Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio
Designed by Francesco di Giorgio Martini; executed by the workshop of Giuliano da Maiano (Francesco di Giorgio 1439 to 1501) · About 1478 to 1482
Step into this small wood panelled room and you seem to be in a Renaissance prince's study, with cupboards left half open and books, musical instruments and scientific tools lying on the benches. Nothing is real. Every object, every shadow, every latticed door is an illusion made of thousands of pieces of wood in different colours, fitted together in the technique called intarsia. The room was made for Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, one of the most cultivated soldiers of the fifteenth century, for his palace in the hill town of Gubbio.
Look at the benches that run around the walls. Above them, the illusionistic cupboards hold a lute, a hurdy gurdy, an armillary sphere, a hourglass, a mace and armour, all in perfect perspective, as if the light came from the windows on your left. A cage with a parrot hangs on one wall. The perspective was laid out by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, an architect and military engineer, and the panels were cut in Florence by the workshop of Giuliano da Maiano. Inscriptions in Latin along the top praise the liberal arts, and the duke's emblems appear everywhere.
The studiolo was sold from the palace in the nineteenth century and eventually bought by the Met in 1939. Its sister room in Urbino remains in place, and the two are the only Renaissance studioli of their kind to survive. The panels were restored over more than a decade before the room reopened in 1996, and its ceiling, doorway and floor were reconstructed to give the exact proportions the duke would have known.
Did You Know? The intarsia panels use only natural wood colours; the shadows are made by scorching the wood in hot sand.
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