Dürer’s rhinoceros and what he or she was wearing: Carnations, luxury gardens, identity formation, and urban splendor, 1460–1550

Abstract

This article examines how images of carnations in the page borders and calendar miniatures of the late medieval devotional books locally produced for Netherlandish civic elites provide an opportunity to examine identity formation and concepts of urban magnificence and splendor. It also considers the role of carnations in discussions and depictions of gardens in a popular medieval Italian estate creation and management book, Piero Crescenzi’s Ruralium Commodorum, that, especially in French translation in Netherlandish illuminated manuscript copies, was a how-to-do-it manual for those seeking to build manor and town houses with gardens befitting their status. Thus, both depictions of the potted plant in art and scenes of the carnation in a garden setting were intended to project the owners’ flower connoisseurship and their splendor and civic magnificence. Further, the makers (in most cases artisan fellow townsmen of the commissioners) of these miniatures and borders projected for the books’ patrons luxury and consumption fantasies on which to model their lives, and to help them distinguish themselves culturally from the long established landed aristocracy.