A few days ago, during my usual tours around the Marche region, I passed through Arcevia, a charming little village perched on the first hills behind Senigallia.
I was thinking of Gherardo Cibo and his drawings, which I'd stumbled upon some time ago in a local library, and immediately, walking through the historic center, I began to wonder which building he owned, as the street suddenly came alive with people, horse-drawn carts, curtains billowing from open windows, maids cleaning the doorways, watching me sideways. It always feels the same when I immerse myself in history: I'm immersed in a time that's no longer mine, but who can say to whom time belongs, after all? Has anyone ever owned it? And so, amidst these thoughts swirling around in my head, I asked him to accompany me to the story I wanted to tell, that of a man who lived in these parts in the 16th century and was a talented botanist and painter.
Obviously, no one showed up at my request. I continued wandering the streets, thinking about his life in these parts: about what it had been like to move from Rome, where he was born and raised—he, a man of noble lineage and the grandson of a pope, was a native of Rome—to the rocky Rocca Contrada, as Arcevia was once called. I also thought about his love of plants, which shone through in his drawings. I thought he felt free here, having abandoned the military and diplomatic career that had taken him around Europe, and with no real financial worries, he could afford to dedicate his life to what he was truly born to do.
Then, after a lot of thinking and walking, I found myself in the car ready to go home.
On the road, his beautiful drawings were always in my mind. The rocky landscapes in the background, the hills, the farmers with their sheaves, the shepherds and farmhouses alternating with towers, and those oversized, bold plants in the foreground, as if to remind us that nature is the true Goddess, the mother of all things that towers over us and orders the multiplicity of her Creation.
As I was walking down, I too looked at the hills. I could never have painted them because that wasn't my true nature. I felt a sort of envy at having been so capable of expressing himself and at the same time being so incapable of believing in his multiple talents.
Because in life, it's said, he had a good-natured and generous nature, so much so that he gave away his drawings without much thought, a sign that he didn't take them into account. And in fact, until recently, the authorship of his work had been attributed to some of his friends, who were also botany enthusiasts.
It was the stubbornness of a scholar, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, who unraveled the mystery and, together with Giorgio Mangani, wrote a book about it. Those drawings, now held at the British Library in London and the Marucelliana in Florence, are by Gherardo Cibo and no one else, and it's high time some enlightened local government at least held an exhibition about them.
He had arrived in the Marche after the sack of Rome, initially taking refuge in Camerino with relatives, then diverted to Arcevia, where his mother and sister, a nun in a nearby convent, were staying. He had studied in Bologna with the botanist Luca Ghini, in contact with the most enlightened and powerful doctors in the pay of the Habsburgs. He had become close to the Flemish painters after discovering their painting during a trip to Flanders commissioned by Charles V to quell a revolt over the new political-religious direction: the Spanish Inquisition was unwelcome in those parts, he was not in Italy, and the new dictates of the Council of Trent were not so well received in the rest of Europe, with a whiff of post-Lutheran heresy.
Perhaps this was also why the alchemist Gherardo Cibo took refuge in the Marche region, because herbs were considered suspicious material, akin to witches and their dubious nature. Perhaps his passionate but unsystematic approach was simply a strategy to continue his studies undisturbed.
In his refuge far from Rome, Gherardo collected, dried, and catalogued plants. Yet for centuries, even the authorship of his herbals, which can now be consulted in many national libraries, such as those in Rome and Fermo, was unknown. He knew herbs so well that he even wrote treatises on how to paint and color plants and landscapes, creating pastels himself by "blending herbs, berries, flowers, and seeds."
Flemish figurative art, which inspired his drawings, allowed him to create striking leaps in perspective that highlighted the plants, lending the drawing a certain entirely original narrative charm. His fortresses, arches, and lakeside landscapes perhaps served to confuse the message: the oversized display of the plant confirmed the sacredness of nature that governs the cosmos, the respect for its laws that guide us and allow us to live in harmony on this earth.
Ernst Junger said: “when the fountains dry up, the nihilistic buzz of a reason that evokes monsters and nightmares of all sorts is silenced, and we begin to contemplate landscapes, plants, stars, animals, and water again to regain a sense of reality.”
This is what Gherardo Cibo must have done when he took refuge in Arcevia. And he succeeded magnificently.
