Pasta Eater: Allegory of Taste
Luca Giordano·1660
Historical Context
Pasta Eater: Allegory of Taste at the Princeton Art Museum belongs to a Five Senses series, depicting the sense of taste through a figure consuming pasta. Such allegories were popular in Italian and Netherlandish Baroque painting, combining philosophical themes with genre-like naturalism. Giordano's mythological canvases display his absorption of Venetian colorism, deploying warm flesh tones and lavish drapery against luminous skies with the fluency of a born decorative painter. These works c...
Technical Analysis
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.
Look Closer
- ◆Notice the naturalistic rendering of the eating figure: Giordano treats the sense of taste with direct observation, the pleasure of food depicted without the moralizing distance that the allegorical framework might impose.
- ◆Look at the food and eating implements depicted with still-life precision: pasta, bowls, and utensils are rendered with the same observational attention as the figure consuming them.
- ◆Find the characteristic energy Giordano brings even to this small-scale genre subject: the Riberesque tradition of depicting ordinary activities with full artistic seriousness underlies the Five Senses format.
- ◆Observe that Princeton Art Museum holds this work — the range of American university and civic museums holding Giordano paintings reflects how actively American institutions collected Italian Baroque art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
