Caravaggio and the art of dieting

The luscious banquets painted by the Renaissance master were held up as a good example of healthy eating this week by the National Obesity Forum – but were they really that nutritious?

The Caravaggio diet is spread out at an inn in The Supper at Emmaus, painted in 1601 by the man himself. But does it have much in common with the jolly pre-modern gourmandising recommended this week by David Haslam of the National Obesity Forum? Claiming that low-fat diets are counter-productive, Haslam mused: “I often contrast a Caravaggio still-life masterpiece, giving ideal positive images of healthy food – pheasant, meat, fish, wine, cocoa, fruit and vegetables, with maybe a slice of bread – with the negative image of a traditional ‘diet’ … and wonder where the world went wrong.”

He is clearly familiar with Dan Brown’s law, which says that if you are going to namecheck an artist, you should make sure it’s a name everyone has heard of. The secret society conspiracy theories in Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code had previously been attached to the French artist Nicolas Poussin, but Brown must have rightly realised that no one would buy a novel called The Poussin Code. Few even look at Poussin’s paintings in the National Gallery. I suspect the paintings Haslam is thinking of are really 17th-century Dutch still-life pictures with their hearty north European hunks of high- fat cheese, frothing ale glasses and bulging pies. But the “Willem Claeszoon Heda diet” doesn’t sound nearly so good.

Related: Official advice on low-fat diet and cholesterol is wrong, says health charity

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