By Zheyuan Liu
My exhibit mainly talks about how renaissance food was used in art painting. The reason why I chose the period of the Renaissance is that in that environment, people’s emotional expression was intense and dramatic. Whether people were entertaining or expressing their emotions through paintings, painting was the favorite way of doing things at that time. Therefore, there are tons of resources and works that can help me explore paintings and art from that period. In my analysis, I mainly analyze how artists express their ideas through paintings and the essence of their paintings.
In my first primary source, I explored the painting Banquet Piece with Mince, which vividly expressed the prevalence of waste under consumerism at the time through the arrangement of messy food utensils and leftover food, and The painter may wish to satirize the excessive consumerism of the time through his paintings. In the second painting – The Gardener, we can get two different paintings by flipping the painting upside down, one is a big bowl full of vegetables and the other is a god with a black hat. This detail is not only the expression of the painter’s cleverness but also emphasizes the richness of people’s life at the time of humanism. Finally, I analyzed the painting The Feast of Dives. The author vividly expressed the cruel oppression of the nobles at that time and the benevolence of Christianity to people at that time through strong color contrast and expression.
Art is synonymous with the Renaissance, and the element of food makes our exploration of the Renaissance more in-depth and clear.
