Pummelo: whole and half-fruit
c. 1640RCIN 919333
This drawing comes from a group of over a hundred studies of citrus fruit in the ‘paper museum’. Cassiano had them engraved to illustrate a treatise on the cultivation of citrus fruit, written by his friend Giovanni Battista Ferrari, who enthused about the size of the pummelo, one of the largest citrus fruits. However, as the cross-section shows, much of the fruit’s bulk is made up of a thick pith.