Foreign as native: Baltic amber in Florence

Most amber artefacts in early modern Medici collections originated in the Prussian cities of Danzig and Königsberg. Despite this connection, the Florentine painter Santi di Tito depicted the material from which these artefacts were made as native to Italy. One of the sources for this misapprehension was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a classical poem that locates the occurrence of amber on the banks of the river Eridanus–widely associated with the Po in early modern Italy. In Ovid’s narrative, amber took its luminous form from the metamorphosis of the daughters of the Sun into trees. It was their hardened tears that gave rise to the new material. In this account, amber signalled a transformation from liquid to solid, its lustrous materiality lending credibility to Ovid’s narrative. Referring to the physical and olfactory attributes of amber, this article explains why the Ovidian myth was at times given more credence than the early modern naturalist tracts that situated amber deposits on the Prussian littoral. The mechanism of this discursive framing is explored here with a focus on how sensory perception is rooted in culturally bound values and beliefs.