Food and drink in painting work as a coded language. Bread stands for the body of Christ, wine for his blood, and rotting fruit for death. This page opens seven guides, on feasts, bread, wine, kitchens, taverns, card tables and fruit, and each one shows the code at work in a dozen paintings.
Painters carried that code from the altar to the dinner table, and not everyone was happy to see it there. In 1573, a Venetian painter found out how closely a tribunal could read a table.
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Paolo Veronese was summoned before the Holy Office in Venice on 18 July 1573. His canvas was meant to be a Last Supper for the Dominican friary of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and the inquisitors counted everything else that was on it: jesters, drunkards, Germans and dwarfs, and a dog. They asked about a servant with a nosebleed, and Veronese said the man had been hurt by some mischance.
The inquisitors then told him to paint Mary Magdalene in place of the dog. Veronese answered that he would gladly do it, and anything else, for his own honor and the picture's. The verdict gave him three months to correct the canvas at his own expense.
He did not repaint a single figure. He changed the title to Feast in the House of Levi, and no punishment followed.
The judges had read the table like a text, and a new title was enough to change what it said. The seven guides below teach that kind of reading, one food at a time.
What You'll Discover
Why a new title satisfied the judges.
Why bread appears where no one eats.
How a sacred cup became a product.
What the kitchen shows that banquets hide.
Why the tavern was a moral stage.
Why an apple took the blame.