The food we eat, how we source it and prepare it, and what we think about it, has been recorded in works of art since earliest times, from cave paintings to altarpieces and secular still-lifes. In Food in Art Gillian Riley brings together a wide-ranging selection from the vast amount of material available to discuss what we can learn from the art of the past, how to interpret symbols and decorative elements, and enjoy the details of the cooking and presentation of meals.

But this is not all, for food historians can also explain how the almost abstract precision of a kitchen still-life by Meléndez is in fact a precise local recipe, or how the size of a sucking pig on a spit in a small vignette in a Book of Hours can tell us a lot about medieval husbandry, or in what way an ornate pie in a Dutch still-life can be more than the sum of its parts. We can also learn why Aldrovandi’s pet monkey clutches an artichoke, and puzzle out the presence of a cucumber in an altarpiece showing the Annunciation. The text accompanying the images explains much more, and also offers quotations from contemporaneous prose and poetry, with reference to iconic recipes and key personalities. Herbals, psalters, health handbooks and hunting manuals, devotional works and kitchen scenes, portraits and classical landscapes – all yield unsuspected gems. With the author’s help, such works allow twenty-first-century viewers to understand something of the social complexity of lost modes of life regarding food production, presentation and consumption.

This book also explores the many links between food and myth, religion, ritual and legend, and the use of symbolism and allegory in religious and moralizing art works. Covering everything from cave art to cookbooks, bestiaries to botanical illustration, Food in Art is a wide-ranging examination of a world in which cuisine, culture and art production are intertwined and interdependent.

To view some sample pages from Food in Art please click here.