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Abstract
Antonio Pereda y Salgado’s Still Life with an Ebony Chest (c.1652) presents the viewer with the makings of a luxurious Spanish merienda, or light afternoon meal: sausage, biscuits, chocolate, and all the necessary accoutrements. including ceramic cups and a silver plate. Many of these objects and foodstuffs would have been imported to Spain from Spanish Americas and China. Pereda’s painting thus reveals both a material culture as well as social practices that were predicated on Spain’s global maritime trade routes. Chocolate was a key element of these exchanges. A spiced, bitter drink used in Mayan and Aztec social and religious rituals, chocolate was initially perceived in the Spanish realms as medicinal. However, by the middle of the seventeenth century, it had become one of the essential pleasures of the elite Spanish table. It changed not just the Spanish lived experience, but, as Pereda’s and other paintings depicting chocolate attest, also Spanish visual culture.
Notes
1 Sebastián de Covarrubias defines the meal as ‘lo que se comía al medio día, que era poca cosa, esperando comer de propósito a la cena’. While chocolate was also consumed in the morning, Pereda’s and other paintings depicting chocolate suggest the more substantive—and shared—merienda. See Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española (Madrid: por Luis Sanchez, 1611), 547r. The provisions provided weekly for Príncipe Baltasar Carlos’ merienda—‘tres libras y media de azucar, una libra de bizcochos redondos grandes, un cuatrillo de agua de azahar y un cuarteron de gosajea’—underscores that this was often a sweet meal. See Archivo General de Palacio (AGP), Sección Administrativa, leg. 878, cited in María del Carmen Simón Palmer, La cocina de palacio, 1561–1931 (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1997), 24. The seventeenth-century merienda appears to have influenced the development of the eighteenth-century agasajo or refresco, taken mid afternoon ‘con dulces de caramelo, jalea, compota, bebidas como el café, té, chocolate, y bebidas refrescantes’ (Simón Palmer, La cocina de palacio, 141).
2 While scholars such as Byron Hamann have recently looked to Golden-Age icons like Las Meninas for visual and material evidence of a globalizing Spanish culture, I turn to a genre, the still life, which is a more natural fit for this type of inquiry. See Byron Hamann, ‘The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay’, The Art Bulletin, 92:1–2 (2010), 6–35. As Norman Bryson has argued, the still life responded quickly to the ‘unprecedented instability and volatility’ of early modern material culture, and allowed the new and the strange (in the case of the Pereda painting, extra-Peninsular objects and foodstuffs) to ‘appear as regulated and stabilized’. Indeed, paintings like Pereda’s both reflect the phenomenon of, and actively engage in the process of, normalization. See Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1990), 132.
3 The most frequently depicted of these objects are the molinillo and the banded textile, which appear in nine of the twelve paintings of chocolate services, the gourd cup, which appears in eight of the paintings, and the silver plate and/or spoon, which appear in seven of the paintings. Each of the other three objects appear in five of the paintings.
4 See Liudmila Kagané, La pintura española del Museo del Ermitage: siglos XV a comienzos del XIX. Historia de una colección, trad. Aquilino Duque (Sevilla: Fundación el Monte, 2005), 168; Marcy Norton, ‘Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics’, American Historical Review, 111:3 (2006), 660–91 (p. 685); Anne Gerritsen & Giorgio Riello, ‘Introduction: The Global Lives of Things: Material Culture in the First Global Age’, in The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, ed. Anne Gerritsen & Giorgio Riello (London/New York: Routledge, 2016), 1–28 (pp. 1–3); and Cinta Krahe, Chinese Porcelain in Habsburg Spain (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2016), 268.
5 Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1986), 13.
6 See Daniela Bleichmar, ‘The Imperial Visual Archive: Images, Evidence, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Hispanic World’, Colonial Latin American Review, 24:2 (2015), 236–66 (pp. 236 & 240).
7 See Ángel Aterido, ‘Le Siècle d’Or: naissance et essor du bodegón en Espagne’, in La Nature morte espagnole, ed. Ángel Aterido (Bruxelles: Bozar Books/Ghent: Snoeck, 2018), 30–51 (p. 33).
8 See the works cited in note 4, above, for several recent descriptions of the Pereda painting. None of these descriptions is in complete accordance with the others.
9 See James S. Amelang, ‘The New World in the Old? The Absence of Empire in Early Modern Madrid’, Cuadernos de Historia de España, 82 (2008), 147–64.
10 To note just two examples of many, escritorios of ebony, ivory and American palo santo appear in the 1636 inventory of the Madrid Alcázar and in the 1655 post-mortem inventory of Don Diego Felípez de Guzmán, Marqués de Leganés. See Quadros y otras cosas que tienen su Magestad Felipe IV en este Alcázar de Madrid. Año de 1636, ed. Gloria Martínez Leiva & Ángel Rodriguez Rebollos (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 2007), 125 and Archivo Histórico de Protocolos de Madrid (AHPM), Protocolo 6267, fol. 449v.
11 See Gerritsen & Riello, ‘Introduction’, in The Global Lives of Things, ed. Gerritsen & Riello, 5. I, too, initially thought that the textile might be Andean.
12 While I do not know of any viceregal Andean textiles of this type, two seventeenth-century Spanish paintings, Francisco de Zurbarán’s Saint Margaret of Antioch (1630–1634; National Gallery of Art, London, NG1930) and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s The Flower Girl (1665–1670; Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, DPG199), feature textiles of a similar design.
13 According to Lorenzo Magalotti, a late seventeenth-century Italian connoisseur of the earthenware vessels known as búcaros, black búcaros were produced in Nata, Panama. Although he does not identify Mexico as a production site for these ceramics, nearly 140 such objects are identified as coming from Guadalajara in the 1685 inventory of Catalina Vélez de Guevara, the Condesa de Oñate. See Margaret E. Connors McQuade’s untitled essay, in The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, ed. Joseph J. Rishel & Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt (New Haven/London: Yale U. P./Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006), 115–21 (p. 119), and AHPM, Protocolo 11162, inventory no. 921, fols 160v & 163r–v.
14 See Pedro Moura Carvalho, Luxury for Export: Artistic Exchange between India and Portugal around 1600 (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum/Pittsburgh: Gutenberg Periscope Publishing, 2008).
15 Amaya Morera, ‘El escaparate, un mueble para una dinastía’, Doctoral thesis (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, 2010); cited in Krahe, Chinese Porcelain, 109.
16 Moura Carvalho asserts that ‘there are no traces of lacquer on […] the gourd, although its dark and glossy surface is indeed reminiscent of urushi [Japanese lacquer]’ (Moura Carvalho, Luxury for Export, 50–51; see also p. 68).
17 Besides adding visual interest to the vessels, dimpling may have aided evaporation.
18 By the middle of the seventeenth century, a variety of infused waters—agua de canela, agua de azahar and agua de hinojo, to name a few—as well as aloja, a honeyed and spiced drink, were served at the Spanish court. See Simón Palmer, La cocina del palacio, 24 & 50–61.
19 Krahe has identified Pereda’s two-handled red jar as Tonalá, of the enchinado type, in which ‘fragments of quartz’ were embedded in the clay. Here, these incrustratons are ‘in the shape of small flowers’. However, this style is associated with the city of Nisa, Portugal, and I am unaware of any similar traditions in Spanish America. See Krahe, Chinese Porcelain, 268. The press-mould faces of the jars in the Metropolitan Museum of Art are covered in silver leaf that has since oxidized and turned black, which opens up the possibility that Pereda intended his white highlights to be read as silver.
20 Jícaras could be used to drink water, the corn beverage atole or chocolate. The Franciscan missionary-scholar Bernardino de Sahagún observed that only Aztec lords were served chocolate in gourd vessels. In his description of a feast given by a wealthy merchant, he reports that at the end of the meal, the lords were served chocolate in gourd cups, while the guests of lower rank were served the drink in earthenware vessels. See Fray Bernadino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex. General History of the Things of New Spain, trans., with notes, by Charles E. Dibble & Arthur J. O. Anderson, 13 vols in 12 (Santa Fe: School of American Research/Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah, 1950–1982), XI, Book 10, Ch. 21, p. 78 for the types of drinks served in jícaras; IX, Book 8, Ch. 13, p. 40 for a reference to chocolate served in painted gourd vessels; and X, Book 9, Ch. 7, p. 35 for the abovementioned feast.
21 There is an eighteenth-century lacquered gourd bowl from Olinalá (Guerrero) in the collection of the Museo de América in Madrid (inv. 12194). The bowl is quite large (height 19 cm; diameter 47 cm), and an inscription on the interior, ‘para las manos de Don Jose Martinez Rios’, indicates that it was used as a bowl for washing one’s hands.
22 Mitchell A. Codding, ‘The Decorative Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820’, in The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820, ed. Rishel & Stratton, 98–113 (pp. 110–11).
23 In 1604, for example, the Augustinian friar Pedro Gallo sent ‘chícaras y tecomates [gourd-shaped clay vessels]’ along with ‘platos de China’ from Mexico to Juan Rodríguez de León in Seville. See Archivo General de Indias, Contratación, 1805, cuaderno 16, fols 70–71. Veracruz. 1604, published in Krahe, Chinese Porcelain, 523.
24 F. J. Sánchez Cantón, Inventarios reales: bienes muebles que pertenecieron a Felipe II, 2 vols (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1956–1959), II, 268. This cup was inventoried with a variety of porcelain and glass vessels kept in the Pieza de la Torre in the Alcázar, Madrid. While the term ‘calabaza’ is used rather loosely in many Golden-Age Spanish inventories to refer to a variety of drinking vessels which are, presumably, globular or gourd-shaped—the Marqués de Leganes owned a ‘calabacita de plata’, the Condesa de Oñate had several ‘coco[s] calavaza[s] de la Yndia’ and the Conde de Benavente owned a ‘calabaza de porcelana de la yndia’—the object in Felipe II’s collection, with ‘figuras’ decorating the exterior, seems almost certain to be a Mexican gourd cup. For the other inventories, see, respectively, AHPM Protocolo 6267 (1655), fol. 428v; AHPM, Protocolo 11162 (1684–1685), fol. 303r; and Archivo Histórico de la Nobleza, Osuna, Caja 3916, doc. 1, fol. 45r.
25 While some scholars, including Gerritsen & Riello and Krahe, have identified the white lump as a crumbly cheese, it does not resemble any of the cheeses depicted in other seventeenth-century Spanish still lifes, such as the soft, fresh cheese in Barrera’s El mes de mayo (1640; Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava) or the wedge of aged, Manchego-style cheese in van der Hamen’s Servicio de mesa con dulces, aceitunas y queso, cristal y cerámica (1631; private collection); a reproduction of the van der Hamen painting can be found in Peter Cherry, Arte y naturaleza: el bodegón español en el Siglo de Oro (Aranjuez: Doce Calles, 1999), trad. Ivars Barzdevics, plate XXXVIII. Moreover, in Barrera’s February, Winter Still Life at the Prado, a similar white lump appears on a silver plate alongside a round box of cacao paste, which supports my reading of the object as sugar. Bizcochos de soletilla are associated with chocolate in these paintings, appearing in the Barrera work at the Prado and also in Ponce’s Still Life with Peaches, Fish, and Chocolate and Antolínez’s Still Life with Papillon images.
26 Pereda himself painted several vanitas scenes that do incorporate these objects. One, the Allegorie der Vergänglichkeit (c.1634) is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and one, El sueño del caballero (c.1650) is in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.
27 For the idea that still life painting stills time itself and thus ‘nurture[s] the cherished fiction that that which is most ephemeral [such as eating a meal] can be possessed and preserved’, see Celeste Brusati, ‘Stilled Lives: Self-Portraiture and Self-Reflection in Seventeenth-Century Netherlandish Still-Life Painting’, Simiolus. Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 20:2–3 (1990–1991), 168–82 (pp. 175–76).
28 In his Vocabulario en lengua mexicana y castellana (México D.F.: En casa de Antonio de Spinosa, 1571), the Franciscan friar Alonso de Molina defines xicalli as ‘vaso de calabaça’ (fol. 158v). Similar to these gourd vessels, and sometimes confused for them in the literature, are tecomates, or gourd-shaped clay vessels, from the Nahuatl tecomatl. Molina defines tecomate as a ‘vaso de barro, como taça honda’ (fol. 93r).
29 See María Antonia Casanovas, ‘Ceramics in Domestic Life in Spain’, in ‘Cerámica y cultura’: The Story of Spanish and Mexican Mayolica, ed. Robin Garwell Gavin, Donna Pierce & Alfonso Pleguezuelo, trans. Kenny Firtzgerald (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2003), 48–75 (pp. 55–59).
30 See María Paz Soler Ferrer, Historia de la cerámica Valenciana, 3 vols (Valencia: Vicent García, 1989), III, 8.
31 The San Diego sank off the coast of Fortune Island, in the Philippines, after a battle with the Dutch ship Mauritius in December 1600. The wreck was discovered and excavated in the early 1990s. See Jean-Paul Desroches et al., Treasures of the San Diego (Paris: Association Française d’Action Artistique/Fondation Elf/New York: Elf Aquitaine International Foundation, 1996).
32 For recent publications on kraak porcelain—a Dutch term referring to ceramics shipped on the type of ocean-going ship called kraak in Dutch, carrack in English and nao in Spanish—, see Krahe, Chinese Porcelain, 91 and Kraak Porcelain: The Rise of Global Trade in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries, ed. Luísa Vinhais & Jorge Welsh (London: Jorge Welsh Books, 2008).
33 Hans van Lemmen, ‘Delft Pottery: A Brief History’, in Delft Ceramics at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, ed. Ella B. Schaap & Hans van Lemmen (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2003), 13–19 (p. 14). See also Margaret Medley, ‘The Ming-Qing Transition in Chinese Porcelain’, Arts Asiatiques, 42 (1987), 65–76 (p. 66), and Krahe, Chinese Porcelain, 52.
34 Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 612.
35 For more on the various Spanish and Dutch embargoes, blockades and truces, see Israel, The Dutch Republic, 400–04, 410, 478 & 610–11.
36 See Krahe, Chinese Porcelain, 276, figures 218 & 219 for a comparison of the overturned cup with floral decorations in the Kiev painting with a similar Chinese-export cup in the Frits Lugt Collection (Paris).
37 Krahe’s study and my own focus on collections in Madrid. It would also be useful to examine collections of porcelain and other extra-Peninsular objects in cities such as Lisbon, Seville and Barcelona. It is important to note that while ‘jícaras’ and ‘jícaras de la China’ appear in Spanish inventories with increasing frequency from the 1660s, the objects themselves—as the paintings discussed in this essay attest—were part of elite Peninsular material culture decades earlier. Indeed, inventories, which are often created on the occasion of a person’s death, often lag behind lived experience. See Jessica Keating & Lia Markey, ‘Introduction: Captured Objects: Inventories of Early Modern Collections’, in Captured Objects: Inventories of Early Modern Collections, ed. Jessica Keating & Lia Markey, Journal of the History of Collections, 23:2 (2011), 209–14.
38 Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española, fol. 593r.
39 See Javier Portús Pérez, ‘ “Que están vertiendo claveles”: notas sobre el aprecio por la cerámica en el Siglo de Oro’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie VII, Historia del Arte, 6 (1993), 255–74 (pp. 272–73).
40 Krahe, Chinese Porcelain, 425–26. Here, Krahe publishes an excerpt from the Marqués’ inventory (AHPM Protocolo 6219).
41 See Krahe, Chinese Porcelain, 423–24 & 427–32. Here, Krahe publishes excerpts from the Hinojosa inventory (AHPM Protocolo 7671) and the Montealegre inventory (AHPM 6295). The latter also features jícaras made from coconut shells.
42 For Alburquerque, see Krahe, Chinese Porcelain, 432–33 (this is excerpted from AHPM Protocolo 10600); for Valenzuela, AHPM Protocolo 13074, fol. 257+ (this inventory also features chocolate and chocolateras); for Oñate, AHPM Protocolo 11162, fol. 302r+; and for Carvajal, AHPM Protocolo 11552, fol. 805. For the royal documents, see the 1686 inventory of the king’s guardarropa, AGP, Administración General, leg. 766, exp. 7 (this inventory also features two chocolateras and a mancerina, a type of saucer with a ring to hold a jícara in place) and the 1696 inventory of Mariana of Austria, BNE Ms. 9196 (this inventory also includes ‘jícaras de charol’—probably lacquered gourd cups—as well as coconut-shell chocolate cups).
43 For example, unmounted ‘jícaras de la China’ in the condesa’s inventory are usually valued at five or six reales each. Her six mounted blue-and-white jícaras, however, are valued at 240 reales all together, or forty reales each. See fols 302r & 567r.
44 See Gabrielle Vail, ‘Cacao Use in Yucatán among the Pre-Hispanic Maya’, in Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage, ed. Louis Evan Grivetti & Howard Yana Shapiro (Hoboken: Wiley, 2009), 3–15.
45 Teresa L. Dillinger, et al., ‘Food of the Gods: Cure for Humanity? A Cultural History of the Medicinal and Ritual Use of Chocolate’, JN: The Journal of Nutrition, 130 (8S Supplement) (2000), 2057S–72S (p. 2058S).
46 Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias (1559), ed. Agustín Millares Carlo & Lewis Hanke, 3 vols (México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951), II, 274.
47 Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1568), ed. Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas (México D.F.: Editorial Porrúa, 1976), 272.
48 The K’ekchi delegation consisted of four lords who brought with them not just chocolate, but also 2,000 quetzal feathers, ceramics, jícaras, textiles, other foodstuffs including beans, sarsaparilla and corn, liquid amber (the pleasantly odiferous resin of the sweet gum tree) and copal (another resin used by the Maya as incense). See Agustín Estrada Monroy, El Mundo K’ekchi’ de la Vera-Paz (Guatemala: Editorial del Ejército, 1979), 195. The arrival of the K’ekchi lords in Spain followed the pacification—through evangelization—of the K’ekchi region of Guatemala; this region had been known as Tuzulutlan, or ‘land of war,’ due to the resistance of the indigenous peoples there but was renamed Verapaz by Charles V in 1547. See Victoria Reifler Bricker, The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 35–36.
49 See Donna Pierce, ‘Mayolica in the Daily Life of Colonial Mexico’, in ‘Cerámica y cultura’, ed. Gavin, Pierce & Pleguezuelo, 245–69 (p. 250), and Sophie D. Coe & Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), 112–13.
50 Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race, and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2014), 68–69.
51 Louis Evan Grivetti, ‘Medicinal Chocolate in New Spain, Western Europe, and North America’, in Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage, ed. Grivetti & Shapiro, 67–88 (p. 68). See also Dillinger et al., ‘Food of the Gods: Cure for Humanity?’. The Badianus Manuscript, written in Nahuatl by the indigenous Mexican physician Martín de la Cruz and translated into Latin by the indigenous scholar Juan Badiano in 1552, features the earliest known painting of the cacao plant (Theobroma cacao). It also describes a concoction made from cacao beans and a variety of barks, flowers, leaves and herbs with which the bodies of government administrators and office holders could be annointed to relieve fatigue. See Martinus de la Cruz & Juannes Badianus, The Badianus Manuscript (Codex Barberini, Latin 241) Vatican Library; An Aztec Herbal of 1552, trans. Emily Walcott Emmart (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1940), plates 68, 70 & 71, and pp. 276–77. The Florentine Codex was compiled by the Franciscan friar-scholar Bernardino de Sahagún in collaboration with indigenous scholars c.1575–1577. Sahagún writes that chocolate, when mixed with other animal and plant compounds, could be used to relieve coughing (Florentine Codex, ed. Dibble & Anderson, XII, Book 11, Chapter 1, p. 12); to refresh and invigorate (XII, Book 11, Chapter 6, pp. 119–20); to treat diarrhoea in children and to stop the spitting up of blood (XII, Book 11, Chapter 7, p. 170); as a nutritive beverage during fasting, to aid digestion, and to reduce fever (XII, Book 11, Chapter 7, p. 176); and to cure dysentery (XII, Book 11, Chapter 7, p. 189). Francisco Hernández, whose manuscript was finished c.1577, writes that preparations of cacao can help to cool down hotness and burning and relieve dysentery. It can also ‘exciter el apetito venéreo’, fatten and refresh. He warns, though, that excessive chocolate consumption can obstruct the bowels and cause general bad health. See Francisco Hernández, Obras completas, 5 vols in 6 (México D.F.: Univ. Nacional de México, 1959–1976), II, Historia natural de Nueva España, 305.
52 Juan de Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias (1591), ed., con intro. & notas, de Ángeles Durán (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1988), 147. Furthermore, the ‘humida y dejativa’ atmosphere of the Indies, wrote Cárdenas, resulted in bodies ‘llenos de flema y superflua humedad’ (147) which chocolate converted into blood, thus balancing the humours.
53 Alfredo López Austin, The Human Body and Ideology: Concepts of the Ancient Nahuas, trans. Thelma Ortiz de Montellano & Bernard Ortiz de Montellano (Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 1988), 270–82.
54 See above, note 51, in particular Hernández, Historia natural de Nueva España, 305.
55 Marcy Norton, arguing that ‘the “medicalization” of chocolate was a consequence, not a cause, of the challenge that this novel taste posed for colonial ideology’, pushes against the view that the ‘medical paradigm’ can explain ‘how Europeans came to embrace chocolate and remove its potentially idolatrous association’. Instead, she asserts that this paradigm was employed to justify the creole and Peninsular ‘taste for an Indian delicacy’ (Norton, ‘Tasting Empire’ 687–90). I suspect the truth lies somewhere between these two interpretations: the ‘taste’ for chocolate and its medicinal qualities mutually encouraged, and legitimized, the creole and Peninsular adoption of the indigenous American drink.
56 Although Isabella’s inventory dates to 1644, it is likely that she acquired her chocolate sets some time, perhaps even a decade or more, before her death. The sets included silver plates and spoons, molinillos and silver-mounted búcaros and jícaras ‘de La India’. See ‘Ynbentario Tasacion y almoneda de los bienes que quedaron por muerte de la Reyna nra. Sra. Dona Ysavel de Boruon’, 1644, AHPM Protocolo 5412, fols 115v–116r.
57 D’Aulnoy’s account was written in 1679 as a series of letters, and was first published in 1691. In the Introduction to their critical translation of the text, Gabriel Maura Gamazo and Agustín González-Amezúa assert that D’Aulnoy drew from contemporary travel accounts, guides to Spain, novels and theatre in composing her text. See Gabriel Maura Gamazo & Agustín González de Amezúa y Mayo, ‘Introducción’, in Fantasías y realidades del viaje a Madrid de la Condessa d’Aulnoy (Madrid: Ed. Saturino Calleja, 1944), vii–xxi (pp. xv–xvi).
58 D’Aulnoy’s identification of the ‘princess’ of Monteleon is one of her inaccuracies, as there was no member of the house of Monteleon with that title. The woman in question was, instead, the Duchess of Monteleon. See R. Foulché-Delbosc, ‘Introduction’, in Madame d’Aulnoy, Travels into Spain (London: Routledge, 2014), i–lxxiii (p. xl).
59 For the full description of this meal, see Madame d’Aulnoy, The Lady’s Travels into Spain, 2 vols (London: Wood and Innes for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1808), I, 327–30; Madame D’Aulnoy, Relation du voyage d’Espagne, 2e ed., 3 vols (The Hague: Chez Henri van Bulderen, 1692), I, 142–44; or Madame D’Aulnoy, in Viajes de extranjeros por España y Portugal: desde los tiempos más remotos hasta comienzos del siglo XX, recopilación, trad., prólogo & notas de José García Mercadal, prefacio de Agustín García Simón, 6 vols (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y Leon, Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 1999), IV, 102.
60 Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma, Curioso tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del chocolate (Madrid: por Francisco Martinez, 1631), fol. 4v. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given parenthetically in the main text. The major source of cinnamon in the early modern period was Sri Lanka (Ceylon), which was under Portuguese control until 1638 (it was then that the Dutch gained control, though their victory was not complete until 1658, when they drove the last Portuguese from the island). Magellan found cinnamon (Cinnamomum mindanaense) in the Philippines in 1519, and shipments were sent to Spain periodically in the 1560s and 1570s, after the arrival of Miguel López de Legazpi. There appears to have been a healthy trade in Mindanao cinnamon between the Philippines and New Spain in the seventeenth century, but it is unclear how much (if any) of this cinnamon made its way to Spain. Philippine cinnamon production never truly thrived, and in the eighteenth century much of the cinnamon arriving in New Spain (and, presumably, Spain) was obtained from Dutch traders in Sri Lanka. See Francisco Mallari, ‘The Mindanao Cinnamon’, Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, 2:4 (1974), 190–94. Achiote are seeds used both to flavour the drink and impart a reddish colour.
61 Colmenero’s recipe is similar to the recipe published by Turices in 1624. However, the former is the best known, his treatise having been translated and published in English as Chocolate, or an Indian Drinke, in 1652, and in Italian and French in the later seventeenth century.
62 I avoid the word ‘exotic’ because I find its modern connotations to be too wrapped up in nineteenth-century orientalism.
63 See Kristel Smentek, Rococo Exotic: French Mounted Porcelains and the Allure of the East (New York: The Frick Collection, 2007).
64 See William B. Jordan, Spanish Still Life in the Golden Age, 1600–1650 (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1985); William B. Jordan & Peter Cherry, Spanish Still Life from Velázquez to Goya (London: National Gallery Publications, 1995); Cherry, Arte y naturaleza trad. Barzdevics. Also important is Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Pintura española de bodegones y floreros de 1600 a Goya (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Direccion General de Bellas Artes y Archivos, 1983).
65 Carmen Ripollés, ‘Fictions of Abundance in Early Modern Madrid: Hospitality, Consumption, and Artistic Identity in the World of Juan van der Hamen y León’, Renaissance Quarterly, 69:1 (2016), 155–99 (p. 159).
66 An inscription on the re-lining canvas seems to indicate a date of 1632, though this would have been after van der Hamen’s death in 1631. The painting is in an unidentified private collection and I have not examined it in person. Both Christie’s, which sold the painting at auction in 1996 as a Francisco Barrera (Sale 8338, Important Old Master Paintings, 12 January 1996, lot 131, <https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/francesco-barrera-1058328-details.aspx?from=searchresults&intObjectID=1058328&sid=b1bdb2a0-9093-48c3-bb44-3cd708f5ceb2> [accessed 18 September 2019]), and Sotheby’s, which sold it in 2014 (Old Master Paintings, 30 January 2014, lot 265, <http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/lot.265.html/2014/old-master-paintings-n09102> [accessed 18 September 2019]) note the inscription in the cataloguing information on their websites.
67 Cherry, Arte y naturaleza, trad. Barzdevics, Cuarta Parte, 103. The church and monastery of San Felipe were destroyed in the nineteenth century.
68 Cherry, Arte y naturaleza, trad. Barzdevics, Appendix IX, 499–500.
69 The correspondences between Barrera’s work and Ponce’s are so great that Cherry previously attributed the Ponce chocolate painting at Galería Caylus to Barrera. On the basis of that attribution, the van der Hamen chocolate painting was, when it was sold at Christie’s in 1996, also attributed to Barrera. See, for the Ponce misattribution, Cherry, Arte y naturaleza, plate XLVII.
70 Five other paintings from Barrera’s month series survive: April and June are in private collections, and May, July and August are in the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava.
71 Cherry, Arte y naturaleza, trad. Barzdevics, Cuarta Parte, 109.
72 See Cherry, Arte y naturaleza, trad. Barzdevics, 521, and Jordan & Cherry, Spanish Still Life, 78.
73 Cherry, Arte y naturaleza, trad. Barzdevics, 522–26.
74 Chocolate, chocolate preparation and chocolate drinking also appear regularly in both Spanish and New Spanish paintings in the eighteenth century; these works, however, have few direct relationships with their seventeenth-century predecessors.
75 Not a lot is known about Antolínez. See Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Pintura barroca en España, 1600–1750 (Madrid: Cátedra, 1992), 39–40, 53–54, 58, 62, 310–14.
76 Antolínez’s group portrait of the Danish ambassador to Spain, Cornelius Pedersen Lerche, and his staff (1662, National Gallery of Denmark, KMS1646) also includes a lively papillon.
77 The round boxes in the Kiev and Beltrán y Güel paintings are lidded, though their inclusion among objects associated with chocolate suggests that they do, indeed, contain cacao paste. The round box in the Brossa painting is, however, open. Unfortunately, I have only been able to examine a rather grainy, black-and-white reproduction of the work, making it difficult to confirm that the substance inside is cacao paste.
78 Cherry, Arte y naturaleza, trad. Barzdevics, Cuarta Parte, 132.
79 That chocolate was an elite comestible is clear not just from its appearance in still life painting, but also from the role it played in Spain’s socio-economic system. In 1644, Philip IV issued a cédula rescinding permission for non-Peninsular and non-creole vendors, specified as mestizos, mulattos, blacks and Chinese, to sell cacao and chocolate within the Spanish reinos; see ‘Appendix B: Chocolate Timeline’, in Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage, ed. Grivetti & Shapiro, 924. The cost of chocolate in the marketplace was also prohibitively high: at the end of the seventeenth century, the price of one pound of chocolate ‘oscillated between ten and seventeen reales (slightly more than a master carpenter’s daily wage), making its consumption impossible for the majority of the population’. See Irene Fattacciu, ‘The Resilience and Boomerang Effect of Chocolate: A Product’s Globalization and Commodification’, in Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–1824: Circulation, Resistance and Diversity, ed. Bethany Aram & Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 255–73 (p. 259).
80 Two years earlier, Barrios published his much longer Verdadera medicina, cirugía y astrología en tres libros dividida (Mexico City: Fernando Balli, 1607). This treatise includes an excerpt of Hernández’s text on the medicinal plants of Mexico which Barrios borrowed from Nardo Antonio Recchi’s redaction of the protomédico’s manuscript. See José María López Piñero & José Pardo Tomás, La influencia de Franciso Hernández 1515–1587, en la constitución de la botánica y la materia médica moderna (Valencia: Instituto de Estudios Documentales e Históricos sobre la Ciencia, Univ. de Valencia/CSIC, 1996), 151–53.
81 See Santiago Valverde Turices, Un discurso del Chocolate (Sevilla: J. Cabrera, 1624), n. p.; and Antonio de León Pinelo, Question moral si el Chocolate quebranta el ayuno Eclesiastico: Tratase de otras bebidas i confecciones que se vsan en varias Provincias (Madrid: por la Viuda de Juan Gonçalez, 1636), fol. 116r–122v for the excerpt of Barrios. Further references are to these editions and are given in parentheses in the main text.
82 Alan Martín Pisconte Quispe, ‘Antonio de León Pinelo (1596–1660) ¿Perteneció a la segunda escolástica?’, Logos Latinoamericano, 5:5 (2000), 1–6; available digitally from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima at <http://sisbib.unmsm.edu.pe/bibvirtual/publicaciones/logos/2000_n5/avances_investigacion4.htm> (accessed 3 September 2018).
83 Sahagún writes that chocolate is a good source of nutrition during fasting. See Florentine Codex, ed. Dibble & Anderson, XII, Book 11, Chapter 7, p. 176.
84 Tomas Hurtado, Chocolate y Tabaco ayuno eclesiastico y natural: si este le quebrante el chocolate y el Tabaco al natural, para la Sagrada Comunion (Madrid: por Francisco Garcia, 1645), fol. 1r. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be given in the main text.
* Disclosure Statement. No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.