The first record of Marcgrave's capuchin in Europe: South American monkeys in Italy during the early sixteenth century

Around the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century, in the Villa Medici of Poggio a Caiano in the vicinity of Florence, the Florentine artist Andrea del Sarto painted a great fresco, commissioned by Pope Leo X in honour of his late father, Lorenzo de’ Medici. This fresco contains one of the earliest representations in Europe of a living South American primate, which can easily be identified as Marcgrave's capuchin, Cebus flavius (Schreber, 1774). The appearance is so accurate that we can assume that the painter was familiar with the animal, and may even have used a live monkey as a model. Marcgrave's capuchin is a taxon that was recently rediscovered in Brazil, where it has been found in fragments of the Atlantic Forest in the states of Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco, Alagoas and Paraiba. The portrayal of this species in the early sixteenth-century decoration of Poggio a Caiano raises interesting questions about the popularity of Brazilian primates in European artistic and scientific circles fr...