Renaissance fruit

 Earlier I posted about medieval fruits and vegetables, the mainstay of the diet for people who had access to a lot less meat than we do in the modern West.  Today I want to discuss a bit more about how we know what their fruit was like.

Surprisingly, we know an awful lot from Renaissance paintings, dating from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.  The artists would put people in the foreground, maybe a wealthy duke who wanted to be memorialized, maybe a Madonna and child, and then fill in the rest with a realistic landscape or household setting.  Often they would include fruit.  For example, Baby Jesus might be depicted holding some cherries, whose red juice was considered symbolic of the blood of the Sacrifice.

(Wait, the kid's not even to his first birthday, and we're already foretelling his painful death?  Yep, that's what's happening.)

A painting by Bellini from the end of the fifteenth century shows a Madonna and child with what appears to be a pear sitting in front of them. Recent scholarship has indicated that it is more likely to be an apple, perhaps symbolizing the Fruit that Adam and Even unwisely ate, causing all sorts of problems, to be contrasted to the salvation Jesus would bring.

 Renaissance painters also sometimes did still lifes, pictures of bowls of fruit and flowers and the like, and helpfully these still lifes often came with labels, as the artist was proud not just of painting an attractive picture but of doing so extremely accurately.  "See, I caught the distinguishing characteristics of this variety of peach or these plums very clearly."

These detailed paintings have been used to identify many kinds of "heritage" fruits, with the purpose of not letting the biodiversity of multiple varieties disappear, as just a few popular types take over the market.  In Italy especially (where a lot of this Renaissance art is found) there is now a concerted effort to find a few small orchards that might still be growing some of the scores of varieties that used to be grown, before the big orchard growers turned to varieties that, with chemical fertilizer and irrigation, could turn out large harvests.

Interestingly, a lot of these small orchards with old varieties are found at monasteries.  The monks and nuns have had orchards since their monasteries were first established, and since the fruit was for their own use, not for the grocery store, they kept on with the varieties they knew best.

Historians can also get a better sense of what medieval fruit looked like.  It was smaller and doubtless a bit scruffier than modern fruit, and often what we would call misshapen.  The apple in the picture above, for example, is a variety dubbed "cow nose apple," still grown in a few places and considered very good, but it doesn't look a lot like a nice round, red McIntosh.

There is an article in the November 2024 Smithsonian magazine about Isabella Dalla Ragione, who is leading the effort in Italy to rediscover and identify many types of heritage fruit, with the purpose of maintaining fruit's ability to adapt to changing climate and conditions.  She found many clues in old manorial records from the Renaissance as well as in Renaissance paintings.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval food and drink, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.