(August 9, 2017) “The Venetian Table in the Renaissance”: this is the title of the conference that Ekaterina Igošina, art historian, responsible for the Puškin Museum’s Scientific Library, will hold on August 10 at 7pm at the Musejon Center Of the Museum of Fine Arts “ASPuškin” in Moscow. “One of the most brilliant pages of the 16th century Venetian culture – reads the note on the event on the site of the Italian Institute of Culture of Russian Capital – are the luxurious feasts: they were organized for civil holidays or special occasions of the religious calendar, nobility wedding or the election of the Doge, the birth of heirs of noble families or the arrival of ambassadors and important guests in the city. Usually the feast was accompanied by an exquisite banquet that could last from a few hours to a week and was subject to special rules on the list and the order of the dishes, the number of chefs and servants”. These solemn feasts often became subjects for the works of artists who worked in Venice at that time, including the famous triad of painters whose activities cover almost the whole of the sixteenth century: Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Most of the paintings depict scenes of meals, mentioned in the Sacred Scriptures, but for researchers who are rebuilding this page in Venice’s history in the sixteenth century, such works have become irreplaceable sources of information on the traditions of the Renaissance feast.
