The Hungry Eye : Eating, Drinking, and European Culture From Rome to the Renaissance

**An enticing history of food and drink in Western art and culture** Eating and drinking can be aesthetic experiences as well as sensory ones. __The Hungry Eye__ takes readers from antiquity to the Renaissance to explore the central role of food and drink in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and statecraft. In this beautifully illustrated book, Leonard Barkan provides an illuminating meditation on how culture finds expression in what we eat and drink. Plato's __Symposium__ is a timeless philosophical text, one that also describes a drinking party. Salome performed her dance at a banquet where the head of John the Baptist was presented on a platter. Barkan looks at ancient mosaics, Dutch still life, and Venetian Last Suppers. He describes how ancient Rome was a paradise of culinary obsessives, and explains what it meant for the Israelites to dine on manna. He discusses the surprising relationship between Renaissance perspective and dinner parties, and sheds new light on the moment when the risen Christ appears to his disciples hungry for a piece of broiled fish. Readers will browse the pages of the __Deipnosophistae__—an ancient Greek work in sixteen volumes about a single meal, complete with menus—and gain epicurean insights into such figures as Rabelais and Shakespeare, Leonardo and Vermeer. A book for anyone who relishes the pleasures of the table, __The Hungry Eye__ is an erudite and uniquely personal look at all the glorious ways that food and drink have transfigured Western arts and high culture. An enticing history of food and drink in Western art and culture Eating and drinking can be aesthetic experiences as well as sensory ones. The Hungry Eye takes readers from antiquity to the Renaissance to explore the central role of food and drink in literature, art, philosophy, religion, and statecraft. In this beautifully illustrated book, Leonard Barkan provides an illuminating meditation on how culture finds expression in what we eat and drink. Plato's Symposium is a timeless philosophical text, one that also describes a drinking party. Salome performed her dance at a banquet where the head of John the Baptist was presented on a platter. Barkan looks at ancient mosaics, Dutch still life, and Venetian Last Suppers. He describes how ancient Rome was a paradise of culinary obsessives, and explains what it meant for the Israelites to dine on manna. He discusses the surprising relationship between Renaissance perspective and dinner parties, and sheds new light on the moment when the risen Christ appears to his disciples hungry for a piece of broiled fish. Readers will browse the pages of the Deipnosophistae ―an ancient Greek work in sixteen volumes about a single meal, complete with menus―and gain epicurean insights into such figures as Rabelais and Shakespeare, Leonardo and Vermeer. A book for anyone who relishes the pleasures of the table, The Hungry Eye is an erudite and uniquely personal look at all the glorious ways that food and drink have transfigured Western arts and high culture. "In discussions of arts and culture, food and drink are often relegated to the realms of mere decoration or mere necessity. However, like the term taste, which begins as one of the five senses but comes to be understood as the most sweeping term for human sensibility, eating and drinking can also be fundamental aesthetic experiences. In this book, author Leonard Barkan covers millennia of Western aesthetic and cultural activity, tracing the history of eating and drinking across literature, art, philosophy, statecraft, religion, and historiography. Drawing on a myriad of historical and analytic perspectives, Barkan demonstrates how the materials of the dining table, the flavor and pleasure of food, and hunger and satiety are central to life and culture. He explores what it means to "read for the food" in works of art, literature, and philosophy, and demonstrates the central role that food played in Roman civilization. He examines the deeply culinary qualities of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the relationship between food and drink and the culture of the Renaissance, and the literal acts of consumption that are endowed with sacred significance. By uncovering the gastronomic underplot in cultural and artistic works, Barkan proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the relation between sense experience and aesthetic experience, and considers what it means to move from the margins to the center in a study of culture"-- Provided by publisher