Cesare Ripa
Italian scholar and author of the Iconologia
Biography
Cesare Ripa (Perugia, c. 1555 - Rome, 1622) was an Italian Renaissance scholar and iconographer, an amateur student of art and antiquity whose reputation rests almost entirely on a single book: the Iconologia. His link to food history is indirect but significant: the book set the visual vocabulary of allegory that painters and sculptors used for centuries, including figures later linked to cooking and the table in Baroque art.
Little is known about his life, and nearly all of it comes from the Iconologia itself. Of humble origins, he entered the household of Cardinal Antonio Maria Salviati in Rome while still very young, initially as a squire. He took part in academic circles such as the Filomati and Intronati of Siena, devoted to classical literature and antiquities, and the Accademia degli Incitati in Rome, where he lived between 1611 and 1620. In Rome he moved among the learned circles of early Baroque culture, and across successive editions he incorporated suggestions and new images from friends such as Pietro Leone Casella and Giovanni Zaratino Castellini.
The first edition appeared in 1593 without illustrations; the second, in 1603, contained 684 concepts and 151 woodcuts. In 1598 Pope Clement VIII made him a Knight of the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus. He died in Rome in 1622. His legacy is twofold: the Iconologia became a working handbook for painters and sculptors across Europe through the 17th and 18th centuries, and in the twentieth century scholars such as Émile Mâle, Ernst Gombrich and Erwin Panofsky recovered it as a key to early modern art, after Winckelmann had dismissed it harshly in the eighteenth century.
Key contributions
- Iconologia (1593; enlarged edition 1603): an alphabetical encyclopedia of allegories that served as an iconographic manual for artists and poets for two centuries.
- Codified descriptions of personifications, specifying clothing, colour and symbolic attributes, with their literary justifications.
- Influence on Baroque painting, including Pietro da Cortona and the Dutch painters Gerard de Lairesse and Willem van Mieris.
- Jean Baudoin's French translation (Paris, 1636), with engravings adapted by Jacob de Bie.
- Pierce Tempest's English translation (1709) and its spread in the Anglophone world.