Dishing up Pictures from the Pantry: An Eighteenth-Century French Recipe for Illustrating Athenaeus's Deipnosophistae

In the years 1789 – 1791, the Paris book dealer Pierre-Michel Lamy published under the title Banquet des savans the first complete French translation of Athenaeus's Deipnosophistae by Jean-Baptiste Lefebvre de Villebrune. He also supplied two sets of etchings and engravings for the first and the fifth volume of this translation. All of these illustrations, however, were loans from books which had been published earlier in the century, most notably from Jean-Benjamin de Laborde's Choix de chansons (1773 ff.), Laborde's Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (1780) and the 1728 Amsterdam edition of Ezechiel von Spanheim's translation of Julian Apostata's Sympósion. Though this recycling strategy meant that notable artists such as Jean Michel Moreau or Bernard Picart now contributed to the illustration of the Banquet, the undertaking as a whole suffers from the fact that there is often but a poor correspondence between the images and their new context and that the original subjects often had to be reinterpreted in a way that carries little conviction. Thus, a print showing Petrarca mourning at the tomb of Laura now accompanies Athenaeus's account of the tomb erected in honour of a courtesan. A German version of this text was published under the title ‚Banquet des savans : Ein antikes Gastmahl, illustriert nach französischem Rezept‘ in: Wulf-Dieter Kavasch (ed.): Rieser Kulturtage : Eine Landschaft stellt sich vor, XVI (2006), Nördlingen 2007, p. 453 – 477