Le Presens Rustique from Les Images ou Tableaux de platte peinture des deux Philostrates sophistes grecs et les statue de Callistrate.

Engraving  1615

Image: 240 x 190 mm  Frame: 575 x 470 mm

PHILOSTRATUS  Imagines 1.31. Xenia

It is a good thing to gather figs and also not to pass over in silence the figs in this picture. Purple figs dripping with juice are heaped on vine leaves; and they are depicted with breaks in the skin, some just cracking open to disgorge their honey, some split apart, they are so ripe. Near them lies a branch, not bare, by Zeus, or empty of fruit, but under the shade of its leaves are figs some still green and "untimely," some with wrinkled skin over-ripe, and some about to turn, disclosing the shining juice, while on the tip of the branch a sparrow buries its bill in what seems the very sweetest of the figs. All the ground is strewn with chestnuts, some of which are rubbed free of the burr, others like quite shut up, and others bow the burr breaking at the lines of division. See, too, the pears on pears, apples on apples, both heaps of them and piles of ten, all fragrant and golden. You will say that their redness has not been put on from outside, but has bloomed from within. Here are gift of the cherry tree, here is fruit in clusters heaped in a basket, and the basket is woven, not from alien twigs, but from branches of the plant itself. And if you look at the vine-sprays woven together and at the clusters hanging from them and how the grapes sand out one by one, you will certainly hymn Dionysus and speak of the vine as "Queenly giver of grapes." You should say that even the grapes in the painting are good to eat and full of winey juice. An on another leaf is cheese new curdled and quivering: and there are bowls of milk not merely white but gleaming, for the cream floating upon it makes it seem to gleam.