Overhead at Villa Medici: Jacopo Zucchi

 

"How does he know

that spring has come to the world?

From

         within the cage

where he wakes from sleep at daybreak -

the sound of a warbler's call."

 - Shotetsu (1381-1459), translated from the Japanese by Stephen D. Carter, from Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, New York, Columbia University Press: 2010

Look up. Overhead is a garland of intertwined circles where a parliament of birds convenes. The artist Jacopo Zucchi designed a garden room for his patron Ferdinando de' Medici, crowning it with a frescoe above.  The ceiling is a delicate and charming vision of harmonious nature, a green and pleasant place inhabited by green birds, no less. Jacopo Zucchi (c. 1541 - c.  1590) was a Florentine painter who received his training in the studio of Giorgio Vasari, a author of Lives of the Painters. 

Renovations to the ancient villa began in 1576, the year that Ferdinando de' Medici, a Cardinal in the Church, purchased the property which is adjacent to the Borghese Gardens.  The palaces were  known as the Collus Hortulorum (the hill of gardens). The Cardinal was a scholar of the sciences and a collector of antiquities and cultivated a garden of rare botanical specimens.

Informally known as the bird room, at some point in  subsequent years the exquisite fresco was white  washed, only to be revealed when Geraldine Albers, a student of the French Academy at Rome, became curious about the vast white space, knowing that two other studios on the grounds were adorned with frescoes. These rooms allowed Cardinal de' Medici to withdrawn from the everyday into a place devoted to quiet contemplation.

Emily Dickinson famously described Hope as the thing with feathers but the metaphor could apply as well to poetry.  From the time of the Bayeux Tapestries and medieval bestiaries, down to contemporary poetry, birds have been a continuing object of human wonder. Shotetsu was a Japanese poet of the Muromachi period.

Image; Jacopo Zucchi  - photo by Florizel, Painted ceiling  frescoe of the garden room at Villa Medici in Rome, c.1576  - 1577, in situ, Rome, Italy