The Italian Fruit Detective Who Investigates Centuries-Old Paintings for Disappeared Produce
November 18, 2024 at 08:30PMIt turns out that the solution to Italy’s climate change-induced agricultural woes might come from two things Italy has in abundance: Renaissance paintings and Catholic saints. The super-realistic 15th and 16th century art captures dozens of almost or entirely extinct fruits, and central Italy’s many monasteries — monasteries that have refused to sell their land to agribusiness — remain surrounded by orchards planted hundreds of years ago, where many of the ancient cultivars bloom on. Who knew? Isabella Dalla Ragione did, and now we do too, thanks to Mark Schapiro’s fascinating feature-slash-profile of the (world’s first?) fruit detective.
Before the 15th century, almost all European artwork was focused on mythical or religious imagery. But in a shift away from the formal and thematic rigidity of the medieval period, many artists, often immersed in their own rural societies, began to paint nature and its bounty with increasingly devoted precision. Even more important, Dalla Ragione says, fruits often carried symbolic meaning—cherries the blood of Christ, pears the symbol of paradise after death, and so on. Painters needed to be precise in their renderings so that “the messages from the paintings had to arrive to everybody, rich and poor alike.” That lifelike precision means that Dalla Ragione can tell, by the placement of a fruit’s stem, or its shape, or the colors of its skin, not only the species of fruit but also the variety—that is, not only the difference between an apple and a pear, but the difference between one kind of apple or pear and another.
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The importance of agricultural biodiversity, Dalla Ragione says, can be explained with a very human metaphor—language. She likens biodiversity on a farm to expanding a vocabulary. Conventional agriculture, with its limited genetic range, relies on a narrow vocabulary: “Industrial agriculture created a few varieties that are very productive in very precise conditions, with a lot of chemicals and a lot of water. The new varieties may be bigger and have more consistent color, but they have very few genes—few words. Their genetic patrimony is very simple. If you present the right question, they can answer, because maybe they have four or five or maybe ten words. But if you present other questions—like drought or climate change or other situations—they have no words to answer. They can’t answer because they do not have enough genetic variability inside to answer these questions. Old varieties have a big vocabulary. They have many words to answer these new questions.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/18/the-italian-fruit-detective-who-investigates-centuries-old-paintings-for-disappeared-produce/
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