Culinary Icons: Cooks and Their Labor in the Roman Visual Arts (20 min)

Presenters

Aaron Brown, St. Norbert College

Abstract

What place did the cook occupy in the visual arts of ancient Rome, and what can representations of their labor reveal about the mechanics of actual kitchenwork in antiquity? In seeking to address these questions, this paper brings together a diverse array of largely understudied food preparation scenes and related imagery in paint, mosaic, relief sculpture, and decorative silverware drawn from across the Roman Empire and dating from the first century B.C.E. to the fourth century C.E., allowing us to appreciate temporal and geographic variations in artistic and culinary practice. The surveyed works of art—consisting of elite “cookout” scenes, static kitchenware displays, and imagery relating to the professional lives of those in the food service industry—I interrogate from a technofunctional standpoint, while attending to the genre and spectatorship of individual images. In the process, we gain a deeper understanding of Roman attitudes toward kitchenwork, variously represented as menial labor and sacred undertaking, and the habits of the cook at work. Above all, this material allows us to glimpse gestures and ephemeral bodily practices that would otherwise remain matters of speculation and to visualize implements that typically do not survive in the archaeological record, helping us to reimagine the composition of the Roman batterie de cuisine, or kitchenware kit. Examined in conjunction with other forms of evidence (literary, artifactual, organic, etc.), the iconographic record stands to contribute much to the evolving story of meal-making in the Roman world, as this paper aims to demonstrate.