Botanical Symbolism in Vicino Orsini’s Sacro Bosco

Abstract

The Orsini Sacro Bosco, or Sacred Wood, has always been considered just that — a forest or wooded grove rather than a garden. Recreating its presence in the lives of the owner Pier Francesco (‘Vicino’) Orsini (1523–1585), the duke of Bomarzo, and his guests means attending to the flora once prevalent in the sixteenth century. Here, the historical record fails, for although Orsini’s letter of 3 April 1583 to his friend Giovanni Drouet references ‘taking solace among the plants’, their correspondence says nothing about specific trees or shrubs. What meets the modern eye is a mix of native and foreign species introduced since the mid-twentieth century, as well as fruits of two species of trees — pine and oak — carved repeatedly in ‘peperino’ tufo stone as a prominent sculptural motif on the park’s central terrace (Figure 1). The non-native plants deserve only a few words, since they tend to mislead the historical perceptions of present-day visitors. The colossal pinecones and acorns, however, amount to a significant and intentional part of the Sacro Bosco’s sculptural program that has been mostly overlooked in scholarly literature. Enrico Guidoni’s 2006 study of the sculptural program of the Sacro Bosco synthesizes earlier efforts to interpret the pinecone and acorn terrace. He posits that these sculptures may allude to an occult, now lost, meaning involving preparation for an afterlife, with cones being perfectly designed to hold the seeds of such robust species of plants — a suggestion that seems plausible if difficult to buttress in any surviving texts. The acorns Guidone links with the heraldic device of Pope Julius II della Rovere (r. 1503–1513), whose illegitimate daughter, Felice della Rovere (1483–1536) after the death of her first husband married Gian Giordano Orsini (ca. 1460–1517), becoming the progenitor of the subsequent Orsini dukes of Bracciano. The present study explores the multivalent symbolism of the carved pinecones and acorns by drawing on the patron’s classical knowledge, the emblemata studies practiced by his nephew Fulvio Orsini (1529–1600) for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–1589), and the contemporaneous political significance of the representations of pinecones in Rome, where the ancient bronze Pigna had become a Vatican symbol and was relocated to the Cortile del Belvedere in 1562–65 by Pope Pius IV. In particular, I will advance a thesis that the pinecones held symbolic allusions to Orsini’s political allegiance to pro-Farnese popes. Together with the acorns’ long association with Roman civic service and military valor, the alternating motif affirms the patron’s past soldierly prowess while also fitting the bosco’s classicizing sculptural program. As someone who served reliably in papal military campaigns but later came to view himself, as he wrote in a letter to a friend, as a ‘denizen of the woods’, I will also argue that the pinecone and acorn motif served Orsini’s selffashioning. Insomuch as the identities of any artistic advisors to Vicino remain unknown, the pinecones in the sculptural program at Bomarzo offer association with Pirro Ligorio, the artist responsible for moving the Vatican Pigna, which I interpret as a likely model for Bomarzo’s pinecones. To return briefly to the living flora of the Sacro Bosco, the modern visitor to the site encounters introduced species that were not part of the original plant palette or planting scheme. Recent botanical study of the native flora of the adjacent Riserva Naturale Monte Casoli di Bomarzo offers a chance to re-