Oleum Olivarum: Stradano's Engraving and the New Art of Olive-Oil Making in Sixteenth-Century Tuscany

Abstract

This article demonstrates the merited inclusion of Giovanni Stradano's olive-oil engraving in the “Nova Reperta,” a series showcasing postclassical inventions that Florentine nobleman and Alterati member Luigi Alamanni commissioned in the late 1580s. The image and accompanying inscription must be understood within their broader cultural, scientific, legal, political, and socioeconomic contexts. The print reflects olive oil's economic potential and the evolving dietary preferences in Medici Florence. It evinces the flexibility of the concept of invention. Rather than being technological, the novelties mirror ideas central to the Alterati academics around classical knowledge and the alchemical ability of humans to transform nature through artisanship.

INTRODUCTION: A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY OIL MILL

In the late 1580s, the Flemish artist Jan van der Straet (1523–1605), also known as Johannes Stradanus or under the Italianized name Giovanni Stradano, designed an engraving that vividly depicts the process of olive-oil manufacture.¹ From the moment of harvest to the transportation of the final product to the city markets, the Oleum Olivarum (Olive oil) print invites the viewer to step directly into the space of an oil mill buzzing with activity (fig. 1). In the center of the composition stands the figure of a muleteer. From this principal point, the walls draw the gaze to the background, where Stradano depicted an undulating terrain flanked by high olive trees that can be recognized from the tortuous and gnarled trunks typical of this plant.² A man perched in a tree on the right shakes the branches with the help of a long stick, while a group of women collect the fruits from the ground in their baskets. The Latin inscription at the bottom of the print informs the reader that the right moment to perform this task to have an abundant supply of oil is when the olives are still bitter.³ Brought to the workshop, the olives are unloaded into the circular basin of an ox-driven mill; a worker uses a spade to ensure that no berry escapes the stone.⁴ The resulting ground paste is poured by workers into woven disks known as fiscoli (Lat. fiscis), buscole, or gabbie, which have been employed since antiquity.⁵ The fiscoli are then stacked under the plate of a direct screw press actuated by three straining workers. A figure pours hot water over the squeezed olives, with more boiling in the caldron at his back, a process typically performed after the first and most precious cold-pressed juices have already been extracted.⁶ Finally, the oil is carefully separated from the vegetable water and poured into large terracotta containers (the Florentine orci) or loaded into wooden barrels for transport on the back of the mule.⁷

Figure 1. Philips Galle after Giovanni Stradano. Oleum Olivarum in the Nova Reperta series, ca. 1588. Engraving. Chicago, Newberry Library, VAULT Case Wing oversize Z 412 .85.

At first glance, the process of olive-oil making, as depicted by Stradano, presents little technological innovation. After all, the vertical wheel mill was commonplace from late antiquity on, and Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) attested to the direct screw press as a novelty of his own age in his Natural History.⁸ It is rather surprising, therefore, that one finds this image among the nineteen prints of the Nova Reperta (New discoveries), a series celebrating the advancements of the postclassical world. Why did Stradano include the making of olive oil alongside the discovery of the Americas (by the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci [1454–1512] rather than Columbus [ca. 1450–1506]); the production of silk and cane sugar; and the invention of print, oil pigments, spectacles, and gunpowder? How did the old practice of oil extraction combine with the confident sense of present achievements declared on the frontispiece of the Nova Reperta, where one sees the personification of the past leaving the stage to be replaced by the new age?⁹

This article will first uncover the ways in which Stradano manipulated the concept of invention in the Oleum Olivarum image and its accompanying inscription to respond to the new scientific, dietary, and politico-economic importance of olive oil in sixteenth-century Florence.¹⁰ The print evinces changing contemporaneous attitudes toward classical knowledge, nature, and craftsmanship. Therefore, any understanding of Stradano's association of olive oil with modern innovation necessarily delves deeper and can only be revealed upon examining this work in its broader context of production, patronage, and association with visual and textual sources.¹¹

Giovanni Stradano was one of the most versatile artists who hailed from the Low Countries to work at the Medici Court in Florence in the early 1550s.¹² He operated first as a tapestry designer and a court artist under Vasari, and then, from the 1560s on, as an independent artist and member of the Accademia del Disegno. Stradano had a prolific career, both as a painter and as a designer of tapestries, maps, ephemera, and printed texts, many of which celebrated de’ Medici's rule—first under Cosimo I de’ Medici (Duke of Florence, 1537–69; Grand Duke, 1569–74) and then under his sons: Francesco I (r. 1574–87) and Ferdinando I (r. 1588–1609).

In Il Riposo (The respite, 1584), the Florentine writer Raffaello Borghini praises Stradano's invention in draftsmanship, describing how, to make his virtue known across the world, the artist created numerous cycles of drawings, which he sent to be printed in Antwerp by the renowned engraver Philips Galle (1537–1612).¹³ Among these was the Nova Reperta, one of several series of prints that Stradano designed at the commission of and in collaboration with Luigi Alamanni (1558–1603).¹⁴ Alamanni was Stradano's patron, a Florentine nobleman, a member of the Accademia degli Alterati, and possibly the nephew of the acclaimed poet Luigi Alamanni (1495–1556), whose bucolic verses dealt at length with the cultivation of olives.¹⁵ The conspicuous notes written on the preserved preparatory drawings for the Nova Reperta demonstrate Alamanni's involvement in the conception of this project and testify to a close collaboration between artist, publisher, and patron—a relationship acknowledged on the frontispiece of the series.¹⁶

Lia Markey analyzed the Nova Reperta prints in the context of Alamanni's engagement with the Accademia degli Alterati, a small and rather restrictive literary academy founded in 1569 Florence.¹⁷ Scholars have shown how Stradano and Alamanni chose to document, in many of these prints, the application of modern innovations in everyday life through genre scenes, rather than through the representation of the moment of invention or discovery.¹⁸ In doing so, the Nova Reperta participated in contemporary conversations, among the Alterati academics and wider Italian intellectual community, about the competition between classical and modern knowledge; the balance between mechanical processes and nature; and the significance of invention, ultimately to emphasize Florence's leading role in global progress.¹⁹

As the ancient world had already established the technology of olive pressing, the literature on the Nova Reperta series has generally overlooked the Oleum Olivarum engraving.²⁰ Therefore, as early as the second quarter of the seventeenth century, scholars such as the Olivetan monk Secondo Lancellotti (1583–1643) struggled to grasp the novelty in this print and its accompanying Latin inscription.²¹ This article sets out to show the extent to which the manufacture of olive oil gained a merited role among other early modern innovations showcased in the Nova Reperta. It does so by examining the Oleum Olivarum engraving in the context of the active scientific environment of Medici Florence and the circle of the Alterati. Stradano's print exhibits the social, cultural, and economic ambitions of the Florentine academics, as well as their interest in the toils of the artisan. This study brings Stradano's print into conversation with sources on craftsmanship and oil production, along with works interested in the classification and visualization of modern knowledge.²² Through an interrogation of the geopolitical, socioeconomic, dietary, and legal contexts of olive growing and pressing in sixteenth-century Tuscany, I will show how Stradano reflected on the commercial relationship between city and countryside at a time of increasing intervention in the environment.

The second part of the essay identifies the critical role of the recovery of Greek classical knowledge in the Latin inscription of the Oleum Olivarum print, and attributes it to the new botanical interests of scholars close to the Alterati, particularly Piero Vettori (1499–1585). Furthermore, the study links the medical and culinary reappraisal of ancient green oil to the gradual rejection of Galenic humoral theories in the second half of the sixteenth century. It also suggests the economic potential of this type of production for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Finally, my analysis shows how an emphasis on the collective work of the oil millers rather than actual technological developments allowed Stradano and his patron Alamanni to engage with ideas expressed by thinkers and artisans such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Paracelsus (1493–1541), and the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Moletti (1531–88), who saw humans as alchemists capable of transforming nature.

The article adopts a holistic approach to reveal the cultural, semiotic, and material density of the Oleum Olivarum print, in relation both to its explicit object (olives and mills) and to the wider world it is part of and that it draws together. By looking through one representative image at the interconnections of multiple factors in Florentine high and low culture, this study shows that traditionally distinct fields of enquiry, such as intellectual, environmental, and art history, must talk to each other.

THE ALTERATI IN THE WORKSHOP: THE CONTEXT OF PRODUCTION

One cannot fully comprehend the original intent behind Stradano's olive-oil print, its sources, function, and audience, without setting this image against the broader background of the Nova Reperta, the Accademia degli Alterati, and Medici Florence. Starting in the late fourteenth century, Florence was a principal center in the development of the scholarly movement of humanism.²³ Intertwining practical and theoretical concerns, humanists devoted themselves to the study of disciplines considered to be useful to citizens’ moral edification, such as history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy.²⁴ They cultivated a philological approach to Greek and Latin texts, and passionately investigated the physical remains of the ancient world. Building on this tradition, sixteenth-century Florence was a vibrant environment, driven by a desire not only to rediscover and study the classics but also to test and verify their authority through new observations. The creation by Cosimo I of botanical gardens for medical and study purposes in Pisa and Florence sparked scientific interest in botany.²⁵ Novel studies were carried out by figures close to the Alterati, such as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and the humanists Piero Vettori and Giovan Vettorio Soderini (1526–96).²⁶ Classical knowledge had to be updated and images became a favorite means to identify and classify an enlarged diversity of plants, trades, goods, and territories, in series such as the Nova Reperta itself.²⁷

Historians of science argued that the new mid-sixteenth-century investigations of the natural world were powered by the application of empirical methodologies specific to the artisanal world.²⁸ One important factor in the adoption of experiential approaches by the learned elite was the development of state-financed industries and innovative technologies, some portrayed in the Nova Reperta series. Olive oil supported many of these developments. Oil was not only a revalued foodstuff, as will be later discussed, but it was also employed in the carding of wool for the tapestry workshop that Cosimo had set up in the Palazzo Vecchio in the early 1540s.²⁹ Adding to this was the use of oil in the pharmaceutical and scientific experimentation celebrated in the paintings adorning the studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici (1570–72).³⁰ There, Stradano depicted Francesco at work in an alchemist's laboratory, an important precedent for the Nova Reperta (fig. 2).³¹ Upon Francesco's death in 1587, Lorenzo Giacomini Tebalducci Malespini (1552–98), an Alterati member and former student of Vettori, praised the Grand Duke's love for the study of science and agriculture. His interests in the “effects of Nature” caused him delight and increased the utility of his efforts to the state.³² These works testify to the degree to which humanists and state authorities actively engaged in the mechanical arts (including occupations carried out through manual labor).³³

Figure 2. Giovanni Stradano. The Alchemist's Laboratory, 1570. Oil on slate. Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, Archivi Alinari. Photo credit: Archivi Alinari, Firenze.

Conversely, highly skilled artisans strove to elevate their status and participate in the intellectual tradition. The contact between artisanal and elite cultures between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries informed remarkably complex careers at the crossroads of craftspeople, engineers, and thinkers—famously, Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1501) and his younger contemporary Leonardo da Vinci.³⁴ Print and graphic representations played an important role in these sociocultural exchanges. A boom in books on mechanical arts by humanists, including treatises on agriculture, accompanied a new vernacular genre created by practitioners themselves.³⁵ How-to manuals rendered artisanal expertise—traditionally transmitted orally or through bodily experience—accessible to an engaged elite readership. Images particularly explained hands-on knowledge to the unskilled.³⁶ Engineers fashioned machine books to advertise their ideas, to entertain, and to inform patrons.³⁷

Both the Nova Reperta series and the Accademia degli Alterati highlighted the fruitful intertwining of erudite and practical cultures in the early modern period. One might see in the Oleum Olivarum print a reflection of the ways in which the Alterati academics saw their status in Medici Florence through their social and economic aspirations and liberal arts education. Most of the members came from families of merchants or bankers with an anti-Medicean past, which made it harder for them to access the Florentine court or other public functions.³⁸ The Accademia degli Alterati provided a safe environment to exhibit their patrician status and level of education.

Markey showed how the Nova Reperta series recalled the professional as well as literary activities of the Alterati, which included figures such as the explorer Filippo Sassetti (1550–88) and the humanist Piero Vettori.³⁹ As an honorary member, though, Vettori never attended the meetings of this society.⁴⁰ He was, nevertheless, close to the Alterati affiliates, most of whom, like Giacomini Tebalducci Malespini, studied at his Studio fiorentino, and continued to engage with his work at their new academy.⁴¹ Markey postulated the influence of Vettori's 1569 treatise on olive cultivation on the Oleum Olivarum print and noticed that other members of the Alterati also published works that dealt to some degree with olive plants—namely, Bernardo Davanzati (1529–1606) and Soderini.⁴² Their writings evoke a common literary and scientific interest, as well as an increasing empirical approach to agriculture.

The Alterati were themselves innovators in the realm of literature, as they sought to improve their written productions using collective evaluations. Déborah Blocker noticed how these vernacular literary exercises mirrored the learning processes in contemporary Florentine workshops, in which guildsmen acquired skills through communal exchange of practical expertise.⁴³ Such familiarity with artisanal practices reflected the Alterati's continued involvement in the economic life of the city.⁴⁴ The application of technological invention within collaborative processes of production, as depicted in many of the Nova Reperta prints, would have thus resonated with the Accademia degli Alterati.⁴⁵

The records of the Alterati meetings reflect subjects in close connection with those represented in the Nova Reperta and suggest that Alamanni and his colleagues used the prints to trigger their debates. Topics spanned from classical and modern artillery to the consequences of the discovery of the New World for Florence.⁴⁶ One must imagine that the range of subjects in Stradano's prints would have encouraged contextualized pro and counter debates—a common practice of the Alterati—about the value and constraints of contemporaneous discoveries and innovations, and the hiatus between modern and ancient.⁴⁷ An example is the oration on the writing of bibliographies, given in 1584 by the academy member Torquato Malaspina (1557–94), who highlighted the importance of knowledge of the past over fascination with the modern.⁴⁸ These discussions betray an increased awareness of the role of human developments in history and their impact on the physical environment (seen both on a global scale and in the relationship between city and countryside).⁴⁹

FROM MYTH TO THE OIL MARKET: SOURCES AND CONTEXT

By the sixteenth century, a variety of new products had invaded the streets of the city, including novelties depicted in the Nova Reperta, such as printed books, luxuries, and cures.⁵⁰ In his detailed account of the Venetian trades and markets, Tommaso Garzoni (1549–89) mentioned in 1585 the sale of “virgin” olive oils—it is uncertain if the term alluded at this time to the first press or, more likely, to an oil obtained prior to submitting the olives to the press—alongside “pulp oils, and oils that are mostly dregs.”⁵¹ The new consumption practices stimulated the curiosity of the social elite regarding the contemporary technologies and craftspeople involved in the production of these goods.⁵² It translated into a growing awareness of the achievements made in the present, and a desire to document them, which reached a pinnacle with the Nova Reperta. Indeed, scholars have rightly argued that this series integrates the late fifteenth-century textual tradition on the origin of contemporary discoveries—most famously Giovanni Tortelli's (ca. 1400–66) De orthographia dictionum e Graecis tractarum (The orthography of words derived from the Greek, 1471) and Polidoro Vergilio's (ca. 1470–1555) De rerum inventoribus (On the inventors of all things, 1499)—with the new interest in artisanship.⁵³

A systematic representation of artisans at work, created outside the Italian space in the so-called Book of Trades (Das Ständebuch), was first published in Frankfurt am Main in 1568.⁵⁴ It included woodcuts designed by Jost Amman (1539–91) showing diverse professions and social groups in sixteenth-century Nuremberg.⁵⁵ Amman's woodcuts provided Stradano and his patron with visual models for their engravings (fig. 3). Sigmund Feyerabend (ca. 1528–90) printed Amman's illustrations in two separate editions: first, with accompanying German verses by Hans Sachs (1494–1576) and, second, with Latin compositions by Hartmann Schopper (ca. 1542–ca. 1595).⁵⁶ When interrogating the image and relative verses dedicated to the oil maker, it is interesting to note how the two editions of the Book of Trades address different audiences, which also reflects the geographical boundaries of olive production and, for the most part, consumption.⁵⁷ Sachs integrated olive oil with other types of nut and seed oil that would have been more familiar to the German public (fig. 3).⁵⁸ A wider humanistic audience, guaranteed by the Latin edition, allowed Schopper to concentrate instead on olives and their various botanical types, according to Virgil's (70–19 BCE) Georgics.⁵⁹

Figure 3. Jost Amman. Der Olmacher. Woodcut. In Hans Sachs, Eygentliche Beschreibung Aller Stände auff Erden. Frankfurt, 1568. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: A: 61 Poet. (1), sig. c2^r [100^r].

Madeleine Viljoen noticed how the preamble of the Book of Trades invoked Polidoro's work on the origin of modern inventions, although this model was hardly followed.⁶⁰ However, contrary to Stradano, both Polidoro's De rerum inventoribus and the verses accompanying Amman's woodcuts situated the discovery of the olive tree and oil in a mythical time. The Book of Trades briefly referenced Minerva, the goddess of war who invented the art of making oil according to Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE) and Virgil.⁶¹ Polidoro instead preferred Pliny's story, which highlighted the civilizing role of Aristaeus, King of Arcadia, in the introduction of humanity to the oil mill.⁶² Polidoro went on, however, to correct the pagan account, noticing that, in fact, “the Jews invented oil,” since “the olive was before Noah's flood and [Moses] spoke of oil that was used in sacrifices.”⁶³ He observed the Mediterranean area in which olive trees were commonly cultivated and some of the liturgical and para-liturgical uses of their liquor, without, however, manifesting any interest in describing the steps involved in the manufacturing of oil.⁶⁴ It will be explained later on that very little information on the process of oil extraction is to be found, even in the specialized postclassical agricultural literature.⁶⁵ This shows the extraordinary value of images in presenting one with a perspective not always transpiring from literary sources.

Stradano drew inspiration for his Oleum Olivarum print from Amman's woodcut depicting the occupation of the oil maker (fig. 3).⁶⁶ When analyzing the two images, one sees not only common references—such as the animal-powered millstone, the direct screw press in the background, and the fireplace on the right—but also how Stradano reinterpreted this image. The small area of the woodcut, compared to the print, did not allow for the inclusion of the moment of harvest, which is only mentioned in Sachs's accompanying verses. It is not certain if Amman would have represented the harvest in any case, since his interest was not in depicting the various steps involved in the manufacturing of oil but in showcasing the status of the oil maker, powerfully placed in the foreground of the woodcut.⁶⁷ The narrative quality of Stradano's print directed attention instead to the space of the oil mill and the final presentation of olive oil as a product for market in the image of the muleteer.⁶⁸ The engraving exemplifies the complex and innovative ways in which the artist of the Nova Reperta navigated his sources to accommodate the various interests of the Alterati around processes of production, interactions with nature, and the complex interplay of classical learning and modern innovations.

Shifting the discussion to the context of the Nova Reperta, the Oleum Olivarum print shares thematic and compositional aspects with the engraving depicting the refinement of sugar.⁶⁹ Both images focus on the representation of the workshop and the artisanal tasks involved in the process of production. These include common technologies, such as the mill—powered by animals and water—and the press, which Stradano reproduced almost identically in the two images. Unlike Amman's woodcut, both prints open their imposing classical architecture suggestively onto landscapes where workers harvest the natural resources. This is despite the fact that oil pressing would have typically been performed in a dark and enclosed space, as advised by the poet Alamanni (not to be confused with Stradano's patron).⁷⁰ The oil lamp hanging from the fireplace on the left would have provided the necessary light and drawn attention, at the same time, to the important use of olive oil for lighting.⁷¹

Through the representation of production processes, the sugar and oil engravings are also related to the silk print (or, more precisely, to its background).⁷² The Nova Reperta prints recall contemporaneous developments carried out by the first three Grand Dukes and praised by Giacomini Tebalducci Malespini in his eulogy to Francesco I.⁷³ Giacomini mentioned an expanded planting of mulberry trees for silk production and even a failed experiment to introduce sugarcane into Tuscany.⁷⁴ While silk and sugar were modern commodities in Europe, Polidoro, citing Pliny, informed his readers that olive trees were present on the Italian Peninsula by 440 AUC (314 BCE).⁷⁵ Recent archeological findings in Sicily have pushed this date to as soon as the early Bronze Age, while pollen-core studies in the Tuscan hills around Lake Accesa bear witness to Etruscan cultivations of olive groves around 900 BCE.⁷⁶ In what way was Stradano's olive-oil making a novelty? Does the modern exclude the ancient, or was this passage a more fluid and complex transition?

OLIVE CULTIVATION AND OIL CONSUMPTION IN RENAISSANCE TUSCANY: AN INTRODUCTION

In the 1569 dedication to Cosimo I, Piero Vettori, opening his ode to the olive tree, rhetorically asked, “Who does not know Tuscany to be all plentiful in this noble plant, of which in great part Your Excellency, the Most Illustrious, is the lord and patron? . . . And what other fruit of our fields is so bountiful that it can be sent out widely to neighboring peoples, in the form of oil?”⁷⁷ Vettori's treatise must have appealed to Cosimo, who was personally involved in the cultivation of olive trees, as well as in the study of plants and their medical properties.⁷⁸ But the plentifulness of the Tuscan oil at this time was arguable, especially if one is to compare it with production in the small rival Republic of Lucca to the northwest.⁷⁹ The suggestion exposed, nevertheless, the politico-economic ambitions of the newly expanded Medici dominion and later reflected on the centrality of the muleteer, as the carrier of this precious good in the Oleum Olivarum print.⁸⁰ To understand in what way olive oil was a novel industry at the end of the sixteenth century in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, one must step back from the current agricultural landscape of this space to encounter a significantly distinct premodern site.

Historians have typically divided the Italian Peninsula into two opposing climatic and cultural regions: a center-south Mediterranean region of Roman heritage that relied on the cultivation of olive trees and the consumption of olive oil and an Italy that extended to the north of the Apennines Mountains and distinguished itself through its Germanic influence and the use of animal-derived fats.⁸¹ The northern geographical reach of the olive tree imposed, therefore, a physical boundary that, according to Fernand Braudel, distinguished the true Mediterranean from Europe.⁸² It was a borderline often blurred by the plants’ sensitivity to changes in local climate as well as political and cultural influences.⁸³

Olive production depended not only on specific temperate climatic conditions but also on an extended period of peace and stability.⁸⁴ It took ten years—Vettori noticed—for a basal shoot to be born under the shadow of an olive tree, and between four and five years for it to arrive at maturity and produce its own biennial fruits.⁸⁵ The fall of the Roman Empire and subsequent social and economic unrest brought about a sharp decline in olive cultivation, with consequences, which Vettori was well aware, that remained felt in early modern groves.⁸⁶ A small number of olive trees continued to be planted during the Italian early Middle Ages; their oil served mainly to light churches and aid in liturgy (confirmation, unction of the sick, and priestly ordination). Animal fats, however, had largely replaced oil in culinary settings.⁸⁷

The gradual reintroduction of olive trees into the Tuscan landscape, through intercultivation with grain and grapevines, depended on the development of urban centers and their extended control over the countryside. Communal legal codes (statuti) and, from the sixteenth century, the Medici Grand Dukes encouraged regular plantings of olive basal shoots and vines.⁸⁸ The construction of the contado (the rural territory subjected to the power of the city, generally coinciding with the ecclesiastical district under the jurisdiction of a bishop) and the rapid expansion of the métayage sharecropping system from the thirteenth century onward allowed city dwellers to invest their profits into the surrounding countryside and to initiate a diversification of the fields.⁸⁹ These developments brought them both economic profit, in the form of half of the products of their lands, and social affirmation, as the practice of agriculture became a noble fashion.

The boom in printed publications on estate management in the second half of the sixteenth century, some written by Alterati members, responded to these new socioeconomic trends. The Alterati were industrious landowners in their own right, and their villas in the contado of Florence yielded enough wine and oil to furnish their tables throughout the year. Blocker highlighted the preeminence of agriculture for the members of the academy, which, each year, interrupted its activity in September and November for the grape and olive harvests.⁹⁰

The burgeoning of olive-oil production, thus, must also be considered in relation to a transformation in culinary habits. Oil was used in the frying of fish, eaten especially during the Lenten period, when other meats and animal-based products were forbidden by the Catholic Church.⁹¹ Significantly, Allen Grieco demonstrated how the sixteenth century saw a growing consumption of shellfish and other delicate fish kinds by the highest Italian social ranks.⁹² Ahead of the Lenten season in 1547, Eleonora di Toledo (1522–62), wife of Cosimo I, sent her father in Naples a favorite recipe for oysters.⁹³ It entailed carefully washing the oysters in the Tuscan Trebbiano wine and then lightly frying them in virgin oil—a relatively early mention of this term.⁹⁴ Olive oil also accompanied the salads and vegetables that the urban elites of Central Italy increasingly consumed, despite a traditionally negative perception of such foodstuffs.⁹⁵ Sixteenth-century recipe books document this dietary change.⁹⁶ A fascinating example is the Letter on the Salads, a medical and gastronomic compilation of eatable greens and vegetables that the naturalist and physician Costanzo Felici (ca. 1525–85) composed in 1565 at the request of the Bolognese scientist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605).⁹⁷ Felici's treatise suggests that olive oil was used at this time outside lean days in a variety of cold meat salads.⁹⁸ Driven by national and religious biases, English travelers such as Fynes Moryson (1566–1630) and Robert Dallington (1561–1637) grossly exaggerated the degree to which fish, vegetables, and, consequently, oil formed the staple diet of early modern Italians.⁹⁹

It should be noted that Dallington's account contradicted Vettori's commercial claims. The English traveler remarked that the Grand Duchy of Tuscany had “olives, but not in such plentiful manner as to be able to send any oil into other parts: for they want hereof to serve their own turns; being a commodity so necessary, as without it, it were not possible they should live, feeding as they do upon nothing else but cold fruits and raw herbs.”¹⁰⁰ The Grand Ducal efforts were indeed directed toward the preservation of the state's resources, appearing to support Dallington's account. They consisted of the reorganization of the administrative system that oversaw the production of olive oil throughout the rural district and built stockpiles in case of famine; imposed state control of prices; and issued proclamations that heavily restricted the extraction of oil, together with other essentials, both from the state and respective contado.¹⁰¹

The organization of the rural territory according to the city's needs favored a localized circulation of goods. The regulations allowed Stradano's muleteer to take the oil home from the mill, bearing the pomace as proof of local production, or to deliver the share due to the landlord. Beyond this, he could transport the oil to the closest market through the principal streets on specific market days and hours; the selling of oil was further subjected to the regulation of the oil merchants' guild. However, “turning the back to the city,” especially if that city was Florence, when transporting the oil through the contado or into the district triggered a tax of a giulio per barrel (a silver coin of the value of 13 soldi and 4 denari).¹⁰² The muleteer also had to carry an official note (bulletta) documenting the origin and quantity of the merchandise, the route, and the schedule of arrival. He was banned from introducing oil into areas that were already abundant in this product—for example, in the contado of San Gimignano.¹⁰³

Official weights and measures dictated that the transportation of oil had to be done in fiaschi (a fiasco equals 2.08 liters) or wooden barrels, such as those illustrated in the Oleum Olivarum print, which show the richness of this image for the study of material culture. The authorities in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany strictly forbade the use of animal skin receptacles known as otri—like the ones depicted in the Tacuinum sanitatis (Almanac of health), illustrated in Lombardy from the end of the fourteenth century—since the amount of oil carried in such containers could not be regulated (fig. 4).¹⁰⁴ Defying these bans resulted in the confiscation of both the mule and the oil.¹⁰⁵ An instance of this punishment is found in a 1537 letter sent by Cosimo I, who intervened on behalf of Giannino da Montemagno after the latter's mule and olive oil were mistakenly seized by the Vicopisano guards.¹⁰⁶

Figure 4. Ibn Butlân. Oleum olive in the Tacuinum sanitatis, fifteenth century. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Latin 9333, fol. 88^v.

The plants themselves became controlled when an order issued on 14 April 1575 outlawed the transportation of olive basal shoots and other types of olive plants outside the state.¹⁰⁷ The ban blamed the exports for the shortage of plants that was causing incalculable harm to the cultivation of olive groves. It imposed strict penalties for all those facilitating illicit transactions, who were also deterred by an increased number of spies employed throughout the territory. It is difficult to assess the effectiveness of these measures, which were periodically renewed and, therefore, supposedly transgressed. For example, between 1580 and 1585, Vettori sent regular gifts of olive plants and olives for consumption to the Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II Della Rovere (1549–1631).¹⁰⁸ It is illuminating to note, however, that these political policies corresponded to a new empirical conception and utilitarian exploitation of natural resources, as reflected in the Oleum Olivarum print.¹⁰⁹ Stradano's muleteer impersonated, thus, the economic and legal links between city and countryside at a moment of growing intervention by the Medici in the environment, of which the Alterati members, as small landowners, would have been aware.¹¹⁰

The Oleum Olivarum print could have also hinted toward the economic potential of olive oil foreseen by Vettori for boosting the wealth and prestige of the state. Indeed, in 1570 the Grand Duchy of Tuscany allowed its first exports from a couple of privileged, small but fertile areas in the region of Pistoia (northwest of Florence).¹¹¹ These commercial activities were suppressed during years of low harvest—for example, in 1594 due to the damage caused by frost.¹¹² Overall, the planting and manufacture of oil in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany never reached levels comparable with those achieved in the Kingdom of Naples, which continued to supply the ports of Pisa and Livorno with oil, principally for the wool industry (to lubricate the fibers of wool before carding and spinning).¹¹³ The local Tuscan olive-oil production distinguished itself, however, through its high quality and, consequently, its expensive price.¹¹⁴ It was Vettori's declared ambition to obtain a balance between the value of the Tuscan oil and its levels of production, which is reflected in the Latin inscription at the bottom of the Oleum Olivarum print.

STRADANO'S INSCRIPTION AND THE REINVENTION OF EARLY MODERN OLIVE OIL

The rise in oil consumption and olive planting in sixteenth-century Tuscany corresponded with a renewed interest in the study of plants and husbandry. The reappraisal of the empirical knowledge of Pliny and the Greek physicians and naturalists Pedanius Dioscorides (ca. 40–ca. 90 CE) and Theophrastus (ca. 371–ca. 287 BCE) fueled new scientific enquiries. Early modern texts, such as the treatises of Vettori and Soderini, responded, however, to contemporary local realities.¹¹⁵ Their innovations largely concentrated on botanical aspects, seen as having the ability to improve the rendering of oil and transform it into one of the Grand Duchy's leading industries. This section will investigate how Stradano and his patron reacted to new developments in specialized literature by symbolically including the moment of the olive harvest.

The Oleum Olivarum print depicts pickers in warm garments, long-sleeve robes, mantels, and hats, since the harvest took place at the beginning of the cold season. In fact, the sixteenth-century Sienese naturalist and physician Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–77) informed the readers of his commentary on Dioscorides's De materia medica that in Tuscany the olives were picked in November and December, as seen from the periods of vacation in the calendar of the Alterati academics.¹¹⁶ November was indeed the time when olives were harvested, according to most postclassical literature written between Tuscany and Umbria.¹¹⁷ This schedule is also corroborated by the illustrated calendars showing the olive harvest, which were created predominantly in Central Italy, such as the terracotta roundels designed by Luca della Robbia (ca. 1400–82) for the ceiling of the studiolo of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici (1416–69) in Via Larga around the middle of the fifteenth century (fig. 5).¹¹⁸

Figure 5. Luca della Robbia. November Roundel, from the studiolo of Piero de’ Medici, ca. 1450–56. Tin-glazed terracotta. London, Victoria & Albert Museum. Photo credit: Iberfoto/Archivi Alinari.

Inspired by the fifteenth-century rediscovery of Columella's (first century CE) writings, the November roundel depicts a peasant sitting in an olive tree and stripping the berries from a branch into a basket.¹¹⁹ According to Vettori, it was a common technique, but one that an ancient law, reported by Pliny, prohibited, together with the beating of the olive tree.¹²⁰ The specialized literature recommended picking the olives by hand to avoid bruising the berries or tearing away the shoots and thus ruining the production of the following year.¹²¹ For the berries that could not be reached otherwise, the agronomists, including Vettori and the poet Luigi Alamanni, advised to gently shake the branches with a cane, as seen in the Oleum Olivarum print.¹²² Undoubtedly, Stradano's patron would have been aware of Alamanni's verses, which also acknowledged the contribution of women and children to the harvest, the only type of labor performed by female workers in the engraving.¹²³

Gathering the olives and extracting their oil entailed specialized knowledge. Pliny declared in his Natural History that “making olive oil requires even more science than making wine, as the same olive tree produces a variety of oils.”¹²⁴ The art, according to Pliny, consisted primarily in recognizing the right moment to initiate the olive harvest.¹²⁵ Timing has been a predominant concern of agronomists from antiquity up to our own times, since the fruits’ degrees of ripeness influence the quantity and quality of the oil.¹²⁶ The Latin inscription included at the bottom of the Oleum Olivarum print references these concerns, informing one that “[if] the olives are shaken from the tree while still bitter [and] pressed, they give a rich abundance of oil” (fig. 1). It is a statement that flags two complex issues—namely, the problematic correspondence between unripe olives and levels of production as well as the dissension between what the inscription considers as repertum (discovery) and what Stradano and his patron Alamanni chose to represent.

The Latin inscription advised one to pick the olives while they are still bitter (adhuc acerbae). Recognizing when this precise moment happened within the various stages of maturity of the fruit was a crucial, yet not an easy, task. While seasonality was an essential factor, it was not, however, the primary criterion in choosing the right moment to gather the berries, according to the classical and early modern texts.¹²⁷ They all pointed instead toward the importance of sight—the noblest among senses and the one, according to Aristotle's Metaphysics, that “best helps us to know things and reveals many distinctions”—in perceiving the various changes that occurred in the coloring of the berries (fig. 6).¹²⁸

Figure 6. Gherardo Cibo. Olea Europaea. In Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Discorsi, ca. 1564–84. London, © British Library Board, Add MS 22332, fol. 181^v.

In all likelihood, Stradano's print did not refer to the bitter oil of antiquity made from white olives: the famous oleum omphacium recommended for its excellent medical properties by Pliny or Dioscorides.¹²⁹ Mattioli informed his readers that this type of oil was no longer produced during his time.¹³⁰ One might imagine that the absence of such niche production was due to the self-sufficient economies that characterized the postclassical Italian Peninsula. The bitter oil—also called “summer oil” because it was pressed before the end of October, or mid-September in Pliny—yielded less oil and was thus less profitable.¹³¹

It is possible that Mattioli's successful commentary of Dioscorides, which he translated into vernacular Italian in 1544, informed to some extent the Oleum Olivarum print. Mattioli was close to the Medici court, and Cosimo himself owned and heavily annotated a copy of his work.¹³² In the sections dedicated to the olive tree and oil, Mattioli referenced Tuscan customs and briefly listed the stages involved in the making of olive oil, including a rare mention of the addition of warm water during the pressing of olives, as depicted by Stradano.¹³³ Mattioli listed the principal stages of ripeness according to colors: going from green to yellow, purple, and black (fig. 6).¹³⁴ He recounted that typically “the oil made from fully ripened olives is the one that is employed in daily use. Those who want a sweeter oil, more appropriate for their health, make oil from unripe olives, picked at the time when berries are yellow and starting to turn slightly red.”¹³⁵ Mattioli's reference to a superior oil made from olives at veraison (as they turn from green to purple) recalls the “green oil” described by Columella and Pliny.¹³⁶ In medical terms, Pliny appreciated this type of production as a secondary omphacium.¹³⁷ Likely, this oil was also alluded to in the Oleum Olivarum engraving. Both classical and modern authors agreed that the oil extracted from olives at veraison was the best compromise between quantity and flavor.¹³⁸ This opinion formed especially since the oil made from ripened berries, which peasants typically left to fall to the ground and ferment in piles, was greasy and of less agreeable taste.

It is interesting to consider, however, the nuances that distinguish the recommendations of postclassical authors: these ranged from Crescenzi's (1304–1309) advice to delay the picking of speckled olives until the berries are almost black to Tanaglia's (1480–89), on early harvest, or Mattioli's, on reddish olives.¹³⁹ This variety suggests a gradual, and by no means total, rejection of the humoral doctrine that had dictated gastronomic thought throughout the Middle Ages.¹⁴⁰ According to theories of Hippocratic (450–370 BCE) and Galenic (129–ca. 216) origin, health was contingent on maintaining the balance of the four humors.¹⁴¹ Thus, a hot and dry humoral complexion should be balanced by a cold and humid diet. To some extent, humoral doctrine remained pertinent throughout the early modern period. In the third quarter of the fifteenth century, the cook Bartolomeo Sacchi (1421–81), better known as Platina, still warned against the cold and dry nature of the oil of unripe berries.¹⁴² Although Platina admitted the delicate flavor of the omphacium oil, he believed it to be more dangerous for digestion than the temperate oil pressed from mature olives—in stark contrast with the later writings of Mattioli.

The reevaluation of the medical and culinary qualities of green oil by the Italian elite paralleled the appraisal of fish and vegetables (both excessively cold and watery foods that were prone to corruption). Concordant with the analysis proposed in this article, Ken Albala and Grieco demonstrated how the new scientific and gastronomic interests of the mid-sixteenth century were at the root of this dietary evolution, evidenced, for example, in Mattioli, and later in the Oleum Olivarum print (although predated by authors such as Tanaglia).¹⁴³ Furthermore, Naso noticed how the agronomic texts of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries revealed a change toward the appreciation of more delicate and sweet flavors, in the context of the growing culinary use of olive oil in salads.¹⁴⁴ It is perhaps not by chance that this shift in taste corresponded to a significant increase in the presence of sugar in the cuisine of the European upper class.¹⁴⁵ The visual dialogue between the olive-oil- and sugar-making prints in the Nova Reperta invites one to reflect on this apparent dichotomy between bitter olives and the resulting sweet flavor of their juice.

While appraisal of the benefits of unripe olives clearly transpired from most classical and postclassical sources, the idea that these speckled immature berries led to an abundance of oil, as advocated in Stradano's inscription, contradicted most specialized literature. Indeed, the common knowledge originating from the Latin agronomists Cato and Columella was that the olives yield more if left to mature, despite the lesser quality of the oil.¹⁴⁶ This opinion is well exemplified by the verses of the elder Alamanni: “He who values more sweet taste than abundance / in that holy liquor should pick them [the berries] bitter, / And he who seeks the opposite: the longer he lingers, the more he will fill his vessels with oil.”¹⁴⁷

The Oleum Olivarum print registers, therefore, a shift from the earlier dependences on Latin agronomists and humoral theories to a new empirical approach toward nature in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. As anticipated at the beginning of this article, this transformation can be related to the works of Vettori and Soderini.¹⁴⁸ The latter proclaimed “the proof of experience” as the sole base of agriculture.¹⁴⁹ In actual fact, this late sixteenth-century hands-on approach heavily relied on a revived interest in and a careful rereading of the empiricism of Pliny and the ancient Greek authors, who had been attentively translated in the middle of that same century (as seen in the case of Mattioli).¹⁵⁰ Indeed, it is revealing to think that the idea and catalogue format of the Nova Reperta itself originated in Pliny's encyclopedic classification of human knowledge.¹⁵¹

It is in Theophrastus's De causis plantarum (On the causes of plants) that one finds a fervent diatribe against the idea that “olives pressed when green yield less oil, and the best yield of all is from the olives gathered last.”¹⁵² Contrary to this, Theophrastus argued that “the greater yield [of ripe olives] may be only apparent, owing to the presence of the watery part and the dregs, since the fact that olives contain the oil before they turn dark is evident, and that this oil is purer and lighter in color.”¹⁵³ Theophrastus's argument was carried forth by Pliny and was recovered in 1569 by Vettori.¹⁵⁴ Recurrent is Vettori's exposition of the errors of his contemporaries who believed the brown color to be a sign that the olives were starting to mature, when in reality they were beginning to decompose, “since the berries were already previously mature, and pressed then [when still bitter] they would have yielded a larger quantity of oil.”¹⁵⁵ It is evident, therefore, that the Latin inscription in Stradano's print looked back at Theophrastus and Pliny, and that this transmission occurred through Vettori's treatise.

Markey argued that “Vettori's comparative analysis of present-day methods and those of antiquity recalls Stradano's efforts in the Nova Reperta to demonstrate new methods that surpassed those of the ancients.”¹⁵⁶ Indeed, Vettori lamented the errors of classical authors like Palladius (writing at the turn of the fifth century), who limited himself to copying his predecessors “in an era in which diligence started to fade.”¹⁵⁷ Even the celebrated Virgil and Vettori's fellow countryman, the elder poet Alamanni, did not escape the critical eye of the Florentine humanist, who often dismissed their poetic license: “But let us leave them in their error, and follow what we see from experience to succeed better.”¹⁵⁸ Similar attitudes were noted within the Alterati circle—for example, in the oration of Malaspina, who praised the “telling of the true effect of nature” by Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny.¹⁵⁹

Moreover, Vettori's position toward authority can be compared with the earlier observations of the mechanics of nature by Leonardo da Vinci.¹⁶⁰ Leonardo similarly rebuffed the pretentious attitude of those who quote from the works of others rather than relying on their own experience.¹⁶¹ Vettori's treatise did not exclude, however, classical expertise, but scrutinized and selected it to create new literature and technologies that more profitably responded to the economic and cultural necessities of the early modern world. In doing this, it overcame the science of the past—while still building on it—aligning its efforts with those seen in the Nova Reperta.

Vettori declared that his goal was unearthing the ways in which the “most diligent among the ancients” planted olive groves before the “barbaric invasion” of the Roman Empire. His interests are mainly in the method of propagation through ovuli, an ancient technique—“or let us call it new, for I have rediscovered and almost resurrected it.”¹⁶² In the complex framework of early modern thought, Vettori's rediscovery is viewed as discovery.¹⁶³ By analogy, so was Theophrastus's recovered knowledge in the Oleum Olivarum print, hence justifying the inclusion of this engraving in the Nova Reperta series.

The addition of the Latin inscription and the image of harvest—with respect to Amman's woodcut of the oil maker in the Book of Trades—transformed oil making into a modern innovation by uncovering the science of the most “diligent among the ancients.” In this sense, olive oil relates to another print in the Nova Reperta series—namely, the Mola aquaria (Water mill), the inscription of which stated, “Whoever thinks that watermills were invented in ancient times is all wrong.”¹⁶⁴ Again, as in Vettori's treatise, the ancient technology is claimed anew by Florence, whose industry largely depended upon water mills, also used in the extraction of oil.¹⁶⁵ It is a concept one can see at play in the Nova Reperta, in the often fine lines delineating excitement for novel technologies and classical knowledge, and in their joint effort in improving and celebrating the economy of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

If the discovery of creating a good balance between quantity and quality of oil rests so firmly in the knowledge of when to pick the olives from the trees, why did Stradano and his patron push this crucial step in the process of olive-oil making to the background and concentrate instead on the mechanical aspects of oil manufacturing?

IN THE MILL: THE ALCHEMY OF OLIVE-OIL MAKING IN STRADANO'S PRINT

Postclassical agricultural literature dedicates little space to the actual process of oil production, which Vettori neglected altogether.¹⁶⁶ Interestingly, this was not the case for the Latin writers, who gave detailed guidelines on building a pressroom and manufacturing the oil.¹⁶⁷ This observation reveals the limitations of empirical experience in sixteenth-century agricultural works, and the extent to which the educated elite was interested in and comfortable with getting its hands dirty. Instances are found in the correspondence between the dedicatee of Vettori's treatise, Cosimo I de’ Medici, and his land administrators in Pisa and Livorno, dating to around the 1560s.¹⁶⁸ These letters testify to a campaign of olive growing in Cosimo's lands, as well as to the Duke's specialized knowledge in strictly insisting that the workers maintained the correct distance between olive plants (an aspect of primary importance in Vettori).¹⁶⁹ It is in matters of tree reproduction, soil improvement, harvest, and the properties of the oil and olives that these letters appear to be most interested, and not in the actual work happening in the loud and smelly environment of the mill, which, as the elder poet Alamanni advised, should be kept separate from other living spaces.¹⁷⁰ Conversely, what makes Stradano's print such a powerfully innovative image—despite the rather idealized rendering—is that it foregrounds the oil mill and its workers. The mill here is important but not for its ancient technology. It is a celebration of the work of artisans and their creative power mirroring the collaborative literary practices of the Alterati academics.

A number of early modern artworks document oil mills, reflecting the desire to associate Florence with olive-oil production. A vertical millstone driven by an ox, like the one in Stradano, appears in the calendar opening a book of hours commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92) for his daughter Maddalena (1473–1519) and decorated in Florence around 1486–87.¹⁷¹ The latter also includes the olive harvest, which is delayed until December.¹⁷² Another example is found in a manuscript copy of Columella's De re rustica (On agriculture) from the second half of the fifteenth century, held in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome (fig. 7). Here, one finds olive crushing and pressing inhabiting the initial “X” at the start of book 12, which deals with the responsibilities of the bailiff's wife and the storage of provisions.¹⁷³ In this case, the workers are turning a direct double press in which a wooden plate is forced downward by two screws fixed at opposite ends, a type that is encountered in contemporary inventories of the Tuscan countryside.¹⁷⁴ Outside Tuscany, around the end of the sixteenth century, the humanist Marc Antonio Bonciario (1555–1616) used a direct screw press, similar to the one employed by Stradano's workers, as his personal emblem of membership to the Academy of the Insensati di Perugia (Academy of the Senseless).¹⁷⁵ It shows the importance of artworks in documenting material culture, left otherwise to the often evasive archival documents and scarce archeological sources.¹⁷⁶

Figure 7. Initial “X.” In Columella, De re rustica, 1451–1500. Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, MS E 39, fol. 191^r. Per concessione della Biblioteca Vallicelliana, Roma – Ministero della Cultura. Photo by Antonio Idini.

One can find depictions of oil mills and oil-making machinery in the notes of Leonardo da Vinci (fig. 8), and, before him, in the treatises of the Sienese artist, architect, and engineer Francesco di Giorgio Martini.¹⁷⁷ The innovative technologies presented in these works challenge one to think about their relationship with the Nova Reperta. The scientific illustrations of mills and presses in Leonardo and Francesco di Giorgio are accompanied by drawings of various parts, measurements, and technical observations that explicate engineering knowledge. Moreover, for Leonardo, drawing became a tool both for his experimental processes and for the investigation of nature.¹⁷⁸ The observation of mechanical movement helped him understand by analogy the operation of natural phenomena. The role of visual representations in explaining the correspondence between the work of art and that of nature evokes, in more general terms, the principle behind the Nova Reperta prints and their place within the intellectual debates of the Alterati academics.

Figure 8. Leonardo da Vinci. Study for an olive press, 1480. Milan, Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, fol. 47^r. © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Mondadori Portfolio.

In Francesco di Giorgio and, in a less organized manner, in the encyclopedic notes of Leonardo, the agricultural/industrial implements are placed alongside other types of mills employed in military and architectural engineering.¹⁷⁹ This juxtaposition of machine variations and observations anticipates the catalogue of Renaissance innovations depicted by Stradano. In fact, one can also notice in the Nova Reperta the recurrence of technologies and their application in new industries, as seen, for example, in the deployment of the classical press and grinding stone in sugar refinement, distillery, and armor polishing.¹⁸⁰ This is reminiscent of the concept of progress exposed in the work De rerum natura (On the nature of things) of Lucretius (ca. 99–ca. 55 BCE)—the Latin poet esteemed by Alamanni—according to which “all things illuminate each other's rise.”¹⁸¹ The notion of the old illuminating the new seems to have inspired Vettori's modern discoveries and channeled the argumentative debates of the Alterati.

It is, however, significant that the innovative engineering projects of Leonardo and Francesco di Giorgio Martini do not appear in Stradano's traditional olive-oil mill. In 1591—the year in which Philips Galles printed the first edition of the Nova Reperta—an artisan named Luca Colombini, from Spoleto, patented in Livorno a type of basket for the pressing of small olives, which promised to increment the production and quality of the oil.¹⁸² The fact that Stradano and his patron Alamanni did not concern themselves with portraying the most innovative mill practices led to a blurred division between ancient and modern, inviting a rather rhetorical reading of the technological advancements of olive-oil making in the Oleum Olivarum print.

This is further reinforced when closely examining the Oleum Olivarum print. Stradano depicted the various stages in the process of oil making in unprecedented detail and with attention to the rendering of the properties of different materials: stone, wood, ceramics, copper, and reeds (also due to the great skill of the engraver). A close examination reveals, however, the lack of accuracy in the representation of the tools and craftsmanship involved in the process of olive-oil making. Marie-Claire Amouretti highlighted the expertise required in the operation of a traditional oil mill, which included the knowledge of how much olive paste one could fit into the fiscoli.¹⁸³ The workers in Stradano's print overfilled the baskets with still-intact olives, which would have posed a high level of resistance, causing the screw to break.¹⁸⁴ Other incongruities are evident in the off-centered grinding stone and the pole extending from behind the stone and at the ox's back, rendering it of no practical function. Scholars Dirk Imhof, James Clifton, and James Akerman noticed similar discrepancies depicted in the Nova Reperta series, including in the print shop and the representation of mathematical and navigational technologies.¹⁸⁵

Stradano would have certainly visited one of the Tuscan oil mills as a source. His didactic design evinces knowledge of the space and the steps required in the production of oil. It is, however, not scientific precision that interests him but, rather, a broader symbolic rendering of the process, tools, and human work involved in the creation of a resurrected Florentine olive oil. The celebration of human ingenuity places Stradano's print in conversation with broader sixteenth-century philosophic attitudes toward technology and nature seen in Leonardo and the later writings of the Swiss physician Paracelsus, the German mineralogist and metallurgist Agricola (1494–1555), and the French craftsman Bernard Palissy (1510–89).¹⁸⁶ According to Clarence J. Glacken, what unites these artisans and thinkers, who originated from very different time periods and contexts, is their conscious recognition of the creative power of humankind to transform nature, even in the most ordinary activities.¹⁸⁷ The link between the Nova Reperta and some of these writings has been drawn by Pamela Smith, who demonstrated the ability of Stradano's depicted artisans and tools “to imitate by art the process of nature,” with limited attention, however, toward the Oleum Olivarum print.¹⁸⁸

Stradano's oil makers not only imitate nature but also transform it, adding value for the benefit of humankind.¹⁸⁹ In fact, Glacken showed how the idea that God gave humans the capacity to enhance nature (an idea, however, that was not devoid of nuances) springs from many of the aforementioned sixteenth-century thinkers.¹⁹⁰ Among the latter, one must consider the Italian mathematician Guidobaldo del Monte.¹⁹¹ In his address to Francesco Maria II Della Rovere opening the Six Books of Mechanics (1577), Guidobaldo reflected on the utility and nobility of mechanics for the state of Urbino—reminiscent of Vettori's similar praise of agriculture.¹⁹² In fact, Guidobaldo mentioned oil among the benefits that the technical application of simple machinery brought to everyday life.¹⁹³ He praised the tools of artisans and farmers for their ability to rival nature.¹⁹⁴

Agriculture itself, as the oldest among the arts, is celebrated by Giuseppe Moletti (1531–88), professor of mathematics at the University of Padua, in his commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanica (Mechanical problems).¹⁹⁵ For Moletti, as for Leonardo before him, both nature and art operated according to the same mechanical principles. By imitating natural laws, humankind could improve nature:

Nature would not have given us the vine, the olive, or grain, since wild grapes, olives, and grain are unsuitable for our uses. And without the wine press, olive press, and mill, we would not have wine, oil, or flour. Similarly, while nature gives us wool, flax, and cotton, art gives us the means to spin yarn and weave cloth, which we learned from the spider. So in general, while nature gives us the raw materials, art makes them useful to man.¹⁹⁶

This creative power of humans, who are able to change their environment through their daily activities, was associated by Paracelsus with alchemical experimentations.¹⁹⁷ The figure who carefully decants the oil on the right side of the muleteer in the Oleum Olivarum print (fig. 1) is reminiscent of the alchemist who, as Paracelsus declared, brought nature (olives) to completion (oil).¹⁹⁸ His concentration on this delicate and final procedure in the transformation of matter contrasts the heavy physical work in the oil mill, and sends one to the distillation print in the Nova Reperta series, another of the postclassical inventions that can be traced to the Medici court.¹⁹⁹

Indeed, as seen at the beginning of the paper, Stradano famously represented Francesco I's undertakings in alchemy in the panels decorating the studiolo of the Grand Duke (fig. 2).²⁰⁰ Francesco is depicted leaning over a small furnace on the right of The Laboratory of an Alchemist (1570). He is diligently heating a pan while mixing the green liquid—which had been pressed out of plants on the left—with a spoon.²⁰¹ Francesco's pose and actions are mirrored in the worker ladling the oil on the right of the Oleum Olivarum print (figs. 1–2). Like the latter, Francesco is separating the medicine from the dregs through the agency of fire, a process described by Paracelsus.²⁰² In fact, the medical distillery, also included by Stradano in the Nova Reperta, was one of the most important branches of alchemy.²⁰³ The relationship between the two images is all the more relevant given the pharmaceutical usage of olive oil.²⁰⁴ This use was especially the case for the bitter oil depicted by Stradano and recommended by the Greek physician and botanist Dioscorides, among others.²⁰⁵ The archives richly document the medical use of oil at the Florentine court.²⁰⁶

Fire was important in both alchemy and oil manufacturing—for example, in boiling the water needed in the working of the pomace.²⁰⁷ Moreover, a warm environment was a crucial condition during the entire process of making and storing oil, especially since these operations took place in early winter. Pliny reported from Theophrastus that “the cause of oil as of other things is entirely warmth, and this is why steps are taken to produce warmth even in the presses and the cellars by lighting large fires.”²⁰⁸ It is perhaps why Stradano decided to retain the image of the fireplace from Amman's woodcut, despite Columella's severe admonition against lighting fires in the mill, especially in those where—as in the Oleum Olivarum print—green oil is pressed, since “the taste of the oil is spoiled by smoke and soot.”²⁰⁹

Like the supervision of olive planting by Cosimo I, alchemy represented one of the acceptable forms through which the governing strata negotiated its engagement into manual work, as these occupations still required a high degree of erudite knowledge. Stradano and his patron thus placed the manufacturing of olive oil at the intersection of artisanal work and humanistic knowledge. In doing so, they also recalled the apparently divergent concerns of the Alterati academics. On the one hand, the Oleum Olivarum print reflected the collaborative literary practices of the Alterati by depicting the combined effort of the mill workers in creating a novel product for the Florentine market. On the other hand, the harvest scene and Latin inscription alluded instead to their patrician aspirations.

CONCLUSION

This article emphasized the status of olive-oil making on a par with the other postclassical discoveries depicted in the Nova Reperta series. It has integrated the Oleum Olivarum print within the diverse economic, scientific, humanistic, and social ambitions of the Accademia degli Alterati. The study demonstrates the impact of Piero Vettori, a figure close to the Alterati, on the concept of innovation as displayed in the olive-oil print, particularly in the Latin inscription accompanying it. It has explored the complex intertwining between classical knowledge and modern achievements echoed throughout the Nova Reperta series. The essay also integrates the print into the broader empirical approach to nature manifested through a novel interest in artisanship, as well as into the political and economic exploitation of the surrounding countryside characterizing sixteenth-century Florence.

Representing the process of production rather than the mythical moment of discovery allowed Stradano and Alamanni to reflect on the modern innovations of olive-oil making. In doing so, the olive-oil-making print engaged with both agricultural literature and visual sources. Stradano changed the focus from the figure of the olive maker in Amman's woodcut to the actual process of production. He created a new link between the olive harvest—unknown to Germanic areas—and the reclaimed classical knowledge of when to pick the berries, the alchemical work of transforming olives into oil, and the muleteer transporting the oil to the market. The latter impersonated the ultimate politico-economic goal of making olive oil an export product to enrich the economy and power of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

The highly innovative role of the Oleum Olivarum print stands, thus, in bringing together the mechanical arts involved in the manufacturing of oil and the new empirical, yet highly learned, approach to the study of agriculture. Through depicting both the nobility and utility of olive-oil making, Stradano and his patron Alamanni symbolically elevated the new art of olive-oil making to an argument worthy of the erudite discussions happening in the Accademia degli Alterati.

***