I’ve developed a habit of looking at things and wondering what I can do with them. A beautiful plate arrives at a restaurant and some part of my brain starts composing the photograph before I’ve picked up my fork. I see an unusual building and wonder about the people who once walked through it. A painting catches my attention and I start inventing personalities for people who’ve been dead for centuries. Years of writing, photographing, filming, and making things for the internet have apparently trained my brain to regard the world as one enormous collection of unfinished stories.

This is how I ended up staring at four people eating ricotta.

The painting is The Ricotta Eaters, by the Italian painter Vincenzo Campi, from around 1580. There are four figures gathered around an enormous mound of ricotta, and subtlety doesn’t appear to be anyone’s priority. One man, wearing a red cap, has extended himself across the foreground with a spoon. Another throws his head back with an expression that seems to suggest he’s reached some higher plane of dairy-based consciousness. A bearded man leans into the scene. The woman looks out at us with an expression that, nearly four and a half centuries later, feels remarkably easy to interpret. She knows something. At least, that’s what my 2026 brain decided.

The wonderful thing about The Ricotta Eaters is that its humor isn’t something we’ve entirely imposed upon it from the future. Campi painted scenes of everyday life with a taste for comedy, abundance, and exaggerated human behavior. This particular work has even been associated with the title Buffonaria, a word that points toward buffoonery and comic performance. The faces matter, the gestures matter, and the ridiculous quantity of food certainly matters. Campi was giving his viewers something to look at, recognize, and enjoy.

Which raises a question that seems almost absurd until you spend a little time with the painting: Was this the food content of 1580?

We tend to think of documenting food as one of our more modern peculiarities. We photograph restaurant tables from above, film cheese pulls, record ourselves tasting things, and occasionally make an entire table wait while we get the shot. Entire careers have been built around the ability to make another person want a croissant they can’t smell, touch, or eat. A beautifully plated dish may sit untouched while somebody finds the right angle and moves a water glass out of the frame. The meal has become nourishment, experience, social currency, visual material, and entertainment.

Campi didn’t have a camera roll. He had a canvas, and nearly 450 years before the food Reel, somebody was already turning what people ate into something other people wanted to look at.

“Nearly 450 years before the food Reel, somebody was already turning what people ate into entertainment.”

What strikes me most is how quickly the painting works. You don’t need to know much about sixteenth-century Italian painting to understand that something is happening here. Your eye finds the faces, then the ricotta, then the gestures, then returns to the faces, and before long you start assigning personalities. Perhaps the man in red always behaves this way. Perhaps the bearded man really did say he was only going to have a bite. Perhaps the woman has begun reconsidering the guest list. That last part is mine, obviously. Campi left enough room for it.

This is one of the reasons I love art. Knowledge adds layers to what we see, and the first encounter can be wonderfully instinctive. Sometimes a painting gets you before you know anything about it. You laugh, recognize an expression, wonder why somebody is holding something or looking somewhere, and curiosity takes over. Suddenly you’re reading about an Italian painter who lived hundreds of years ago because four strangers and an alarming quantity of cheese caught your attention.

Food has always been especially good at this. Meals reveal appetite, status, abundance, scarcity, ritual, work, family, and pleasure, and they have a wonderful way of revealing people too. Put several human beings around something edible and personalities have a tendency to emerge. Anyone who’s hosted Thanksgiving already understands this.

There’s also something wonderfully familiar about Campi’s instinct to preserve the scene. The tools available to us have changed almost beyond recognition, while the impulse to notice an amusing human moment and think, this is worth capturing, feels considerably older. Maybe that’s part of what I’m responding to when I find paintings like this. I’m looking at somebody else’s act of observation, centuries after he made it, and then using the tools available to me to turn that observation into something new.

That’s also why paintings like this are so much fun to revisit through a contemporary lens. Learning about the work doesn’t require us to become solemn in its presence. Sometimes knowledge makes art more playful. We learn what the painter was doing, understand a little more about the world in which he worked, and discover that people several centuries ago could be funny, excessive, hungry, ridiculous, and intensely recognizable.

In 1580, Vincenzo Campi had paint, canvas, four expressive people, and an unreasonable quantity of ricotta. In 2026, I had his painting, an iPhone, editing software, and a few ridiculous ideas. Somewhere across those centuries, we both looked at people behaving rather dramatically around food and thought the same thing: this is worth capturing.

And frankly, are things really all that different today?