CINQUE per MILLE
CINQUE per MILLE
Also known as the ground floor writing room, it was used as a bedroom and, sometimes, as the merchant’s personal office.
The room has a cross-ribbed vault decorated with lilies and lunettes in the walls depicting hunting scenes in a thick forest populated by numerous animals.
Recently restored precious XV century works are also on display in the room: two panels portraying Monte Pugliesi and Francesco Datini, realized by Tommaso di Piero Trombetto, and a plaster bas-relief of the Madonna with Child.
The captions refer to the history of the Ceppi.
According to descriptions appearing in inventories drawn up over the years, the room contained a brickwork bed with painted wooden predella, headboard and canopy, a bed with mattress, carpet and clothes-stand, a walnut writing desk, various chests with locks, one of which containing books, a pair of firedogs, shields with Francesco’s and Margherita’s coats of arms and a panel depicting the Madonna with tabernacle.
Among the objects, tin and marble ink-wells, lever scales and balances, a ruler, money-box, spurs and bridles, boots and bites.
Oil lamps used for lighting, one made of brass on a candle-holder with two wicks, an iron and a bone lantern, a small candle-holder.
Documents report the arrival in Prato on 11 December 1389 of Dino di Puccio, accompanied by his “Gharzone o chompagno”, Iacopo di Agnolo, commissioned to paint this room.
The walls are decorated with geometric diamond-shaped motifs in which, as frequently encountered in stately homes of those times, lilies alternated with crowns and lion’s heads, in imitation, as was the custom, of a cloth or a vast richly embroidered tapestry hanging on the wall. The upper edge, with a false anchoring system – made up of big nails supporting a horizontal pole to which a white net on a black ground is fixed – is animated by little putti, flowering shoots, vine racemes and, at regular intervals, the Datini and Bandini coats of arms.
In the lunettes above, hunting scenes set in verdant woodlands with trees laden with red fruits and pine-cones, populated by different animals, wolves and peacocks, owls and wild boars.
The vaults are decorated with pale-coloured lilies on a dark background, while in the centre are the emblems of Francesco Datini and his wife Margherita Bandini, alternated with front views of faces and profiles in Agnolesque style.
The Bandini coat of arms – a shield on a silver background crossed by a red band – has unusual colouring (the background colour is green), in all probability the result of changes that have taken place over the centuries which do not correspond to its original appearance. Regarding the four faces that alternate with the shields, a study carried out during recent restoration concluded that these are paintings on paper stuck to the vault with animal glue. Observation of the filigree enables us to date intervention to after 1392. It can therefore be assumed that the vault of the room was modernised around that date, by a modest painter in Agnolesque style.
