Renaissance art is rich in information about food. Direct observationfrom nature combined with inspiration from the Ancient World pro-vided incidental details of both ingredients and the rituals of eatingto be found in still-life paintings, genre scenes and religious subjects.

Looking Nature in the Face

It is a relief to encounter the return to naturalism of Renaissanceherbals. One written in the vernacular, Herbolario volgare, a versionof a tenth century text from Salerno, a translation of an earlierArabic translation of the works of the Greek Serapion the Younger,and produced in Padua in the late fourteenth century, is stunning.[illus. 1.118] e heart leaps up at the sight of these images of realplants by an artist who ‘had the courage to look nature in the face’.e plants, drawn from life, sprawl over the page with a wild dynam-ic of their own, but controlled by the artist’s sense of their layout onthe page. Did Pietro d’Abano, the great botanist at the University ofPadua see and wonder at the great Dioscorides herbal when he was inByzantium in the thirteenth century? If so he might have inspiredthis happy fusion of ancient plant lore and modern realism.

is early fifteenth century Italian Liber de simplicibus was onceowned by a physician in the Veneto, Benedetto Rinio, who livedfrom 1485 to 1565. e author was Nicolò Roccabonella, a physicianworking in Venice, who had much earlier commissioned from theartist Andrea Amadio nearly five hundred images of medicinal plants.is superb volume, more of a private art gallery than the equivalentof a coffee table book, was kept under lock and key by Rinio and his

1.118 Vines, from the ‘Carrara Herbal’,the Herbario Volgareof Serapion theYounger, c. 1390s.

s e v e n

Realism and Symbolism in the Renaissance Kitchen

and stews, like its relative the Egyptian melokhia. is gourd or meloncombines accuracy with a decorative composition. [illus. 1.122]

Another herbal with beautiful realism in some of its illustrations isthe Erbario of Pietro Antonio Michiel, also from the Veneto, a wealthyaristocrat and practising botanist who commissioned the artistDomenico Dalle Greche to illustrate his text in the second half of thesixteenth century. Some of the more naïve illustrations may have beenhis own, like this unidentifiable tree and varied insect life, where acouple sit in its shade companionably picking their teeth with its con-

1.123 Spines from anunidentified tree makehandy toothpicks, in adetail from a manu-script herbal, I CinqueLibri di Piante, of PietroAntonio Michiel (1553-65).

heir, who left it to the monks of SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice whereit survived in good condition and is now in the Marciana Library.

An image of chicory, cichorium intybus, is recognisable as the wildvariety of the cultivated plant that we know today. e leaves, raw, assalad plants, or cooked and then turned in oil in a pan, had beenknown for centuries. At last, after over a thousand years, Roccabonellaand his artist give us a sight of the plant itself. Mallow, edible as wellas soothing in poultices [illus. 1.122a] is a thing of beauty in thisimage, the leaves have a soft emollient quality when boiled in soups

1.122 ‘Gourd’, fromthe Libro dei Semplici of Benedetto Rinio(1419).

lands, and he was able to illustrate a live specimen of a chilli plant,unlike the image of pepper, for which his artist had to make do with asketch by a Portuguese mariner. He describes how the cone-shapedfruit turn from green to coral red, with a much stronger taste thanordinary pepper. Fresh chillies were used, crushed, as a poultice forsciatica, which is more or less what is happening in the old-fashionedWintergreen Ointment, a lotion with camphor, menthol, and cap-saicin, (chilli), once prescribed for chilblains, or as a treatment forarthritis, whose pungent warmth seems to do good, perhaps becauseof the endomorphins in the chilli. Mattioli’s contemporary CostanzoFelici, in his letter on salads, Del’insalata e piante che in qualunque

1.124 Chillies in a hand-coloured engraving fromBasilius Besler, HortusEystettensis… (1613).

veniently sharp spines, at a table with the inscription: De sua ombragodiamo, et il dente nettiamo ‘As we enjoy the shade beneath, we happi-ly can pick our teeth.’ [illus. 1.123]

ese zany vignettes of daily life help us to see the plants in thecontext of the outside world rather than the studio of the specialist. Infact Michiel was rich and independent enough to stand up to the terri-bilità of the great botanist and physician Pier Andrea Mattioli,pointing out that he had his own orto botanico and gardens and in anargument knew better than the crusty old professor.

Truth, Beauty and Recrimination

In their search for truth and beauty in the natural world theRenaissance botanists were extremely contentious and quarrelsomeamongst themselves. Mattioli, always grumpy, could become ven-omous, and differences of opinion over the identification of plants, orthe interpretation of ancient authors fuelled long-lasting feuds with col-leagues. But Mattioli was one of the first to see the value of the printingpress in making accurate images of plants available in multiple copies.,making discussion and comparison possible at last. e lack of recog-nisable images and consistent text inspired him to produce his owntranslation of Dioscorides, published in Venice in 1568, which becamea standard work of reference. Food historians also value Mattioli’sCommentaries on Dioscorides for its images of arrivals from the NewWorld and for remarks on common vegetables like aubergines, or cab-bages, than for the erudite textual ramifications. Mattioli’s personalobservations of local treatment of edible plants are little gems hiddenaway in the eight massive volumes. Wild rocket goes well in a saladwith lettuce, the heat of the rocket cancelling out the cold of the let-tuce, the humoral theory still applied by cooks today. ‘ere is hardly ahouse in the land that does not have a pot of basil on the windowsill, orin gardens’, said Mattioli. Chilli peppers are included in the entry onpepper, although botanically no relation. Mattioli describes their recentarrival from the New World, brought by Portuguese and Spanishtraders. [illus. 1.124] He implies that they were already well known bythen, per tutto volgare, considerably more pungent than the variouskinds of exotic and expensive peppercorns, from far-away unknown

Mattioli added to his translation of Dioscorides massive commen-taries in Italian, along with the views, often hotly contested, of otherancient authors and those of his long-suffering contemporaries. One ofthese was Costanzo Felici of Piobbico, a little village in a remote andhilly part of the Italian Marches, who corresponded with Mattioli andhis more amiable contemporary Ulisse Aldrovandi, physician andbotanist.

An Inspired Botanist and Collector

Ulisse Aldrovandi, born in 1522, was from a noble family in Bologna,who had the means to give him a conventional education. Perhaps thepressures were too great, for he ran away from home at the tender ageof twelve and took himself off to Rome. On his return he was persuad-ed to get his head round mathematics and the useful skills of

1.126 Gathering sageleaves, from a late 14th-century manu-script of the medicalmanual TacuinumSanitatis produced in Lombardy.

modo vengono per cibo del’homo, written in the 1560s, describes howthey can be seen growing in pots on windowsills. is is long beforethey get a mention in recipe books, leading us to suppose that thecommon usage as a cheap, popular, easily grown seasoning, was notthat of aristocratic kitchens, so never got into print. e master cookAntonio Latini mentions chillies in Naples in the 1690s, in dishes pre-pared for visiting Spanish nobles, but they do not figure in themajority of his recipes, as if chillies were by then a cheap condimentfor the common people, ignored and despised by the rich, in Italy, butwheeled on for foreign guests.

Medicine, Magic and Gastronomy

While the study and depiction of plants, medicinal and for the pot,became more sophisticated, everyday life went on regardless of theo-ry, and we can cautiously imagine hands-on healing from wisewomen and heads of households, or local practitioners who never gotinto print, (like Felici, a practising physician, whose work had a lim-ited circulation in manuscript), flourishing below the radar of thearid academic treatises, more realistic and down to earth than thelearned professors. e rezdora who ruled over the domestic side ofhouseholds in Emilia Romagna until recently, might have been illit-erate but she fed and nursed her family unit very much in the wayuneducated women have always done since the days of Dioscorides(the rezdora was not always the farmer’s wife, but usually the mostapt woman for this position in an extended family. Skills learnedfrom mothers and grandmothers saved lives and cured sick animalsand children for generations. Cur moritur homo qui salvium cresciturin horto? was a common saying, for why need a man die who has sagegrowing in his garden? Its curative properties gave it its name, andhere is a wise woman gathering this essential culinary and medicinalherb. An infusion of sage leaves was good for the blood, but betterstill were sage’s gastronomic uses, as a seasoning for spit-roast smallbirds, the tender young leaves chopped raw with onions into salads,(specially good with anchovies), pounded with oil and vinegar tomake a sauce, and fritters of large leaves dipped in a batter made withchestnut flour and fried in oil or lard. [illus. 1.126]

accountancy, but within a few years the young Ulisse was off again,Rome and then as a pilgrim/package tourist to Santiago daCompostela, enjoying the company and the curiosities. Back home inBologna he studied law and the classics at the university, then movedon to philosophy and logic. A stint in Padua studying medicine andbotany led to an inexplicable charge of heresy, with Aldrovandi sum-moned to Rome and given a bad time by the Inquisition. But it wasthere that he might have met the naturalists and botanists’ includingRondelet and Saviani, who were to set him on the path he eventuallychose, becoming one of the foremost natural historians of the time. Wedo not know if Aldrovandi ever saw the wonderfully naturalistic fruitand vegetables in the loggia of Agostino Chigi’s villa in Trastevere, butif so it must have been an inspiration for his later botanical studies, andhis life’s passion for accurate representation of the natural world.

Joyful Fecundity

Agostino Chigi was a rich self-made man, a successful banker who in

1.128 Giovanni daUdine and others, viewof the decorated Loggiadi Psiche in the VillaFarnesina, Rome(1518).

opposite: 1.130Giovanni da Udine andothers, detail of thehead of Ceres, from thedecoration of the VillaFarnesina, Rome(1518).

the early sixteenth century commissioned a villa, now known as theFarnesina, on the fertile left bank of the Tiber, on the outskirts ofRome. Its loggia walls and ceiling illustrating the story of Cupid andPsyche, were decorated with fruit and flowers. [illus. 1.130]Like thePompeian murals, or Livia’s villa, (at that time still unknown), thedevice of having frescoes bringing the outside world indoors was usedto link this country retreat with the gardens and orchards surroundingit. e vaults and architectural details of the loggia, open to the air onits south facing facade, linked the classical interior of the building withthe outside world of nature. Giovanni da Udine, the artist employedby Raphael in 1517, filled it with images of fruit, vegetables and flow-ers, some of them very early sightings of plants from the New World,only twenty years after their arrival. [illus. 1.128] e murals were adeliberate celebration of fertility, where vegetables and fruit, innocent-ly phallic or reminiscent of female pudenda, were positioned in rathercrude conjunctions to reinforce the message of joyful fecundity. [illus.1.129]

Chigi’s marriage to his mistress, Francesca Ordeaschi, after manyyears of cohabitation and four children, took place as the decorationsof the villa were being completed, so fruitfulness and procreation werecelebrated with the products of kitchen garden and orchard, rare col-lector’s items alongside well-known kitchen stuff. e artist paintedrecent arrivals: maize, several varieties of cucurbita (marrows great andsmall), musk melon, and the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). eseaccurate and beautiful paintings were done well before their appear-ance in published herbals. (Columbus had not come across chillies andtomatoes, which accounts for their absence.) Giovanni da Udinewould have been able to study these exotic plants in the gardens andcollections of Rome’s intellectual elite, and his patron Chigi, withcommercial interests all over Europe and the New World, was wellplaced to procure specimens. Chigi and the Pope had gardens and hothouses in that tranquil rural area across the Tiber, within easy reach ofthe city, where the new villa was situated. e artist could thus workfrom life, depicting the fruit and flowers in various stages of ripenessand maturity.

We have sightings of aubergines, known in the south but less popu-lar elsewhere; asparagus, by then a popular delicacy; artichokes, a wide

1.129 Giovanni daUdine and others, detailof a gourd and grapesfrom the decoration ofthe Villa Farnesina,Rome (1518).

properties of plants, and the exhilaration ofcollecting, classifying and recording speci-mens was always a bond between him andother scholars and practising physicians. econtribution of artists was indispensable tothis, and the skills already deployed in still-life details in religious works were drawnupon by the academics who cherished andneeded the meticulous accuracy of depic-tions of fruit, vegetables and herbs. [illus.1.131] Aldrovandi said of his friend JacopoLigozzi that he was ‘A most excellent artistwho has no other care day and night but topaint plants and animals of every kind’. Hewas kept hard at it by the Grand Dukes ofTuscany, and much of his work survived,including this lively image of a fig plant withfig-peckers pillaging the fruit. [illus. 1.132]

Illustrators at Work

e German naturalist Leonhardt Fuchs appreciated the team whoproduced the illustrations for his De Historia Stirpium of 1542, andincluded their portraits in the book’s colophon. e text is a mixtureof old wives’ tales and chunks of Diosorides along with cookinginstructions, while the illusttrations reflect the delights of discoveryand close observation. As Fuchs himself said: ‘ere is nothing in thislife pleasanter and more delightful than to wander over woods, moun-tains, plains, garlanded and adorned with flowerlets and plants ofvarious sorts, and most elegant to boot, and to gaze intently on them.But it increases that pleasure and delight not a little, if there be addedan acquaintance with the virtues and powers of these same plants’.

is intense study of the natural world was encouraged by theAustrian Emperor Rudolph II, he loved having his portrait painted asmuch as he delighted in gardens and his collections of botanical speci-mens. He corresponded with Aldrovandi, and they shared the skills ofone of the foremost painters of the time, Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

range of cucumbers, melons, gourds and squashes, grains, includingthe recent arrival maize, pulses, broad beans, peas, the new beans fromthe New World, green vegetables like spinach, chard, a range of cab-bages, the beautiful flower heads of fennel and elder, the blossoms oforange, lemon, myrtle and roses, and root vegetables from carrot andparsnip to the various turnip and radish, and salad roots like rampions,nuts of all kinds, and a profusion of succulent fruit, symbols of loveand fertility and destined for the tables of the rich – peaches, apricots,cherries, apples, pears, azaroles, and a range of berries now little used.e scope is wide, a celebration of most of the edible produce of Italy,which would surely have appealed to the young Aldrovandi.

e Art of Collecting and Recording

e restless energies that sent Aldrovandi wandering off on adventuresand later botanising expeditions seem to have been matched with abrilliant intellect and an amiable disposition. His passionate aim wasto record and describe the natural world as he found it, not as knowl-edge hidden away in ancient texts.

Aldrovandi spent a large proportion of his personal wealth and aca-demic salary on hiring artists to copy hisspecimens, to make a complete visualrecord of his collections. ese survive ineighteen volumes in the University Libraryin Bologna. He hired some of the finestartists of the time, including JacopoLigozzi, whose fish and exotic animals areon page 00. ere are over 2900 images ofplants and herbs, most of which have notbeen published, so although some ofAldrovandi’s texts, with woodcut illustra-tions, were published during his lifetime,he had nothing to show as extensive asMattioli’s Commentaries, and consequentlywe know little of this wonderful Bolognaarchive. It was medicine that stimulatedAldrovandi to find out more about the

1.131 A late 16th centurywatercolour depiction of a turnip done for UlisseAldrovandi’s botanicalcollection in Bologna.

1.132 Birds eating figs, in a detail from JacopoLigozzi 1590s water-colour Fig Branch withExotic Finches.

Surreal Accuracy

A century later the Grand Dukes of Tuscany commissioned from theartist Giovanna Garzoni small miniatures on vellum, executed in adelicate stippled technique. ese portraits of citrus fruit and theirflowers would have appealed to her Medici patrons, not so much forany symbolic content, as for a delight in the appearance and aroma ofblossoms and pungent peel, and hence their use in perfumery andcosmetics as well as the kitchen. Her vegetables, three different kindsof artichoke, [illus. 1.152] some rather mature dry peas, and a dish ofbroad beans, are all local foodstuffs, probably enjoyed by aristocracyas well as peasants. Garzoni’s combination of accuracy and fantasywas harnessed by her patrons to promote the products of Tuscany. Aswell as her delicate miniatures there is a larger painting, a celebrationof the good things from a typical Tuscan estate, with Bencino

1.152 Giovanna Garzoni(1600-70), Chinese Dishwith Artichokes, a Roseand Strawberries, temperaon vellum.

1.132.a GiuseppeArcimboldo, eEmperor Rudolph II asVertumnus, c. 1590, oilon panel.

Rudolph was immortalized by the artist as Vertumnus, the Romangod of vegetation and fertility, [illus. 1.132a]and this ‘serious joke’,as it has been described, might well be full of symbolism, but is evenmore welcome as a brilliant description of the plants and flowers dearto the emperor. Corn and grains from the New world combine withthe local fruit, cherries and pears, and the imperial breastplate is ahuge ridged marrow or gourd, while the furrowed brow of themighty ruler is the back end of a ripe melon, n artichike with itsfoliage make an epaulette. is combination of humour and botani-cal accuracy is more significant than surrealist interpratations of thisportrait.