The Instruments of Human Sustenance (Humani Victus Instrumenta): Cooking

Printmaking in woodcut and engraving came to Northern Italy within a few decades of their invention north of the Alps. Engraving probably came first to Florence in the 1440s, the goldsmith Maso Finiguerra (1426–64) used the technique. Italian engraving caught the very early Renaissance, 1460–1490. Print copying was a widely accepted practice, as well as copying of paintings viewed as images in their own right.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) was an Italian painter famous for his extravagant paintings of human faces in the form of compositions of fruit and vegetables, often with portrait likenesses. The forgotten Renaissance artist was proclaimed in the twentieth century as a forerunner of Surrealism. This suggests that the artist was well ahead of his time and deserves to be known not only by specialists but also by the general public.