Os Comedores de Ricota

Around 1580 Vincenzo Campi, working in Cremona in northern Italy, was among the first Italian painters to build whole pictures around ordinary people doing ordinary, faintly ridiculous things. Four figures crowd around a wheel of fresh ricotta, grinning and elbowing one another as they dig in. Campi called the picture a Buffonaria, a piece of clowning, and dressed his eaters like characters from the commedia dell'arte, the improvised street comedy of the day. The man in red is thought to be the painter himself in the role of Pantalone, the greedy old Venetian. Pictures like this, cheap in subject but sharp in observation, fed a new appetite for scenes of kitchens, markets and eating that would soon spread across Europe. It came to the museum in Lyon in 1875.