The ‘Porcospino’ room displays a 17th-century copy of Andrea Mantegna’s fresco series ‘Triumphs of Caesar’. At the centre stands the refined and intense terracotta portrait of Marquis Francesco II, dating from the end of the 15th century and attributed to the sculptor Gian Cristoforo Romano.
The room was intended to receive the marquis’ guests and, like all the rooms on the ground floor, served as a reception room. The room still bears traces of a recurring decorative scheme in all the rooms of the palace except the loggia and the great hall on the main floor. In the centre of the pavilion vault stood out an impresa (i.e. an emblematic image that, accompanied by a motto, recalled a significant moment in the life of the lord who created it) enclosed in a circular frame; the impresa was then repeated, alternating with others, in the lunettes that crowned the walls. The emblem that gives the room its name is that of the porcupine, dedicated to the King of France, Louis XII, who had adopted the emblem of the porcupine crowned with the motto “COMINUS ET EMINUS” to demonstrate that he knew how to defend himself from near as well as far: like the porcupine who stings those who annoy him from close up, but who also knows how to throw his thorns far away.
