Le Mangeur de fèves

Around 1584 in Bologna, the young Annibale Carracci did something almost no serious painter did, he gave a whole canvas to an ordinary man eating beans. No saints, no myth, just a labourer caught mid-mouthful, spoon halfway up, staring out as if you had interrupted his meal. On the table sit onions, bread, a savoury pie, a striped jug and a glass of wine, painted with the plain attention that Netherlandish artists brought to such things. One art historian called the effect a snapshot, a word that fits how suddenly the man seems to look up. It hangs today in the Palazzo Colonna in Rome. His fingers are grubby, his cloth cap pushed back, the bowl still steaming.