Muhlenberg Lecture – Reading for the Food: Art, Literature, and the Hungry Eye

Leonard Barkan, Class of 1943 Professor (Princeton)

Eating and drinking have always accompanied the operations of “high culture”—that is, poetry, painting, philosophy, and music, not to mention the even loftier realms of theology and statecraft—but these gastronomic activities have not necessarily been accorded the prominence they deserve. Drawing from his book-in-progress on the subject, Professor Barkan will, as his projected title suggests, “Read for the Food” such seemingly disparate figures as Plato, Kant, Alberti, Vasari, Boucher, and the anonymous artistic geniuses who produced a late antique mosaic entitled “The Unswept Floor,” designed for a grand dining room and consisting of exquisitely depicted food garbage thrown on the floor after a feast.

To view the lecture and the slides, please click here.