Flaunting food in art
Oil painting often depicts things that are sometimes buyable, or in this case eatable. To have a thing painted on a canvas is quite similar to actually buying the thing and putting it in your home. If you buy a painting you also buy the thing it represents. There is something about 17th century Dutch still-life painting that is the very essence of possession and ostentation. Let’s put all this in context. By the 17th century, the Dutch Republic was already chock-a-block with artists, who with the greatest skill could bang out landscapes, seascapes, vases of flowers, group portraits, belching boars, and militia men all strutting their stuff. It was the only Protestant country in Europe to have fully survived the Reformation, so there was indeed much to celebrate from an artistic point of view. This, and a growing affluent merchant class, who were keen to show off and celebrate their wealth and worldly possessions, gave artists ample employment in the depiction of objects of desire, property, and opulent displays of the most costly foods.
- Bartolomeo Bimbi (1648-1729) painted Pears for Cosimo Medici III, for whom he prepared many such pictorial inventories. The imposing canvas shows 115 different types of pear, arranged by their time of maturation in baskets or platters. Each variety was then grown in the gardens of Tuscany, and given a number corresponding to the list of names on the cartouche included in the painting. Many of these pear varieties have since died out, and have amusing common names like il bugiardo, la brutta-buona and il becco d’oca (goose-beak).
The Dutch were not the first or the last to employ artists as agents for the flaunting of their goods and treasures. In Renaissance Florence, the wealthy engaged artists to paint for them a sort of virtual reality in which their possessions were depicted and catalogued, then hung up in palaces amongst the real thing. Still life was a genre much appreciated by the Dutch, as it showed with great accuracy and respect the material objects that were of importance to them. In Breakfast With a Crab, by William Claez Heda, we see an opulent, discarded breakfast depicted with great pomp and ceremony. The person who commissioned that painting would have done so to communicate the fact, to all those who looked at it, that such luxury was his usual morning fare. They had their breakfast painted in much the same way they had their children painted, or their dogs.
In Willem Kalf’s Still Life With Lobster (c.1665), the canvas is dominated by the extraordinary forms of the great horn and the diagonal lobster. The horn glitters with silver filigree and the lobster is painted with masterly precision. Here the edible is made more visible by being thrown into sharp focus. The painting is an affirmation of the owner’s wealth and life-style.
The confirmation of wealth and status through the painting of food or live-stock was not confined to the Netherlands. These displays of extravagance had strong roots in the Italian peninsula. An abundance of fruit and reams of canvas depicting game are indicative of the desire to display wealth.
In Emilia Romagna, the artists who worked for the Farnese family dedicated themselves to rustic taste, to kitchens and to pantries. Cristofo Munari, a painter from Reggia, created sumptuous paintings in which crystal, porcelain and precious objects were depicted. In Genoa, there was a style of Baroque still life that mixed people with inanimate objects, fresh fruit, and foodstuffs.
The enthusiasm for hunting can be considered the most important reason for the depiction of live and dead game during the 17th century. Particular animals or carcasses were used in allegory for certain attributes or virtues. Giacomo da Castello’s Still Life With Fruit, Parrots and Rabbits is an interesting example of this genre.
Rene Descartes wrote: “I think therefore I am”. The moneyed classes of the 17th century commissioned paintings of food as a way of telling those who saw them: “Look – this is what I eat; so this is what I am.”