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During Rosalynn Carter’s watch, chief floral designer Dottie Temple made della Robbia style pyramids stacked with fresh apples, lemons, limes and kumquats for the State Dining Room.

FLORENCE, Italy — When Botticelli and Luca della Robbia created masterpieces about motherhood, they honored Renaissance idealism with reverential depictions of a serene Madonna and child.

The new dome of Florence’s cathedral, designed by Brunelleschi, ‘vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow’, towered over the city, and a group of brilliant artists—Brunelleschi himself, Donatello, Masaccio, Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia—were producing work which seemed unlike anything that had gone before.

Feel free to gawk at Morgan’s study, where paintings by Perugino and Hans Memling hang in front of red damask wallpaper, and don’t miss the unfailingly crisp Della Robbia ceramic reliefs in the marble-soaked rotunda.

Now a museum, it houses terra-cotta medallions by Luca della Robbia and other magnificent artwork.