Wonders of Common Things: The Natural History of Maternity and the Renaissance Garden-Grotto

When Fynes Moryson (1566–1630), an Elizabethan Englishman abroad, toured Italy in the last decade of the sixteenth century he could not have imagined that the wondrous sights he saw there would soon be reproduced on his own native soil with equal verve. Visiting the lavish gardens of Pratolino just outside Florence he was struck by the many ingenious automata and the breathtaking statuary which adorned an earthly paradise boasting ‘a statua of a Giant, with a curled beard, like a Monster, some forty sixe els high, whose great belly will receive many men at once, and by the same are the Images of many Nimphes, all which cast out water abundantly’. These were sentinels to ‘a Cave under the earth … from whence by many pipes the waters are brought to serve the workes of these Gardens’, among which was ‘a Fountaine of Jupiter & Iris distilling water’. Reproducing the abundance, fecundity and mystery of the natural world, the Pratolino water-works were ‘wrought within little houses, which house is vulgarly called grotta, that is, Cave (or Den), yet they are not built under the earth but above in the manner of a Cave’.