Searching Art for Lost Fruit

From Gastro Obscura:

Sometimes, looking at works of art can lead to new discoveries. That happened with an apple-like pear that she rediscovered, thanks to a painting by Renaissance artist Francesco Squarcione. In “The Virgin and the Child,” a 1460 painting held at the Berlin State Museum in Germany, the artist painted a fruit to the right of Jesus’s feet. “Most art historians refer to this fruit as an apple,” Dalla Ragione says. “But I wasn’t convinced.”

She searched for references to a “flat apple” in old manuscripts, but soon realized that what Squarcione depicted was in fact a “pera verdacchia,” a variety of pear once commonly used in Umbria to make baked pears and crostatas. After a hunt across abandoned the farmsteads and monastic gardens of the Upper Tiber valley, Dalla Ragione eventually found a pera verdacchia in a field near Arezzo, Tuscany. (Read more.)