Picazzo, the crazy painter!
[a.k.a. the man who painted music while listening to paintings] [04 of 40]

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The Ricotta Eaters - Vincenzo Campi (circa 1585)

"The Ricotta Eaters" is an oil on canvas painting from around 1585 by Vincenzo Campi. The painter lives in the "little Antwerp" of Italy (Longhi), the Cremona of the 16th century. This Lombard city particularly feels the cultural influence of Flanders: both regions share Austrian rule, which contributes to making them "sisters." Many painters from Northern Europe, therefore, descend into the Farnese territories to rediscover the roots of Italian painting and to promote artistic exchanges: one of these "tourist" painters, Joachim Beuckelaer, born in "Northern" Antwerp, paints popular and naturalistic subjects that will strongly influence Campi. From Flemish art, indeed, Campi learns to appreciate the grotesque and sensuality and begins to favor genre painting.
The Ricotta Eaters is a hymn to pleasure and life that Campi composes around 1580. Like Van Gogh's The Potato Eaters, these four people of popular origins are so captivated by food that they almost worship it. However, their expressions, their gazes, are filled with a desire that transcends food and becomes something else. Those knowing eyes, those slightly open mouths, as if awaiting, those suggestive smiles speak of something else, no longer about ricotta. It’s pleasure that gathers them around that simple food, and it’s again sensuality that spills from the woman on the right as she offers her breasts to the diners, as if they were food. In this way, once again since the time of Eve’s apple, food and sex brush against and blur into one another. But Vincenzo Campi is certainly not the first to notice this, nor the last. A few decades later, in fact, it will be Caravaggio who paints the same slightly open mouth over food with his "Boy with a Basket of Fruit."