Black Marbles in Renaissance Florence

In his manuscript treatise on the history of stones, Istoria delle pietre (1597), the Florentine friar Agostino del Riccio included a brief description of the so-called paragone d’Inghilterra, a black ‘touchstone’ that was used, as he explained, in the funerary monuments of the English kings, but was actually quarried in ‘Flanders’, that is: the Southern Low Countries. Del Riccio appreciated the qualities of this black stone and emphasized that it could be easily transported to Florence by water – a notable advantage over ‘oriental’ black marbles, which were only available in Rome as antique spolia since, according to del Riccio, their original quarries were lost.
That black marble or paragone was appreciated in sixteenth-century Florence is also confirmed by Giorgio Vasari who highly praised it in several passages in the second edition of The Lives (1568). Paragone had already attracted attention in Florence in the fifteenth century, as attested by Francesco Berlinghieri’s translation of Ptolemy’s Geographia (1482), and continued to do so throughout the sixteenth century, for example in the sculptor Vincenzio Danti’s Trattato delle perfette proporzioni (1567). That paragone di Fiandra was used as the black backing stone in the typically Florentine technique of the commesso di pietre dure (inlaid semi-precious stone mosaics) is well-known, but its use in Florentine architecture remains unstudied. Thus far only one case is well-documented: in 1604 Don Giovanni de’ Medici had 730 pieces of black marble shipped from Dinant via Amsterdam to Florence for use in the Cappella dei Principi at San Lorenzo. But there were likely earlier, 16th-century precedents. According to del Riccio, for example, the black marble used in the Cavalcanti chapel in Santo Spirito (1563) and the ‘beautiful piece of paragone’ displayed in the house of Giovanni Vittorio Soderini were also of Flemish provenance. And the Florentine fascination for paragone was already evident in a few earlier examples. Two works by Giuliano da Sangallo, for instance, employ black marble of hitherto unknown provenance: the sarcophagi in the Sassetti chapel at Santa Trinita (1480s) and the Doric column shafts and sarcophagi in the Gondi chapel at Santa Maria Novella (begun in 1503).
This contribution offers a first study of the use of black marble in Renaissance Florence, with a focus on its provenance, on the basis of mostly written sources. This illuminates how the intense commercial, cultural and artistic exchanges between Flanders and Florence in this period might also have influenced Florentine construction practices.