The Kitchen

Leonardo worked in Milan for the better part of 20 years and left behind him a stock of drawings of deliberately deformed heads, which Lombard painters went on copying for generations. That taste is what the museum finds in the faces in this kitchen. Vincenzo Campi painted it in Cremona around 1580 as one of a set of four, and it is read as the element Fire. Everything happens at once here, cooks of every age at work, a quartered ox hung up at the side, a child with a twisted face blowing into an animal's bladder. The food and the utensils get none of that distortion. The pots are polished to a shine, the eggs catch the light, the grated cheese is white as snow.