Something odd emerged as a Cambridge student began to research the work of a Renaissance garden designer: although the 16th century Italian artist, sculptor and designer Costantino de’ Servi travelled constantly and never seemed to be short of a bob, he seemed to have completed very few gardens - or any other kind of work.

Wherever there was trouble in Europe, however, be it wars rumbling, alliances being forged, or regime change threatened, de’ Servi seemed to pop up. Then the historian discovered that wherever the supposed gardener travelled and whoever he was nominally working for – and he got as far west as the court of James I in London, and as far east as Persia – he remained on the payroll of one of the richest and most powerful families in Europe, the Medici of Florence. Like any good modern spy who keeps a low profile, there is no known portrait of him.

“In the beginning as I trawled through his correspondence in the archives in Florence, expecting to find evidence of many wonderful Renaissance gardens he had worked on, and found nothing, I was very disappointed. Then as I followed the paper trail, I began to wonder if there was something more interesting going on,” said Davide Martino, a history student at St John’s College, Cambridge.

“I’m not sure you could precisely call him a spy in modern terms,” Martino said. “But his role meant that he could go anywhere and gain intimate access in any court in Europe, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that he was constantly feeding useful information back to his paymasters in Florence.”

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One of the few pieces of work that de’ Servi definitely completed was a garden design for Henry, Prince of Wales, son and heir of James I – and far more popular than his father. The project came, as so often in de’ Servi’s career, at a politically sensitive time: the Medici were trying to arrange a marriage between the prince and one of their family, Caterina.

According to de’ Servi’s letters, the marriage plans hit a bump when the teenage prince demanded to see a portrait of his potential intended, and the ambassador from Florence refused to provide one.



De’ Servi left a sketch of a beautiful young woman in the prince’s quarters, and when Henry asked who she was, claimed that it was Caterina. Henry became much more enthusiastic, but died of typhoid in November 1612, aged just 18. His death, widely regarded as a disaster, had profound consequences for English history: his frail younger brother Charles would become king, spark the English civil war, and die on the scaffold in Whitehall.

Martino suspects that the sketch which almost made the match may survive, subject and artist unrecognised, somewhere in the vast drawings collection kept at Windsor Castle – but the period is one of the few where he has also traced a finished piece of work on a garden design.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest It is suspected that some of de’ Servi’s designs and drawings lie somewhere within Windsor Castle’s archives. Photograph: Peter Packer/Royal Collection Tr/Press Association

King James preferred his palace at Westminster, but Henry liked the old palace west of the capital at Richmond upon Thames, where his father’s second cousin, Elizabeth I, lived out her last months.

De’ Servi created for Henry a plan for a sophisticated Renaissance garden at Richmond, with elaborate planting, formal walks and water features, but the prince’s death meant it was never completeted. So little of de’ Servi’s work survives – one portrait of a very cross looking Medici princess in the Ufizzi Gallery, one painting in an American museum – that the surviving garden design his papers in the state archives in Florence is precious.

Martino’s work in the archives, made possible through a research grant from St John’s, was a true labour of love: the gardener’s files are only partly catalogued, so working on them was a question of asking for all the letters from a particular year, and toiling through them one by one. There were some surprising omissions: despite Europe lying on the brink of the thirty years’ war, a conflict started by divides within Christianity, de’ Servi made almost no mention of his Roman Catholic faith.

De’ Servi was the son of a diplomat, but his role as travelling artist and garden designer was far more useful cover, evading the espionage claustrophobia of the diplomatic circuit. He ended up quietly back in Italy, wealthy, in a grand house and garden of his own design.



“There is much more to find out about this man – I’m certain of it,” Martino said.