Acceso usuarios
Kate E. Holohan
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.
