Food in Renaissance Italy: Display of Power, Wealth and Craftsmanship through the Production of Ephemeral Edibles (original) (raw)
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Displays of Sugar Sculpture and the Collection of Antiquities in Late Renaissance Venice
Renaissance Quarterly, 2020
This article examines the sugar sculptures created for a ball in honor of Henri III of France in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice in 1574. The first part discusses the production and display of the statuettes. In the next section, the setting of the sugar sculptures is examined in the context of the collation prepared for the king in Palazzo Grimani in Santa Maria Formosa, which contains the city’s greatest collection of antiquities. Finally, the article examines the possible relationships between sugar statuettes and ancient sculptures and their use in crafting the image of Venice as a new Rome.
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2013
The review of the book: Varriano J. Tastes and temptations : Food and art in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley ; Los Angeles; London : University of California Press, 2009. 280 p. (California Studies in Food and Culture; [vol.] 27). Рецензия на книгу: Varriano J. Tastes and temptations : Food and art in Renaissance Italy. - Berkeley ; Los Angeles; London : University of California Press, 2009. -280 p. - (California Studies in Food and Culture ; [vol.] 27)
Review: Allen J. Grieco, Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in Renaissance Italy
The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2022
Reviewed by: Jesse Locker Portland State University Food history is perhaps the most ephemeral of all historical disciplines, in that its primary object of study, whether the food itself or the act of its consumption, can no longer be directly experienced and thus requires a particular act of historical imagination. Moreover, perhaps even more than other premodern historical disciplines, food history is by its nature skewed toward the wealthy and powerful, as celebratory banquets for weddings, receptions, celebrations, or other special events of the very wealthy are documented in great detail, while ordinary meals show little record in traditional historical sources. This volume gathers together for the first time essays by eminent food historian Allen J. Grieco, originally published in English, French, and Italian, mostly between 1989 and 1999, and overcomes these limitations by drawing on a vast array of less conventional sources: from literature, poetry, and letters, to cookbooks and dietary treatises, to receipts from convents and orphanages, to sermons and works of art. The volume contains a new introduction and afterword that situate the author's work, and food history more broadly, within the material, social, and cultural turns in the historical disciplines as a whole. Grieco's approach is deeply rooted in the methods of the Annales school, which sought to move beyond the study of political and macroeconomic events to focus instead on how individuals experienced and interacted with the world around them. Although earlier historians might have addressed food in terms of, for example, fluctuations in food prices and their political or economic consequences, Grieco's goal is to understand "the social and cultural context in which the food was consumed" (16). The book comprises fourteen chapters covering a range of food and foodways ca. 1200 to 1550, organized into three sections: "The Renaissance Table in Theory and Practice," "Social Distinctions, Dietary Theory and Classificatory Systems," and "Food in Literary and Visual Discourse," although there is significant thematic overlap between them. The essays display a broad erudition and linguistic command on a range of subjects, from the social conventions of the Renaissance banquet (chap. 3, "Conviviality in a Renaissance Court: The Ordine et Officij of the Court of Urbino") to boar-hunting imagery in chivalric literature (chap. 13, "The Eaten Heart: Social Order, Sexuality, and the Wilderness") to representations of poultry in painting (chap. 11, "What's in a Detail: More Chickens in Renaissance Birth Scenes") to poetical discourses on fish (chap. 7, "Fiordiano Malatesta da Rimini and the Ichthyological Treatises of the Mid-Sixteenth Century"). But the unifying theme is that of the "Great Chain of Being," the Aristotelian cosmological hierarchy adapted by the Scholastics, which governed virtually all aspects of
Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in Renaissance Italy
Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in Renaissance Italy, 2019
The Introduction, acknowledgements and foreword, are in open access. "The act of eating is a basic human need. Yet, in all societies, quotidian choices regarding food and its consumption reveal some of the most deeply-rooted of shared cultural conventions. Food goes beyond issues relating to biological needs and nutrition or production and commerce; it also engages with social and cultural criteria that determine what dishes are prepared on what occasions, and unveils the politics of the table via the rituals appropriate to different meals. This book approaches the history of food in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy through an interdisciplinary prism of sources ranging from epistolary correspondence, literature (both high and low), medical and dietary treatises, cosmographic theory and iconographic evidence. Using a variety of analytical methods and theoretical approaches, it moves food firmly into the arena of Late Medieval and Renaissance history, providing an essential key to deciphering the material and metaphorical complexity of this period in Italian and European history.
The Recipe from the XIIth to the XVIIth Century. Europe, Islam, Far East, Edited by Bruno Laurioux and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, 2023
In the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea of Ferrara is preserved an important anonymous miscellaneous, Renaissance manuscript (ms. Cl. II 147), only partly studied and published before, known as “Pseudo- Savonarola”. It’s a paper volume, with a modest aspect, surely intended for a domestic use, that was written by several hands, probably three. The language is Italian, with vernacular influences, but many recipes in Latin are also present. For the first time, the authors are entirely tran- scribing the manuscript. It contains more than 1200 recipes, among them 240 are cookery and pastry recipes, whereas the others refer to: pigments for different mate- rials, metal alloys, stain removers, chemical treatments for leather and bone, cosmetics, therapies and remedies for several deseases. The manuscript, dating to the second part of the XVIth century, exhibits problems of date, origin and author, that will be analyzed in this paper. We are carrying out a complex interdisciplinary study, which demonstrates the richness of information that this document provides for the understanding and reconstruction of the everyday life in the Reinassance Ferrara. Indeed, the purpose of the manuscript was to offer solution for any problem, small and big, of the everyday life, particularly of health and food: that is, reading this volume we can more thoroughly know the social and cultural context of the Este Court. In addition, in the manuscript, several references to geographical origin of different recipes demonstrate exchange and circulation of knowledge and ideas across Italy and Europe.