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seven
Realism and Symbolism in the
Renaissance Kitchen
Renaissance art is rich in information about food. Direct observation
from nature combined with inspiration from the Ancient World provided incidental details of both ingredients and the rituals of eating
to be found in still-life paintings, genre scenes and religious subjects.
Looking Nature in the Face
1.118 Vines, from
the ‘Carrara Herbal’,
the Herbario Volgare
of Serapion the
Younger, c. 1390s.
It is a relief to encounter the return to naturalism of Renaissance
herbals. One written in the vernacular, Herbolario volgare, a version
of a tenth century text from Salerno, a translation of an earlier
Arabic 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 real
plants 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 dynamic of their own, but controlled by the artist’s sense of their layout on
the page. Did Pietro d’Abano, the great botanist at the University of
Padua see and wonder at the great Dioscorides herbal when he was in
Byzantium in the thirteenth century? If so he might have inspired
this happy fusion of ancient plant lore and modern realism.
is early fifteenth century Italian Liber de simplicibus was once
owned by a physician in the Veneto, Benedetto Rinio, who lived
from 1485 to 1565. e author was Nicolò Roccabonella, a physician
working in Venice, who had much earlier commissioned from the
artist Andrea Amadio nearly five hundred images of medicinal plants.
is superb volume, more of a private art gallery than the equivalent
of a coffee table book, was kept under lock and key by Rinio and his
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1.123 Spines from an
unidentified tree make
handy toothpicks, in a
detail from a manuscript herbal, I Cinque
Libri di Piante, of Pietro
Antonio Michiel (155365).
1.122 ‘Gourd’, from
the Libro dei Semplici
of Benedetto Rinio
(1419).
heir, who left it to the monks of SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice where
it survived in good condition and is now in the Marciana Library.
An image of chicory, cichorium intybus, is recognisable as the wild
variety of the cultivated plant that we know today. e leaves, raw, as
salad plants, or cooked and then turned in oil in a pan, had been
known for centuries. At last, after over a thousand years, Roccabonella
and his artist give us a sight of the plant itself. Mallow, edible as well
as soothing in poultices [illus. 1.122a] is a thing of beauty in this
image, the leaves have a soft emollient quality when boiled in soups
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and stews, like its relative the Egyptian melokhia. is gourd or melon
combines accuracy with a decorative composition. [illus. 1.122]
Another herbal with beautiful realism in some of its illustrations is
the Erbario of Pietro Antonio Michiel, also from the Veneto, a wealthy
aristocrat and practising botanist who commissioned the artist
Domenico Dalle Greche to illustrate his text in the second half of the
sixteenth century. Some of the more naïve illustrations may have been
his own, like this unidentifiable tree and varied insect life, where a
couple sit in its shade companionably picking their teeth with its con
veniently sharp spines, at a table with the inscription: De sua ombra
godiamo, et il dente nettiamo ‘As we enjoy the shade beneath, we happily can pick our teeth.’ [illus. 1.123]
ese zany vignettes of daily life help us to see the plants in the
context of the outside world rather than the studio of the specialist. In
fact Michiel was rich and independent enough to stand up to the terribilità of the great botanist and physician Pier Andrea Mattioli,
pointing out that he had his own orto botanico and gardens and in an
argument knew better than the crusty old professor.
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 a
sketch by a Portuguese mariner. He describes how the cone-shaped
fruit turn from green to coral red, with a much stronger taste than
ordinary pepper. Fresh chillies were used, crushed, as a poultice for
sciatica, which is more or less what is happening in the old-fashioned
Wintergreen Ointment, a lotion with camphor, menthol, and capsaicin, (chilli), once prescribed for chilblains, or as a treatment for
arthritis, whose pungent warmth seems to do good, perhaps because
of the endomorphins in the chilli. Mattioli’s contemporary Costanzo
Felici, in his letter on salads, Del’insalata e piante che in qualunque
Truth, Beauty and Recrimination
In their search for truth and beauty in the natural world the
Renaissance botanists were extremely contentious and quarrelsome
amongst themselves. Mattioli, always grumpy, could become venomous, and differences of opinion over the identification of plants, or
the interpretation of ancient authors fuelled long-lasting feuds with colleagues. But Mattioli was one of the first to see the value of the printing
press in making accurate images of plants available in multiple copies.,
making discussion and comparison possible at last. e lack of recognisable images and consistent text inspired him to produce his own
translation of Dioscorides, published in Venice in 1568, which became
a standard work of reference. Food historians also value Mattioli’s
Commentaries on Dioscorides for its images of arrivals from the New
World and for remarks on common vegetables like aubergines, or cabbages, than for the erudite textual ramifications. Mattioli’s personal
observations of local treatment of edible plants are little gems hidden
away in the eight massive volumes. Wild rocket goes well in a salad
with lettuce, the heat of the rocket cancelling out the cold of the lettuce, the humoral theory still applied by cooks today. ‘ere is hardly a
house in the land that does not have a pot of basil on the windowsill, or
in gardens’, said Mattioli. Chilli peppers are included in the entry on
pepper, although botanically no relation. Mattioli describes their recent
arrival from the New World, brought by Portuguese and Spanish
traders. [illus. 1.124] He implies that they were already well known by
then, per tutto volgare, considerably more pungent than the various
kinds of exotic and expensive peppercorns, from far-away unknown
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1.124 Chillies in a handcoloured engraving from
Basilius Besler, Hortus
Eystettensis… (1613).
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modo vengono per cibo del’homo, written in the 1560s, describes how
they can be seen growing in pots on windowsills. is is long before
they get a mention in recipe books, leading us to suppose that the
common usage as a cheap, popular, easily grown seasoning, was not
that of aristocratic kitchens, so never got into print. e master cook
Antonio Latini mentions chillies in Naples in the 1690s, in dishes prepared for visiting Spanish nobles, but they do not figure in the
majority of his recipes, as if chillies were by then a cheap condiment
for the common people, ignored and despised by the rich, in Italy, but
wheeled on for foreign guests.
1.126 Gathering sage
leaves, from a late
14th-century manuscript of the medical
manual Tacuinum
Sanitatis produced
in Lombardy.
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 theory, and we can cautiously imagine hands-on healing from wise
women and heads of households, or local practitioners who never got
into print, (like Felici, a practising physician, whose work had a limited circulation in manuscript), flourishing below the radar of the
arid academic treatises, more realistic and down to earth than the
learned professors. e rezdora who ruled over the domestic side of
households in Emilia Romagna until recently, might have been illiterate but she fed and nursed her family unit very much in the way
uneducated women have always done since the days of Dioscorides
(the rezdora was not always the farmer’s wife, but usually the most
apt woman for this position in an extended family. Skills learned
from mothers and grandmothers saved lives and cured sick animals
and children for generations. Cur moritur homo qui salvium crescitur
in horto? was a common saying, for why need a man die who has sage
growing in his garden? Its curative properties gave it its name, and
here is a wise woman gathering this essential culinary and medicinal
herb. An infusion of sage leaves was good for the blood, but better
still were sage’s gastronomic uses, as a seasoning for spit-roast small
birds, the tender young leaves chopped raw with onions into salads,
(specially good with anchovies), pounded with oil and vinegar to
make a sauce, and fritters of large leaves dipped in a batter made with
chestnut flour and fried in oil or lard. [illus. 1.126]
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Mattioli added to his translation of Dioscorides massive commentaries in Italian, along with the views, often hotly contested, of other
ancient authors and those of his long-suffering contemporaries. One of
these was Costanzo Felici of Piobbico, a little village in a remote and
hilly part of the Italian Marches, who corresponded with Mattioli and
his more amiable contemporary Ulisse Aldrovandi, physician and
botanist.
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 the
pressures were too great, for he ran away from home at the tender age
of twelve and took himself off to Rome. On his return he was persuaded to get his head round mathematics and the useful skills of
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accountancy, but within a few years the young Ulisse was off again,
Rome and then as a pilgrim/package tourist to Santiago da
Compostela, enjoying the company and the curiosities. Back home in
Bologna he studied law and the classics at the university, then moved
on to philosophy and logic. A stint in Padua studying medicine and
botany led to an inexplicable charge of heresy, with Aldrovandi summoned to Rome and given a bad time by the Inquisition. But it was
there that he might have met the naturalists and botanists’ including
Rondelet and Saviani, who were to set him on the path he eventually
chose, becoming one of the foremost natural historians of the time. We
do not know if Aldrovandi ever saw the wonderfully naturalistic fruit
and vegetables in the loggia of Agostino Chigi’s villa in Trastevere, but
if so it must have been an inspiration for his later botanical studies, and
his 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 da
Udine and others, view
of the decorated Loggia
di Psiche in the Villa
Farnesina, Rome
(1518).
opposite: 1.130
Giovanni da Udine and
others, detail of the
head of Ceres, from the
decoration of the Villa
Farnesina, Rome
(1518).
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1.129 Giovanni da
Udine and others, detail
of a gourd and grapes
from the decoration of
the Villa Farnesina,
Rome (1518).
the early sixteenth century commissioned a villa, now known as the
Farnesina, on the fertile left bank of the Tiber, on the outskirts of
Rome. Its loggia walls and ceiling illustrating the story of Cupid and
Psyche, were decorated with fruit and flowers. [illus. 1.130]Like the
Pompeian murals, or Livia’s villa, (at that time still unknown), the
device of having frescoes bringing the outside world indoors was used
to link this country retreat with the gardens and orchards surrounding
it. e vaults and architectural details of the loggia, open to the air on
its south facing facade, linked the classical interior of the building with
the outside world of nature. Giovanni da Udine, the artist employed
by Raphael in 1517, filled it with images of fruit, vegetables and flowers, some of them very early sightings of plants from the New World,
only twenty years after their arrival. [illus. 1.128] e murals were a
deliberate celebration of fertility, where vegetables and fruit, innocently phallic or reminiscent of female pudenda, were positioned in rather
crude conjunctions to reinforce the message of joyful fecundity. [illus.
1.129]
Chigi’s marriage to his mistress, Francesca Ordeaschi, after many
years of cohabitation and four children, took place as the decorations
of the villa were being completed, so fruitfulness and procreation were
celebrated with the products of kitchen garden and orchard, rare collector’s items alongside well-known kitchen stuff. e artist painted
recent arrivals: maize, several varieties of cucurbita (marrows great and
small), musk melon, and the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). ese
accurate and beautiful paintings were done well before their appearance in published herbals. (Columbus had not come across chillies and
tomatoes, which accounts for their absence.) Giovanni da Udine
would have been able to study these exotic plants in the gardens and
collections of Rome’s intellectual elite, and his patron Chigi, with
commercial interests all over Europe and the New World, was well
placed to procure specimens. Chigi and the Pope had gardens and hot
houses in that tranquil rural area across the Tiber, within easy reach of
the city, where the new villa was situated. e artist could thus work
from life, depicting the fruit and flowers in various stages of ripeness
and maturity.
We have sightings of aubergines, known in the south but less popular elsewhere; asparagus, by then a popular delicacy; artichokes, a wide
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range of cucumbers, melons, gourds and squashes, grains, including
the recent arrival maize, pulses, broad beans, peas, the new beans from
the New World, green vegetables like spinach, chard, a range of cabbages, the beautiful flower heads of fennel and elder, the blossoms of
orange, lemon, myrtle and roses, and root vegetables from carrot and
parsnip to the various turnip and radish, and salad roots like rampions,
nuts of all kinds, and a profusion of succulent fruit, symbols of love
and 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.
properties of plants, and the exhilaration of
collecting, classifying and recording specimens was always a bond between him and
other scholars and practising physicians. e
contribution of artists was indispensable to
this, and the skills already deployed in stilllife details in religious works were drawn
upon by the academics who cherished and
needed the meticulous accuracy of depictions of fruit, vegetables and herbs. [illus.
1.131] Aldrovandi said of his friend Jacopo
Ligozzi that he was ‘A most excellent artist
who has no other care day and night but to
paint plants and animals of every kind’. He
was kept hard at it by the Grand Dukes of
Tuscany, and much of his work survived,
including this lively image of a fig plant with
fig-peckers pillaging the fruit. [illus. 1.132]
e Art of Collecting and Recording
e restless energies that sent Aldrovandi wandering off on adventures
and later botanising expeditions seem to have been matched with a
brilliant intellect and an amiable disposition. His passionate aim was
to record and describe the natural world as he found it, not as knowledge hidden away in ancient texts.
Aldrovandi spent a large proportion of his personal wealth and academic salary on hiring artists to copy his
specimens, to make a complete visual
record of his collections. ese survive in
eighteen volumes in the University Library
in Bologna. He hired some of the finest
artists of the time, including Jacopo
Ligozzi, whose fish and exotic animals are
on page 00. ere are over 2900 images of
plants and herbs, most of which have not
been published, so although some of
Aldrovandi’s texts, with woodcut illustrations, were published during his lifetime,
he had nothing to show as extensive as
Mattioli’s Commentaries, and consequently
we know little of this wonderful Bologna
archive. It was medicine that stimulated
Aldrovandi to find out more about the
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1.131 A late 16th century
watercolour depiction of
a turnip done for Ulisse
Aldrovandi’s botanical
collection in Bologna.
1.132 Birds eating figs,
in a detail from Jacopo
Ligozzi 1590s watercolour Fig Branch with
Exotic Finches.
Illustrators at Work
e German naturalist Leonhardt Fuchs appreciated the team who
produced the illustrations for his De Historia Stirpium of 1542, and
included their portraits in the book’s colophon. e text is a mixture
of old wives’ tales and chunks of Diosorides along with cooking
instructions, while the illusttrations reflect the delights of discovery
and close observation. As Fuchs himself said: ‘ere is nothing in this
life pleasanter and more delightful than to wander over woods, mountains, plains, garlanded and adorned with flowerlets and plants of
various 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 added
an acquaintance with the virtues and powers of these same plants’.
is intense study of the natural world was encouraged by the
Austrian Emperor Rudolph II, he loved having his portrait painted as
much as he delighted in gardens and his collections of botanical specimens. He corresponded with Aldrovandi, and they shared the skills of
one of the foremost painters of the time, Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

1.132.a Giuseppe
Arcimboldo, e
Emperor Rudolph II as
Vertumnus, c. 1590, oil
on panel.
Rudolph was immortalized by the artist as Vertumnus, the Roman
god of vegetation and fertility, [illus. 1.132a]and this ‘serious joke’,
as it has been described, might well be full of symbolism, but is even
more welcome as a brilliant description of the plants and flowers dear
to the emperor. Corn and grains from the New world combine with
the local fruit, cherries and pears, and the imperial breastplate is a
huge ridged marrow or gourd, while the furrowed brow of the
mighty ruler is the back end of a ripe melon, n artichike with its
foliage make an epaulette. is combination of humour and botanical accuracy is more significant than surrealist interpratations of this
portrait.

1.152 Giovanna Garzoni
(1600-70), Chinese Dish
with Artichokes, a Rose
and Strawberries, tempera
on vellum.
Surreal Accuracy
A century later the Grand Dukes of Tuscany commissioned from the
artist Giovanna Garzoni small miniatures on vellum, executed in a
delicate stippled technique. ese portraits of citrus fruit and their
flowers would have appealed to her Medici patrons, not so much for
any symbolic content, as for a delight in the appearance and aroma of
blossoms and pungent peel, and hence their use in perfumery and
cosmetics as well as the kitchen. Her vegetables, three different kinds
of artichoke, [illus. 1.152] some rather mature dry peas, and a dish of
broad beans, are all local foodstuffs, probably enjoyed by aristocracy
as well as peasants. Garzoni’s combination of accuracy and fantasy
was harnessed by her patrons to promote the products of Tuscany. As
well as her delicate miniatures there is a larger painting, a celebration
of the good things from a typical Tuscan estate, with Bencino
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