Visualizing culinary culture at the Medici and Farnese courts

Unrestricted Gastronomy has traditionally been viewed as a product of early modern court life, but I argue for a more nuanced relationship in which the representations of culinary culture in print or painting ensured its cultural centrality. The producers and consumers of culinary imagery performed complementary roles that assured the importance of a sophisticated and theatrical cuisine for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian courts. Preparing, presenting, and consuming elaborate meals were not only deeply ritualized activities but also created and affirmed political, diplomatic, and personal hierarchies and allegiances. Early modern Italy experienced a surge in professionalized culinary activity as cooks, stewards, carvers, and other domestic officials refined their craft, published their work in books such as Bartolomeo Scappi’s "Opera" (Rome, 1570) and Mattia Giegher’s "Li tre trattati" (Padua, 1639), and fashioned a market for their expertise in the courtly milieu. My studies of the “period appetite” at the seventeenth-century Medici and Farnese courts demonstrate how culinary practices in Florence and Parma were informed and shaped by the collecting of kitchen equipment, culinary treatises, and idealized paintings of edible goods by Giovanna Garzoni and Felice Boselli. By putting illustrated books and archival material in conversation with watercolor and oil still life paintings housed in rural villas, this dissertation argues for the necessity of crossing disciplinary boundaries to understand the histories of art, collecting, and food. The producers of these textual and visual records—cooks, stewards, and artists—performed the culinary culture of their elite patrons through detailed cooking treatises, lavish manuscripts, and series of bountiful still life paintings. In so doing, they actively shaped an idealized food culture specific to their courtly and regional environs.; Early modern alimentary practices—including the processes of understanding, selecting, organizing, butchering, cooking, and presenting foods—shared ideological links with contemporary medicine, alchemy, and botany as they mediated between nature and man. This historicized study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culinary culture demonstrates that illustrated books and paintings of edible goods should be understood as constructed fictions offering reassuring visions of a hierarchical, lavish, and orderly gastronomic culture to their patrons in Florence and Parma. The elevation of food and dining was essential to the structure and functions of the Medici and Farnese courts and the recording of these gastronomic practices in print and painting played a key role in constructing and enacting ducal dominance over politics, culture, and nature.