“persuade[s] her readers to experience the unknown, to go beyond first impressions . . . extremely witty and well-written . . . for those who savor art”

--The Chicago Tribune

“Packed with information rarely found in standard guides. . .[Artful Italy] offers a fresh perspective. Highly recommended.”

--The Library Journal

MILAN: Trivulzio Tapestries
of the Months

The first tapestries to dedicate a single panel to each month of the year, the 16-foot square vignettes woven of wool and silk illustrate life at the turn of the sixteenth century in Lombardy. December was recently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s special exhibition on Italian Renaissance tapestries, on loan from Milan’s Castello Sforzesco,

December is real work and real play. The vignettes poetically show how pig slaughtering brings out both the murderer and the lover in us all. In the Renaissance, epicurean laboratories figured out how to preserve innovative cold meats. By the fifteenth century, pork carvers had established their own guild. Italian towns imported workers skilled in butchering from the Umbrian town of Norcia; the new citizens were called Norcini. Pig entrails became sausage cases or smoked budalacci, the cheeks lard, the head and neck capocollo sausages, the liver mezzafegati sausages, and the haunches prosciutto.

     The men and women carrying bowls for the blood (two stand under Capricorn [on right behind pot]) evidently consider the slaughter a sacrifice, given their pious expressions. The floor is tiled and thus easy to clean of offal, fruits dot the foreground as garnish to the main meals of blood sausage and pork, and for the first time, children play with the grown-ups rather than by themselves [left foreground].

     The central figure resembles Father Time with his sickle, and the sun [left background top] a man on his last gasp. Behind the utilitarian brick arches lies a cityscape that could be Sempione Park (behind the Castello Sforzesco) or even Manhattan&146;s Central Park. Father Time waves his arm at the ailing sun and lifts his sickle, and the two archways peer like binoculars into the future of Milan. The inscription [under the pot] reads:

            Rejoice in birth,
            When the flocks fill the house,
            The birdcatcher and his kind mount,
            Increase their offspring,
            December works for the slothful.