Bartolomeo Bimbi

On four large canvases finished in 1715, Bartolomeo Bimbi laid out 116 kinds of citrus, oranges, lemons, citrons, bergamots and bitter melangoli, each labelled and each painted from a real specimen. It looks like a botanist's archive because that is more or less what it was.

Bimbi worked in Florence for Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who collected plants and fruit the way other princes collected antiquities and treated a perfect specimen as a small proof of God's handiwork. Bimbi painted to order: prize grapes, giant gourds, unusual animals, whole seasons of the garden, often working beside the Medici court botanist Pier Antonio Micheli so that the varieties were correctly named and sorted.

The results hung in Medici villas and now sit largely in Florence and at the still-life museum at Poggio a Caiano near the city. Read together they are a picture of what actually grew in Tuscany 300 years ago, down to varieties of pear that no longer exist.