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The Hungry Eye: Eating, Drinking, and European Culture from Rome to the Renaissance
An enticing history of food and drink in Western art and culture
Eating and drinking can be aesthetic experiences as well as sensory ones. The Hungry Eye takes readers from antiquity to the Renaissance to explore the central role of food and drink in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and statecraft.
In this beautifully illustrated book, Leonard Barkan provides an illuminating meditation on how culture finds expression in what we eat and drink. Plato's Symposium is a timeless philosophical text, one that also describes a drinking party. Salome performed her dance at a banquet where the head of John the Baptist was presented on a platter. Barkan looks at ancient mosaics, Dutch still life, and Venetian Last Suppers. He describes how ancient Rome was a paradise of culinary obsessives, and explains what it meant for the Israelites to dine on manna. He discusses the surprising relationship between Renaissance perspective and dinner parties, and sheds new light on the moment when the risen Christ appears to his disciples hungry for a piece of broiled fish. Readers will browse the pages of the Deipnosophistae—an ancient Greek work in sixteen volumes about a single meal, complete with menus—and gain epicurean insights into such figures as Rabelais and Shakespeare, Leonardo and Vermeer.
A book for anyone who relishes the pleasures of the table, The Hungry Eye is an erudite and uniquely personal look at all the glorious ways that food and drink have transfigured Western arts and high culture.
Eating and drinking can be aesthetic experiences as well as sensory ones. The Hungry Eye takes readers from antiquity to the Renaissance to explore the central role of food and drink in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and statecraft.
In this beautifully illustrated book, Leonard Barkan provides an illuminating meditation on how culture finds expression in what we eat and drink. Plato's Symposium is a timeless philosophical text, one that also describes a drinking party. Salome performed her dance at a banquet where the head of John the Baptist was presented on a platter. Barkan looks at ancient mosaics, Dutch still life, and Venetian Last Suppers. He describes how ancient Rome was a paradise of culinary obsessives, and explains what it meant for the Israelites to dine on manna. He discusses the surprising relationship between Renaissance perspective and dinner parties, and sheds new light on the moment when the risen Christ appears to his disciples hungry for a piece of broiled fish. Readers will browse the pages of the Deipnosophistae—an ancient Greek work in sixteen volumes about a single meal, complete with menus—and gain epicurean insights into such figures as Rabelais and Shakespeare, Leonardo and Vermeer.
A book for anyone who relishes the pleasures of the table, The Hungry Eye is an erudite and uniquely personal look at all the glorious ways that food and drink have transfigured Western arts and high culture.
328 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 14, 2021
About the author
Leonard Barkan
21 books6 followersLeonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature along with appointments in the Departments of Art and Archaeology, English, and Classics. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and N.Y.U. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale, 1986) and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (Yale, 1999), which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association,Architectural Digest, and Phi Beta Kappa. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy on the subject of food and wine.
He is the author of Satyr Square (Farrar, Straus, 2006; pbk Northwestern, 2008), which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. In recent years, he has published Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010), which treats the artist’s creative and inner life by considering his constant habit of writing words on his drawings, and Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures(Princeton, 2012), an essay about the intersecting worlds of artists and writers from Plato and Praxiteles to Shakespeare and Rembrandt. During 2014-15 he was the Rudolf Arnheim Gastprofessur at the Institut für Kunst und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt University, and he spent a month as a Visiting Professor at Harvard’s I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. During the sabbatical year he completed Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2016. Having delivered the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome in 2011 on the subject of food culture and high culture from antiquity to the Renaissance, he is now completing a book-length version of that subject to be entitled Reading for the Food: Art, Literature, and the Hungry Eye
He is the author of Satyr Square (Farrar, Straus, 2006; pbk Northwestern, 2008), which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. In recent years, he has published Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010), which treats the artist’s creative and inner life by considering his constant habit of writing words on his drawings, and Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures(Princeton, 2012), an essay about the intersecting worlds of artists and writers from Plato and Praxiteles to Shakespeare and Rembrandt. During 2014-15 he was the Rudolf Arnheim Gastprofessur at the Institut für Kunst und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt University, and he spent a month as a Visiting Professor at Harvard’s I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. During the sabbatical year he completed Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2016. Having delivered the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome in 2011 on the subject of food culture and high culture from antiquity to the Renaissance, he is now completing a book-length version of that subject to be entitled Reading for the Food: Art, Literature, and the Hungry Eye
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August 8, 2026To chew or not to chew is to raise the question whether I am eating Jesus or eating dinner.
January 3, 2022
No account of this life or the next can be complete without the unmistakable signs of eating and drinking, whether in anticipation or as a feast accompli.
Amusing note about the famous interrogation to which the Inquisition submitted the artist Veronese after he had produced a gigantic painting of a feast for the refectory at the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, now in the Gallerie dell'Academia:
114. The comic bathos starts early, at the very beginning of the interrogation, when Veronese is asked whether he knows why he was sent for and he replies, in effect, 'is it about the dog?' It seems that someone whose name he doesn't know want him to replace the dog in the painting with Mary Magdalene. He doesn't want to make that change because he doesn't think Mary Magdalene would look good there, 'for a variety of reasons, which I can speak to if I am given the chance.'
Amusing note about the famous interrogation to which the Inquisition submitted the artist Veronese after he had produced a gigantic painting of a feast for the refectory at the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, now in the Gallerie dell'Academia:
114. The comic bathos starts early, at the very beginning of the interrogation, when Veronese is asked whether he knows why he was sent for and he replies, in effect, 'is it about the dog?' It seems that someone whose name he doesn't know want him to replace the dog in the painting with Mary Magdalene. He doesn't want to make that change because he doesn't think Mary Magdalene would look good there, 'for a variety of reasons, which I can speak to if I am given the chance.'
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews