The Medici Cheetah Musk/Maraschino

From an arched lunette high in the castle turrets, The Medici Cheetah reclines languorously. The scene below is an unfinished fresco bathed in hazy light. Once the province of Gods and birds, this ethereal aerial view presents a forbidden landscape of promises; the Elysian fields, a surrealist earthly paradise with a Babelian tower. Unblemished, soft white petals contrast with luminous, glassy fruits: purity and blood. Columbines crown the captive cheetah’s head, while the noble dove brings news.

The Medici Cheetah was inspired by Italian Renaissance paintings and cultural events alongside beliefs and attitudes of the era; the dichotomy of idealism versus naturalism opening a portal to landscapes of fantasy, a ‘New World’. Within a scene largely inspired by The Arrival in Bethlehem by Master LC, we find mythological or fantasy buildings such as the Tower of Babel (Bruegel The Elder), juxtaposed with real architecture from Medici Florence and its surroundings, such as The Tower of Pisa, the Basilica di Santa Croce, and the Battistero di San Giovanni. Our feline protagonist lounges in the foreground, reclining like Titian’s Venus D’Urbino, the languid, skyward gaze a common feature of Renaissance portraiture. Late in 1487, the sultan of Egypt presented a female giraffe to Lorenzo de’ Medici, which appears within the landscape of this design preparing for the carnival, with several other impressive but nonindigenous creatures. Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights also contained a giraffe, an elephant and a leopard, alongside anachronous plants, red fruits, and flowers, here in the form of white tulips, cherries and pomegranate, symbolising the blood and flesh of Christ and illustrated in the fashion of Schreiber’s illuminated manuscripts. During the Renaissance, the columbine was primarily a Christian symbol, particularly associated with the Holy Spirit due to its dove-like appearance. The banded sky references a 1465 painting, La Divina Commedia di Dante, by Domenico di Michelino, located in the Florence Cathedral.

The whimsical text within the design is a play on Titian’s The Venus D’Urbino.