Italian chefs to conjure up recipes inspired by paintings in Florence’s Uffizi Galleries

A painting by the Italian artist Giacomo Ceruti showing a boy with fish and a spider crab 

Credit: Uffizi Galleries

Cooking may be an art, but great works of art have also featured cooking, and the two are to be melded together in an unusual new initiative by the Uffizi Galleries in Florence.

The museum has invited some of Italy’s most celebrated chefs to draw inspiration from its priceless artworks and to rustle up some recipes in a project called Uffizi da Mangiare, or The Uffizi on a Plate.

Among the art works that have been chosen is a painting by Botticelli and Caravaggio’s famous Bacchus, which shows the Roman god of wine with a large carafe of red. 

Bacchus by Caravaggio

Credit: Uffizi Galleries

Many of the artworks selected are still-life studies of food showing hearty piles of vegetables, ripe fruit, the hanging bodies of rabbits, hares and wildfowl and seafood.

A painting by the 17th century Dutch artist Willem Van Aelst shows a bunch of succulent grapes and a pomegranate, while a painting by the Italian artist Giacomo Cerutti depicts a young boy with fish and a bright red spider crab in a basket.

A juicy cut of meat in a painting by the Italian artist Jacopo Chimenti is a reminder of the joys of good food and convivial eating “during these sad times of social distancing,” said Dario Cecchini, one of the chefs taking part in the initiative.

One of the paintings from which Italian chefs will draw inspiration

Credit: Uffizi Galleries 

The weekly cooking sessions will be filmed and posted on the Uffizi’s website and Facebook channel, with the first to be broadcast on Sunday.

The idea is that people at home will be able to follow the chefs and produce the dishes in their own kitchens.

“We thought that since people can’t go to restaurants right now and they can’t go to museums, why don’t we ask a series of well-known chefs to be inspired by our paintings,” Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi, told The Telegraph.

“The idea came to us in these Covid times. We were talking to chefs from restaurants in Florence because they want to know when we will reopen and when the tourists might start returning. Quite a few of them turned out to be interested in art. They were enthusiastic when we came up with the idea.”

The chefs will either cook with the exact ingredients depicted in the paintings or use them more generally for inspiration.

“For some, it could be a little more abstract – they might be inspired by the colour of the composition,” said Prof Schmidt.