Feast and Fast at the Fitzwilliam: A dog's breakfast?

Is this an exhibition (full title is Feast and Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800) on “the art of food”? Not really. It is more, as director Luke Syson states in the Foreword, “the story of food in Cambridge, Britain and Europe between 1500 and 1800” in a visual display – not at all the same thing. The exhibition is the result of a partnership between the Museum and the University History Faculty, which explains (although doesn't justify) the intensely didactic tone of the catalogue. The result is a hotchpotch, spectacularly good in places, but indigestible as a whole, for example, "Eating in early modern Europe was a performance in which the diners were both audience and actors." 

The Introduction makes bold claims for the exhibition. This is not just “who ate what when … This new interdisciplinary history of food has become a rich and important field through which topics such as religion, class, gender, globalisation and the ‘everyday’ can be explored through food and integrated into wider historical perspectives”. [p8] That’s quite a theme! Because food is ephemeral, the exhibition concentrates on “visual and material culture relating to food”.  In other words, there may be some art, but the link to food is the main point. And what links! There is a recreation of a Baroque feasting table of around 1650, with a full-size swan gracing it. 

As for fasting, you might as well call the exhibition “Feast and Plate”, or “Feast and China” rather than "Feast and Fast" – there is a handful of objects relating to fasting, but the presence of fasting in the title as more for alliteration than for a description of the exhibition as a whole.

Moreover, from the very first sentence of the catalogue, about the Neapolitan cuccagna, or triumphal arch made of cheeses and other foods, you can see the exhibition is based on quite specialised knowledge - and it is made quite clear that this is text for teaching you. Melissa Calaresu (clearly Italian from her name) has written on aspects of Neapolitan food history, and there is a strong injection of detailed knowledge whenever objects relating to Naples and Cambridge are mentioned.

Given that the exercise is written by academics, it’s perhaps not surprising the catalogue is full of academic-speak. Few concessions are made for ordinary gallery-goers. Twenty-four contributors are credited for the many entries, which are grouped into eight main sections (although trying to tackle such a vast subject will always result in gaps). The argument continues in several of the footnotes (but you don’t know in advance which of the footnotes contain additional material). Examples of overly academic writing include:

The ever-present need for food dictated the rhythms of life for people in early modern Europe, and knowledge of the ways of nature was essential to produce enough food for the perpetuation of humanity.  (p11)

I assume “ways of nature” means “knowing how to grow things”, while “the perpetuation of humanity” means "to keep you and your family alive". Nobody then or now produces food for the perpetuation of humanity. 

Whether as potent metaphor or simply representing itself, the familiar qualities of food helped to domesticate the unknowable forces behind the mysteries of nature. [p12]

 One engraving [Bosse, Taste, c1638] has a dog in the foreground, described as follows: “the dog’s stylisation as at once both fat and thin, luxurious furry head combined with bony hindquarters, would seem to enshrine the struggle between indulgence and restraint – the bestiality of gluttony versus the civility of the human experience” [p17]. I’m not sure how a dog, or any part of a dog, represents “the civility of human experience”. I have a dog, and I love it, but it is canine, not human.

The challenge of the exhibition is its sheer range. One or two objects introduce a vast topic, such as the slave trade, or food theft, but then the viewers are swept off to something entirely new. An indication of the vast ambition of the exhibition is seen in part one: “food cycles and systems”. It contains sections on The Four Humours, the Five Senses, the four elements, and the four seasons. We have already broken the boundaries of food. And if these, why not other groups? Why not the Twelve Months, which is included in the exhibits, for example in a Book of Hours, and is described in the introduction to this section as part of the iconographic tradition of depicting the months, for example, a baker making bread in December. I see less connection, however, between food and the Four Humours, or the Five Senses. Here, as elsewhere, the catalogue is reduced to a simple exercise of “where can I find a link to food in all this?” Three of a series of prints on the Four Elements mention food, while one (Fire) does not. Where does that get us? 

There is a magnificent embroidery of Arcadia from 17th-century England – and, surprise, surprise, it includes animals, which can be construed as food! Beyond that, all that is stated is that “both the embroidery, with its varied threads and stitches, and the composition are complex”.

Despite the seemingly all-embracing topic, there are still many items in the exhibition that seem to me to have little relation to food. Jacob van Ruisdael’s Panoramic view on the Amstel is just that, a landscape, albeit with some windmills, which would enable the inclusion of most 17th-century Dutch landscapes.

There are very interesting sections on individual foods, such as the pineapple and ginger, and some good points on how food was brought to the table, (sugar), and finally, some magnificent recreations of floral decorations: a confectioner’s shop window, a sugar banquet, and a baroque feast. But silver plate from Cambridge colleges, and eighteenth-century candlesticks, while readily available for display, do not advance our knowledge of food much further. How people ate in Cambridge colleges in the eighteenth century is always going to be of limited interest in the history of Food. You could describe the Cambridge plate an opportunistic way to fill the exhibition with some readily available artwork that usually gathers dust in the archives. That plate tells you little about food but quite a bit about silversmithing.   And as for the image below, just what is that woman telling us? Is she contemptuous of the vast display of ingredients in front of her, or full of anticipation?               

Is this the kind of exhibition the Fitzwilliam should be doing? Ambition is good, and the exhibition suggests the vast range of topics that can be considered under the heading of “food”. Moreover, the the mainstream premier-league museums such as the National Gallery will stick much more to fine art. This exhibition resembles some recent thematic British Museum shows more than purely art-historical exhibitions. But if it means that the common viewer has to struggle through an academic survey of a vast topic, and one that wasn’t primarily designed for general consumption, then the result is, in a word, indigestion.