Remarkable and imaginative: Fitzwilliam Museum’s The Art of Food reviewed

Eating makes us anxious. This is a feature of contemporary life: a huge amount of attention is devoted to how much we eat, when we eat it, where it comes from, to toxic foods, organic and inorganic ones, environmentally damaging groceries, those that tot up too much mileage or cause damage to the rainforest.

Some of these worries are relatively novel, but preoccupation with the nourishment we consume is not. A remarkable and imaginative exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800, documents just how obsessed our ancestors were with every aspect of their meals.

At its heart are a series of recreations by Ivan Day, a specialist on the subject of what can only be described as edible art. The first you encounter is a Jacobean banquet, c.1610, in which not only are the comestibles extremely sweet, even the crockery is made of moulded sugar. Titbits designed to appeal to sweet Stuart teeth are displayed in an elegant bowl held up by the tails of miniature dolphins — these last derived from designs by Giulio Romano.

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Julie Burchill

Will I ever pee again?

So there you have it: art you could crunch and suck like a stick of rock (though probably at significant dental risk). There were many such aesthetic lollipops on the tables of the wealthy of Renaissance Europe. In 17th-century Rome, cardinals were known to place martyred sugar-saints by notable sculptors in the centre of the spread.

Understandably, such edible statuary did not survive longer than the meals it adorned, so it is fascinating to see these re-created examples. My favourite, though, was more sweetshop neoclassical than baroque: a recreation of an 18th-century London confectioner’s window display, featuring a couple of iced cakes exactly like Adam ceilings (or, an intriguing thought, perhaps 18th-century plasterwork copied these elaborately decorated bakery products).