked up in winter, when there was little to see in the woods of Laurentum, in summer he found a means of appreciating the natural world – from indoors. The ‘Tuscan’ estate he inherited from his uncle lay amid the plains of the upper Tiber valley in the region of modern Perugia. The main villa had been built in Augustan times and boasted a set of baths, a ball court,* and a remarkable colonnade which culminated in a dining room – ‘the folding doors of which open out onto the end of a terrace and meadow beyond and much countryside besides’.1 It sat on the lower incline of a hill that rose so gently that one never noticed the climb. Vineyards, fields and agricultural buildings lay around it, and all were girt by the Apennines, the surrounding landscapes together forming a natural bowl.
For all the beauty of the estate, Pliny’s friends used to grow anxious when he travelled there in summer. Letters arrived, fraught with warnings of the malarial conditions of the coast. While Pliny insisted that his villa was a good distance from the sea, the marshes of the Tiber posed a latent threat. Not one to be deterred, Pliny hastened here for the new season to cherish the meadows, mountain breeze and sense of freedom afforded by being near a town where wearing a toga, the formal wear of Rome, was only optional. The residents of laid-back Tifernum Tiberinum (Città di Castello) had made him their patron when he was still just a boy – an act, Pliny said, that displayed ‘as much enthusiasm as lack of judgement’.2 They were mostly very elderly, grandfathers, great-grandfathers of grown men, full of stories of their distant ancestors.† If you felt as though you had stepped back in time when you arrived, after a few days here, wrote Pliny, ‘you should think you were born in another century’.3 For all his disavowals, Pliny came to appreciate the honour of his position. Whenever he arrived and whenever he left, the people of the local town would gather to greet or see him off.
Such was Pliny’s ardour for his uncle’s former estate that his eighteenth-century biographer, the 5th Earl of Orrery, went so far as to describe it as his mistress: ‘The lover dwells upon the charms of his mistress; he views in rapture every feature, and seems uneasy, lest she should not appear equally amiable to others, as to himself. That state of love must certainly be happy, where jealousy can find no intrusion.’4 Pliny was certainly keen to show his estate off. Being the good patron that he was, he wrote to reassure one anxious friend that it was quite safe to visit; even his slaves were at their healthiest when they came to Tifernum: ‘Certainly up to now I haven’t lost any of those I brought with me here (forgive me).’5
If Pliny was half as relaxed as he said he was about the risk of disease in summer, it was because his estate conformed almost perfectly to the best advice available at the time. According to Cato the Elder, whose ideas Pliny the Elder often reproduced in his encyclopaedia, a farm ought to be south-facing and situated at the foot of a mountain.6 Pliny’s main villa faced mostly south. The Apennines, ‘healthiest of mountains’, rose at its rear, but at some distance, so there was always good movement of air. Cato’s dream estate is well watered and near the sea or a river that can be traversed by boat. Tributaries of the Tiber flowed through Pliny’s land but dried up in summer, reducing the risk of malarial infection. Perhaps the greatest danger Pliny the Elder had perceived when he was living at the estate came from shrews, whose bites he knew to be venomous.7 It was easy enough for Pliny to avoid those.
A series of roads connected the estate to Rome. Passing over the Apennines, the Via Flaminia had recently been relaid with black basalt from the volcanic provinces just north of the region, each luscious slab swollen and organic, like a loaf that had burned and spilled over its tin.8 Approach the mountains from Perugia, and you may still visit the site of Pliny’s estate. From the town of Città di Castello, head towards Pitigliano in the comune of San Giustino. Beside the Campo di Santa Fiora lies a plain named Colle Plinio. The area was inhabited as early as the Bronze Age, but rightly belongs to Pliny.9 In the nineteenth century, a clutch of roof tiles bearing Pliny’s full set of initials was discovered beneath the plain. While one man watched the tiles, then pieces of marble, then black-and-white tesserae of mosaic being lifted from the soil, the resident of a neighbouring estate ‘lovingly’ gathered up whatever fragments he could find.10
Pliny had left nothing to chance. He was not the first or the last man to have his name inscribed on his building materials, but he did so with particular pride. His tiles were made of local clay from the surrounding plains and stamped with fat, rounded letters, ‘CPCS’: Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus.11 It would have been easier to have had his initials printed in relief, but these were raised from the surface, like a scratch freshly applied to the skin. They were designed to be read, but not by anyone visiting in Pliny’s lifetime. Hidden away in the roof of an agricultural outbuilding, they were largely obscured from sight.
Guests at Pliny’s Tuscan villa would have noticed rather the signature he had created in its grounds. Seven letters, snipped from box hedge, revealed the identity of the estate owner: PLINIUS. If the tiles bearing his initials secured Pliny’s place in the history of Perugia (how rare it is to find a house from a description in a Latin letter), then the topiary secured his place in daily conversation. Pliny was so proud of his gardener’s skilful manipulation of Nature that he allowed him to cut his own name from another hedge nearby. Their topiary names grew together in the middle of a large garden fashioned out of a former hippodrome.
Visitors to Pliny’s hippodrome garden were treated to a display of obelisks and roses, fruit trees and acanthus, and many more topiary names and figures cut out of box. At the head of the garden lay Pliny’s marble bench which spurted water whenever someone sat down on it, and the basin he filled with floating hors d’oeuvres. The whole hippodrome was planted round with plane trees, like Plato’s Academy in Athens, ivy weaving its way among the branches and box hedging filling in the spaces between each trunk. Around the box grew laurel, and two rows of shorter plane trees defined the sun-drenched space at the centre of the garden. Pliny was so proud of his plane tree and topiary hippodrome that he believed that it ‘far, far outstripped the design and pleasantness of the buildings’. Millennia after the topiary withered and died, an outline of the hippodrome appears to have been preserved and become part of the landscape. An aerial view of the Colle Plinio reveals a long field with a semi-circular end, like an elongated horseshoe. Looking at it from above it is easy to imagine how majestic it once was, when its centre ‘lay open and offered itself up to full view as soon as one entered it’.
That Pliny should have admired a garden fashioned out of a former hippodrome is surprising because he dismissed horse-racing as ‘inane’.12 The sport was as popular as it had ever been at Rome, where Domitian introduced Capitoline Games in honour of Jupiter, with lyre contests, Latin and Greek declamation competitions, foot races for girls, and equestrian events.13 The sight of men behaving like boys as the horses went round and round irritated Pliny, not least because he suspected it was really the racing colours they came to see and that they were engaging in illicit gambling. A few years later, the Circus Maximus in Rome was restored and enlarged to accommodate an unprecedented quarter of a million spectators.14 Although Pliny insisted that the circus did not interest him either, the driveway at his Tuscan estate was shaped like one. Pliny despised horse-racing and yet he kept a hippodrome garden, a circus drive – and wore a seal ring engraved with a picture of horses and chariot, as if to bring something of his Tuscan estate to the documents which were passed across his desk.15 Equestrianism as such formed part of his signature. It was a lively vignette of fleeting time.
Like most equestrians and senators, Pliny owned in addition to his seal ring a gold ring which distinguished him from plebeians. He may not have given much thought to what it symbolised when he twiddled it on his finger or used it as a gauge to measure the water level at Comum, but he could hardly have forgotten his uncle’s trenchant views on finger rings in general.16 Pliny the Elder had not minded the early Romans wearing iron rings as symbols of courage in war. It was gold and gemstone-encrusted rings he despised: gold, mined from the bowels of the earth and pressed over a man’s knuckles only to broadcast his status and wealth. Slaves wore merely iron rings (though some now covered the iron in gold). In Germania, too, the Chatti tribesmen whom he had encountered as a young soldier wore iron rings as signs of bravery.17 Pliny the Elder deemed even seal rings to be superfluous to human needs on the basis that the otherwise flamboyant Egyptians were content to sign their letters by hand.18 ‘The man who first adorned his fingers,’ he concluded, ‘committed the worst crime against life.’19
Gold rings, like oysters and pearls, earned a prominent place in the Natural History because they represented to Pliny the Elder the kind of luxury that was most damaging to the earth and human morality. When his encyclopaedia was read in the Renaissance it was the passages on extravagances such as these which often attracted the most interest. Pliny the Elder’s discussion of rings was particularly influential, inspiring the central ceiling panel in one of the most important cabinets of curiosity of the sixteenth century. Francesco I de’Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1574, commissioned the cabinet as a private study – accessible by secret passage – in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. His passion was alchemy, and his secret study-gallery housed the products of his experiments.20 Thirty-four compartments were concealed behind paintings inspired by antiquity and Nature. Designed by Giorgio Vasari, author of the Lives, and Vincenzo Borghini, a humanist and Benedictine prelate, Francesco’s Studiolo was less a room than an oversized jewellery box. It is perhaps the closest anyone has ever come to rendering Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in three dimensions.21
The printing of the first edition of the Natural History in 1469 had roused considerable interest in Pliny the Elder as both a naturalist and art historian. Fourteen further editions were produced before the end of the century as his reputation spread through Italy.22 Leonardo da Vinci acquired a copy. Christopher Columbus owned an Italian translation from 1489.23 Vasari seems to have consulted the earliest Italian translation of the text when writing his Lives.24 Each man found his own area of interest in the work, from the engineering of ancient buildings to the geography of the Roman empire and creative possibilities for combining artifice with Nature. The text inspired artistic studies of the natural world, some of which were incorporated into the work itself. A page of an exquisitely illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript of the encyclopaedia, now in the British Library in London, is adorned with a scene of Pliny the Elder hard at work in his study. His desk overlooks a beautiful landscape with sun and moon, sea and mountains, rivers and woods, and fields full of animals and birds.25 When Francesco de’Medici and his designers set about creating his Studiolo the following century, they divided Nature similarly into groups according to the elements, after the manner of Aristotle.
Paintings for the walls of Francesco’s grand study include the fall of Icarus to denote air, the primordial flood from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to evoke water, and scenes of gold miners, jewellery makers and glass blowers for earth and fire. In one panel, pearl fishers pour into boats and tumble out of them in their eagerness to scoop oysters from a bay. The nymphs and tritons in the scene are all but naked, their sashes drenched from their underwater forays. Pearls pile up in foreign shells – conches, roomier than the oyster’s own. Another of the paintings is inspired by the story in the Natural History of Cleopatra’s pearls. According to Pliny the Elder, a sculpture of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome wore enormous earrings formed of two halves of a single pearl formerly owned by Cleopatra. The ‘courtesan queen’ had originally had a pair of pearls, but having wagered with Mark Antony that she could consume 10 million sesterces at a single banquet, she dissolved one in a cup of vinegar and drank it.26 In Francesco’s painting she is shown removing the enormous pearl from her ear and resting it in a cup. Her fellow banqueters lean in to witness her consume its wealth in a single sitting.
Francesco de’Medici had a keen interest in pearls and gems. He established with his brother a pietra dura industry, where pieces of mother-of-pearl, coloured marble, and other precious stones were cut and smoothed and slotted together to create seamless decorative panels. The central ceiling painting commissioned for his private study encapsulated the process. An artist named Francesco Morandini was instructed to paint within its frame the titan Prometheus as ‘first inventor of precious stones and rings, as testified by Pliny [the Elder]’.27 In the Greek myth, Zeus punishes Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to men by chaining him to a rock in the Caucasus for 30,000 years. While so enchained, Prometheus is said to have enclosed a fragment of rock in his shackles and worn it on his finger. Although Pliny the Elder called this story ‘wholly fiction’ in his encyclopaedia, the mere fact that he mentioned it, if only to reject it, persuaded Francesco de’Medici and his designers of its worthiness as inspiration for the centrepiece of the Studiolo. In the finished painting, Prometheus is depicted alongside Nature, who nurtures a baby, rabbit, snake, and unicorn. While still enchained he receives from Nature a rough stone to transform into something more beautiful. Nature’s rock will yield a glittering gem for the ring Prometheus has formed from his chains.
The Renaissance portrait of Prometheus in the guise of an artist was a development of the ancient poets’ depiction of him as a creator of men from clay. In the late fourteenth century, a Florentine chronicler likened the work of the painter and poet to that of Prometheus in fashioning life.28 Among the artists he considered most divine in their talents were Praxiteles and Apelles. Both had flourished in classical Greece and were well known to Renaissance humanists from the elder Pliny’s Natural History. Praxiteles was the Athenian sculptor of the celebrated Aphrodite of Knidos, a work so beautiful and lifelike that one man was said to have made love to it then killed himself out of shame. Apelles was a painter from Kos who, according to Pliny the Elder, surpassed ‘all [the artists] born before him and yet to be born’.29 Pliny the Elder had admired both men for their ability to capture their subjects with such accuracy – despite, in Apelles’ case, using a palette of only white, yellow ochre, red, and black – as to give the illusion of having created something entirely tangible. Pliny the Elder’s passages on the close imitation of life in ancient art were so esteemed in the Renaissance that they helped to inspire a new appetite for naturalism in art.
Artists and art theorists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were particularly interested in an anecdote told in the thirty-fifth book of the Natural History. Here Pliny the Elder described how two artists of fourth-century BC Greece had once challenged each other to a contest.30 The first painter, Zeuxis of Heraclea, painted grapes so lifelike that the birds were tempted to eat them. Meanwhile his rival, Parrhasius of Ephesus, the artist credited with discovering the use of proportion, painted a curtain that looked so real that Zeuxis, ‘gasconading over the judgement of his birds, urged that the curtain be pulled back and the picture revealed’. As soon as Zeuxis realised his error he conceded the prize. He, after all, had deceived only birds, but Parrhasius had fooled him, an artist.
These stories helped to awake in Renaissance artists an ambition to imitate Nature – or even to surpass it, forging life from their paints and marbles as Prometheus had from clay. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History taught them to aspire to the standards of naturalism achieved by the artists of antiquity. Painters now strove to be hailed ‘Apelles’ for their skills of representation. They had no way of knowing how real Apelles’ paintings looked, or of gauging how well they measured up to him, but they had it on Pliny the Elder’s authority that Apelles was the best, and it was as the best that they sought to be hailed in turn. Titian, Mantegna and Pisanello were among the artists who succeeded in earning the sobriquet ‘Apelles’ for their genius.31 All three studied Nature closely and excelled in recreating it in paint. The emphasis that Pliny the Elder had placed on art as the imitation of Nature was perpetuated further by the leading theorists of the day. Vasari, Leon Battista Alberti, Lodovico Dolce and, earlier, Lorenzo Ghiberti, stressed its importance in their works of criticism. In Dolce’s Aretino, an influential dialogue on art from 1557, the protagonist proclaims, in true Pliny the Elder fashion, ‘Painting . . . is nothing other than the imitation of Nature.’32 Pliny the Elder’s descriptions of the perfection achieved by Apelles, Parrhasius and Praxiteles shaped a new competition between the artists of modernity and the artists of antiquity, between object and paint. It was a competition that no one had the authority to judge but everyone the opportunity to form an opinion on. Artists and viewers would now scrutinise art and Nature side by side. The Natural History steadily inculcated their ways of seeing.
It is tempting to see the influence of Pliny the Elder’s passages on art in the design of the Tuscan estate itself. Outside, in the hippodrome garden, Nature was shaped by artifice. Inside, in the rooms used for entertaining, artifice was shaped by Nature. Pliny described a bedroom painted with a fresco of birds sitting on branches.33 Fragments discovered at the site of his villa provide further clues to its decoration. Leaves and vines were painted in stylised columns and framed by theatrical trompe l’oeil panels on walls of red, white, azzurro and yellow.34 Carvings depicted scenes from theatre and myth as though they derived from Nature. A deceptively friendly-faced gorgon poked out from a frieze; a griffin – resembling a cat with wings – posed in profile; a theatre mask carved in deep relief had eyebrows raised so high that they consumed the actor’s entire forehead.35 Pliny the Elder wrote in his encyclopaedia of a species of people from Scythia (the Russian Steppe) with a single eye in the centre of their foreheads who warred against griffins for gold.36 It is uncertain whether he would have known the surviving designs from the villa or whether they were introduced later by his nephew, but they point to a man whose tastes were for the lively and cheering.
The carvings and wall paintings, many of which are characteristic of the first century AD, provided a suitably dramatic backdrop for the entertainers who came to perform at the villa after Pliny inherited it. Forgoing his evening entertainments throughout the winter to retreat to his soundproof study, Pliny liked to invite lyre players and comedians to strum and jest away the long light nights of the summer. On some evenings at the Tuscan estate he was joined by his wife, Calpurnia, who had been known to adapt his poems to the cithara and sing to them. Whenever Pliny gave readings from his own work to groups of male guests, she would ‘sit behind a veil’ and wait eagerly for the applause. Her aunt, Pliny said, had ‘often predicted that I would seem to my wife to be such a man as I am now’.37 He prided himself on being as good a husband to her as she was a wife to him.
* The Romans played a variety of ball games, including one much like Eton Fives in which they would hit a ball against a wall with their hands and compete to score. However it is difficult to imagine the portly Pliny the Elder getting much use out of the ball court at his Tuscan villa.
† It was Pliny’s duty as patron to arbitrate between townsmen wherever a dispute arose. The position must have provided excellent early training for the future lawyer.