2010/02/26 by Marco Masseti, Cecilia Veracini · 2 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Psychology · #Plant and animal studies #Psychedelics and Drug Studies #Primate Behavior and Ecology #Fresco #Honour #Painting #Art #Popularity #Homeland #Ancient history #Geography #Ethnology #Archaeology #History #Art history
paper · doi:10.3366/e0260954109001673
openalex publication_date 2010/02/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
Around the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century, in the Villa Medici of Poggio a Caiano in the vicinity of Florence, the Florentine artist Andrea del Sarto painted a great fresco, commissioned by Pope Leo X in honour of his late father, Lorenzo de’ Medici. This fresco contains one of the earliest representations in Europe of a living South American primate, which can easily be identified as Marcgrave's capuchin, Cebus flavius ( Schreber, 1774 ). The appearance is so accurate that we can assume that the painter was familiar with the animal, and may even have used a live monkey as a model. Marcgrave's capuchin is a taxon that was recently rediscovered in Brazil, where it has been found in fragments of the Atlantic Forest in the states of Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco, Alagoas and Paraíba. The portrayal of this species in the early sixteenth-century decoration of Poggio a Caiano raises interesting questions about the popularity of Brazilian primates in European artistic and scientific circles from the time of the discovery of the New World, and about the rapidity of the initial anthropogenic diffusion of some of these animals beyond their homeland.