An early example of such walls can be found amid the hubbub of today’s Manhattan, tucked away inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, among the Grecian urns and the colonial-era silver, is a tiny gem of a room, re-created as it was in fifteenth-century Perugia: the studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. Federico, whose title called on him to be variously a royal, a politician, and a warrior, lived in the town of Gubbio in what is now central Italy.
Studiolo
