Arcimboldo
by Zanini
The basket gets there before anyone else: shiny aubergines, green and red peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms. The tougher ones go into silver foil, tiny meteorites to be dropped into the embers. The rest wait in line for the grill. Soon the garden fills up. Friends drift in, beers sit in ice, laughter gets louder under the trees. A party, though nobody has called it one. As the vegetables hit the grill, something shifts four centuries backwards. Arcimboldo. The man who studied plants and flowers one leaf at a time, almost obsessively, then put them back together as faces. Now the grill is a canvas. Embers for a palette, vegetables as thick strokes of paint. His paintings were Wunderkammer anyway: fish, pearls, game, feathers, flowers, iron, fire. Inventories of the world pretending to be portraits, made for a court obsessed with collecting wonders. Roses from the garden hang heavy in the air, jammy and faintly spiced, their scent tangled up with the smoke. Roses, vegetables, charcoal. That’s exactly what today smells like. The foil parcels come out of the fire and open like little reliquaries. A wild, balsamic nepetella sauce cuts through the sweetness of the char. In the end, we eat Arcimboldo’s portrait. It’s a summer Sunday. That’s enough.
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The basket gets there before anyone else: shiny aubergines, green and red peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms. The tougher ones go into silver foil, tiny meteorites to be dropped into the embers. The rest wait in line for the grill. Soon the garden fills up. Friends drift in, beers sit in ice, laughter gets louder under the trees. A party, though nobody has called it one. As the vegetables hit the grill, something shifts four centuries backwards. Arcimboldo. The man who studied plants and flowers one leaf at a time, almost obsessively, then put them back together as faces. Now the grill is a canvas. Embers for a palette, vegetables as thick strokes of paint. His paintings were Wunderkammer anyway: fish, pearls, game, feathers, flowers, iron, fire. Inventories of the world pretending to be portraits, made for a court obsessed with collecting wonders. Roses from the garden hang heavy in the air, jammy and faintly spiced, their scent tangled up with the smoke. Roses, vegetables, charcoal. That’s exactly what today smells like. The foil parcels come out of the fire and open like little reliquaries. A wild, balsamic nepetella sauce cuts through the sweetness of the char. In the end, we eat Arcimboldo’s portrait. It’s a summer Sunday. That’s enough.