Large Citron in a Landscape

This is a portrait of a single piece of fruit, a citron, painted large and set out in the open landscape rather than on a table. The citron is the knobbly, thick-skinned ancestor of the lemon, grown more for its peel and its rarity than for eating, and the Medici prized unusual specimens of it. Bimbi was the painter Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, kept to record exactly this kind of thing: a prize fruit, shown life-size and true to its variety, the way we might photograph a record-breaking vegetable today. Setting one citron alone against sky and hills turns a botanical record into something closer to a monument, a piece of the grand-ducal garden held still at the moment it was ripe.