Plutus Wall Painting Analysis

The chamber has shown the affinity and communication of nature and human through its decorative ceiling. There are 34 thematic paintings on panels in the chamber in total, the thematic oval panels on the 4 sides of the room showing religious or mythological scenes, or representing scenes of production process and trade. The object collection itself was stored in 20 cabinets. The arrangement of this hidden vault room is quite unique, instead of showing the collections in a large cabinet, Francesco divided four areas to organize vista of thematic canvases. Earth, water, air and fire are the four governing elements of each side of the space (Figure 1) These wall paintings showed the ultimate personal artistic preference of Francesco. Under each wall, there is a serial of exquisite oil paintings related to the theme. There are 19 of them distributed along the four thematic walls, covering by different oval –framed paintings that indicated the contents in the cupboard. “The paintings of the Studiolo concealed cabinets containing the dilettante prince's collections of precious gems and artifact.” Borghini got the project started with the two niches on the wall of Earth. There were two required statues were placed there. One was Plutus and the other one was Ops. Both statues are made of precious material like gold, silver, porphryry, jasper, as well as marble and sandstone, which is a way to give physical attributes of the God. For the wall of water, there were naked god and
Francesco shows up in the works merely as a participant in this quest for knowledge. Francesco appears at the painting’s left, examining a goblet produced in the Medici glassworks. Francesco is virtually unnoticed by all but a few of the workers, suggesting the prince as merely an observer of the process of technological creation rather than director or creator of such