The Studiolo of Paolo Guinigi : Valois Influence in Early Renaissance Italy

The princely studiolo is associated more than any other feature of the Italian renaissance palace with its owner's cultural identity and humanist credentials. Its Italian history begins in February 1414 when Paolo Guinigi, lord of Lucca from 1400 to 1430, paid Arduino da Baese 100 gold florins for a wooden study in his palace of the Augusta. The assumption is generally made that the importance of Guinigi's now lost studiolo rested on the novelty of Arduino's intarsia and its influence on the more famous studioli of Belriguardo and Belfiore in Ferrara, the Medici palace in Florence, and ultimately the great trompe l'œil studioli of Urbino and Gubbio. A close reading of the correspondence from Guinigi's agents in Genoa in 1413, however, reveals that its panelling was not Italian in manufacture, but was made of Baltic oak imported from Handers and followed the example of Europe's most prestigious court, the Valois. This suggests that intarsia was not as integral to the early development of the princely studiolo in early fifteenth century Italy as had been thought, and that the influence of French and Burgundian culture has been underestimated.