FEAST & FAST AT THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM
Everyone is interested in food. And everyone will love this exhibition. Guaranteed.
Outside the Museum stands a magical great giant pineapple on a lurid pink plinth. The pineapple is a symbol of welcome and generosity and its presence is a dramatic opener to anyone who wants to engage with the hugely interesting exhibition within. Curator Victoria Avery hopes it hooks in passing punters, people who feel museums are not for them. ‘It turns out there is real anxiety about entering a museum or gallery - we want to make it clear that our exhibition is for them :their children might run in to see what the pineapple is all about and when they go to retrieve them, the barriers might fall and they can come in.’
This open attitude runs through this delightful exhibition.
Somehow the feel of it is quite different from the usual scholarly ambience of the Fitzwilliam shows. Not that it isn’t erudite and complex. There are 300 pieces in the three immense exhibition rooms and largely they are packed with home produced items. Instead of the usual diverse collection of expensively freighted international treasures, this exhibition has gone very green indeed. All but two of the paintings belong to the Fitzwilliam – all of them subjected to the meticulous treatment of their in-house restoration Institute.
“The colours leapt out’ Victoria recalls the moment she saw the re-vitalized paintings ‘The lobster, a still life of 1660 by Joris van Son, emerged bright and almost unrecognizable whilst the details of the iron cooking pots once a uniform dark grey reveal the ridges and texture of the original ‘
Sugar Paladian Palce with French style coloured sugar parterre by Ivan Day
The silver on display belongs to Cambridge Colleges, uniquely placed to provide a Jacobean creamer or long unused silver salver. Where great houses and palaces melted down their useless outdated tableware to refashion into the latest gravy boat or platter, Colleges have preserved theirs through the tradition of an annual feast in honour of their founder where things are done exactly as they always have been and no messing about with the new fangled. So lo and behold, the classic table setting for a Jacobean luxury meal, all neatly on display. And the ingredients didn’t have to come far. The exhibition even before it opened provides a service to art and, painting and the chance for Cambridge folk to view the unrivalled beauty of usually exclusive – and priceless – silver. For this reason the show will go on longer than the usual three months (‘ a length prescribed by the costs of loans and insurance’ Victoria tells us confidentially) and will run, intriguingly enough through three phases of the fasting and feasting in its title. So we start with Advent when our ancestors would fast (not too rigorous, you did get one big meal a day and one small one a ‘collation’) then weeks of feasting for the great festival of Christmas – imagine how happy they were to see a great side of beef or goose after weeks of fish and vegetables – then ‘ordinary time’ before off again with fasting for the 40 days of Lent before the greatest celebration of the Christian calendar, Easter.
Feasting before the Golden Calf
The exhibition is quirky and entirely fascinating. Where else would you see table settings created in the style of centuries ago? International food expert Ivan Day has created three and each one reveals so much about thought and tradition – as well as food – in the past.
Number one is a Jacobean wedding feast. There is a centerpiece made in the shape of a mini-banqueting lodge at Long Melford. Selected guests would peel off to such an exclusive small-scale location to enjoy the dessert course of the banquet in an intimate upper room. And what a spread. Ivan Day has achieved the impossible : he has made not only the model building but also the little pieces of crockery, and a pair of miniature gloves all in sugar. The recipe is written on the wall above. From his personal collection of ancient moulds from Tudor times, Mr. Day makes gingerbread people (very popular – and no sex discrimination here, there are ladies and gentlemen) and beautiful reproductions of buildings leaves, even kings and queens. The paraphernalia of a confectioner’s shop window in the eighteenth century. On loads another table . Mr. Genius Day (there must only be one of him in the entire world) has created cakes with coronets on them, sugar plums (actually what we would call sugared almonds) and all the tools of the trade, the knives and moulds and ivory instruments for working the sugar). Finally there’s an astonishing re-creatd feasting table loaded with stuffed animals and birds. Colourful plumage fahioned into a kind of cover indicated what kind of pie you were about to eat. No cunfusion here .The Fitzwilliam Museum has ethically sourced a swan to stuff (it was caught on an overhead electricity line in Norfolk) some partridges and pheasants ( road kill) and a lobster, all to recreate the table of the rich in those extravagant times.
Sugar Plums
You will discover some amazing things about food from this exhibition Veganism a new fad? Absolutely not, a sainted devotee of St Francis of Assisi began his own Order,the Minims, with a vow to never eat meat - or any living creature. There are pictures of giant hares roasting human hunters in revenge, of cows complaining of separation from their babies long before those woke posters appeared and everything religious and held dear was underpinned by food, even the life of prayer itself.
The pineapple has stood as an emblem of power hospitality - and scientific intrigue -for centuries. It was an object of desire for kings and Popes and the talented Mr.Day has created a Pineapple ice cream image for the exhibition. It is a symbol of globalisation in early times and fair trade in ours.
Intriguingly, the original English pineapple grown outside in a natural setting was the horticultural skill of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s founder’s grandfather, Matthew Decker. Just the kind of quirky coincidence that makes this exhbition compelling.
This show is an absolute must. And fun for Christmas.
A palladian creatiion - all in moulded sugar - with parterre made from the French innovation of sables artifices, coloured granulated sand.
