The third volume of Tristram Shandy opens with Tristram’s eventual arrival into the Shandy family, when his nose is crushed during a bungled forceps delivery, causing Walter to throw himself prostrate on the bed. Sterne inserts his most startling innovation, the marbled page, within a volume almost entirely concerned with the publication and collection of medical books. This chapter situates Sterne’s remarkable visual device within a history of colour book illustration dominated by scientific works of the kind treasured by Walter Shandy. It also recounts the history of marbled paper, commonly recognised as book binding material but lesser known as medical packaging for nostrums prescribed to treat wounds and ailments. As a colour illustration in the instalment of Tristram Shandy addressing a wounded nose, for eighteenth-century readers the colour and dimensions of the marbled leaf would have simultaneously recalled colour-illustrated medical books and distinctively packaged branded remedies. The marbled page, therefore, references a full range of paper materials seeking to theorise, diagnose and treat malfunctioning bodies.

Although Piero was criticised for his love of sports and footballing in the streets, sportsmanship – like cultural patronage – contributed to the soft power increasingly enjoyed by Renaissance rulers. Visits to the antiquities in the Medici palace and to the model farm at Poggio a Caiano formed part of diplomats’ tours of Florence, while the sports of horse racing and falconry provided invaluable items for gift exchanges with other rulers. So too did Piero’s famous Spanish runner Garzerano, who was regarded as a trophy (‘like some prince’, in the eyes of the royal court) when borrowed by Alfonso of Naples for his son.1 So if Piero’s sporting activities were unappreciated at home, they gave him more standing outside Florence than his critics may have realised.