Pasta Eater: Allegory of Taste

Giordano's Pasta Eater: Allegory of Taste from 1660 at the Princeton Art Museum belongs to a Five Senses series, representing the sense of taste through the vivid genre image of a Neapolitan street figure eating pasta with evident pleasure. The Five Senses were a popular allegorical series in seventeenth-century painting, treating the philosophical category of the senses through naturalistic genre scenes that combined symbolic content with direct observation of everyday life. Giordano's version brings the street naturalism of the Neapolitan tradition — Ribera's beggars and philosophers, the common people who populated Spanish Naples — into an allegorical framework. The pasta eater was a specifically Neapolitan figure: Naples was famous for pasta consumption in the seventeenth century, its street vendors selling maccaroni to the lazzaroni (working poor) who ate standing in the streets. The Princeton Art Museum holds this as part of its collection of Italian Baroque works, where this rare example of Giordano's genre painting sits alongside his more typical religious and mythological subjects.

The eating figure provides a naturalistic representation of the sense of taste, rendered with Giordano's characteristic energy and direct observation. The food and eating implements are depicted with tactile immediacy.