What Is This Link to 'Mush­rooms in Works of Art'?

by Elio

On the left side of this blog, in amongst the Blogroll links, is (in 2026: was) a some­what strange en­try, "Mush­rooms in Works of Art" I'll save you the trou­ble of click­ing on it. This is the web­site of a reg­istry that lists works of art, mainly West­ern, that dis­play mush­rooms. Now, why would any­one care about this? The project started about 10 years ago when my­col­o­gist Hanns Kreisel from Greif­swald Uni­ver­sity in Ger­many and chemist Tjakko Sti­jve from Switzer­land and I came to­gether, im­pelled by the same thought, which was that de­pic­tions of mush­rooms in art would give us some in­sight into their re­la­tion­ship to peo­ple of var­i­ous times and cul­tures.

Pseudo Fardella, Ital­ian, ac­tive in Tus­cany sec­ond half, 17th cen­tury. A Bas­ket of Cher­ries, Ap­ples, Plums, Chest­nuts, As­para­gus and Porcini on a Ledge. Pri­vate col­lec­tion.

We ex­changed lists of such works of art and found that the cou­ple of hun­dred items each of us had didn't over­lap much. This sug­gested that the "pop­u­la­tion" of such works was quite large and that fur­ther ef­forts were called for. We be­came ever more alerted to "finds" in mu­se­ums, in art books, and, of course, on the in­ter­net. The records of old sales by auc­tion houses proved to be par­tic­u­larly fruit­ful. In time, new peo­ple came on board. The project cur­rently is in the hands of a Bel­gian my­col­o­gist, Daniel Thoen, an artist and Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin art pro­fes­sor, Nancy Mlade­noff, and my­self. The reg­istry now con­sists of over 1200 items, mainly paint­ings. The sin­gle best rep­re­sented genre is Baroque still lifes, mainly Ital­ian, Flem­ish, and Dutch.

Otto Marseus van Schrieck, Dutch, 1614/1620–1678. Still Life with In­sects and Am­phib­ians. Her­zog An­ton Ul­rich Mu­seum, Braun­schweig, Ger­many.

What have we learned? Ba­si­cally, what we al­ready sus­pected, namely that some coun­tries, es­pe­cially Italy, are es­pe­cially my­cophilic. Mush­rooms can be found in per­haps 10% of all Ital­ian Baroque de­pic­tions of fruits and veg­eta­bles. Most com­monly, the species por­trayed are the highly prized Caesar's mush­room (Amanita cae­sarea) and the King bo­lete or por­cino (Bo­le­tus edulis), which have been con­sumed avidly from Ro­man an­tiq­uity to this day. Some artists were par­tic­u­larly fond of mush­rooms and painted them in a large num­ber of their sur­viv­ing works. Among them is an Ital­ian only known by the un­flat­ter­ing name of Pseudo Fardella (mean­ing in the style of Fardella) and the Dutch artist of the for­est un­der­story, Otto Marseus van Schrieck.

Gio­vanni Francesco Bar­bi­eri, known as "Il Guer­cino," Ital­ian, 1591–1666. The Green­gro­cer. Pri­vate col­lec­tion.

A num­ber of paint­ings show mush­rooms be­ing of­fered for sale by veg­etable and fruit ven­dors. This is a good in­di­ca­tion of what species were con­sumed at that time. Few poi­so­nous mush­rooms are seen in paint­ings from be­fore the 18^th cen­tury. This is sur­pris­ing be­cause the ar­che­type of mush­rooms, the red one with white dots (Amanita mus­caria or the fly agaric) is cos­mopoli­tan, abun­dant, and showy. One can spec­u­late that this species was omit­ted be­cause it is toxic enough that nowa­days the trip of peo­ple who take it for "recre­ational" pur­poses" is of­ten to the emer­gency room. One can imag­ine that dis­play­ing poi­so­nous mush­rooms above one's man­tle was not ex­actly pop­u­lar. This has changed and the fly agaric may well be the species that is most of­ten de­picted in re­cent times. Of in­ter­est is that in oth­er­wise non-mush­room lov­ing Great Britain, mush­rooms had a great as­cen­dancy in the 19^th cen­tury. A par­tic­u­lar genre, known as the Vic­to­rian Fairy Paint­ings, deals with the un­der­world of fairies and grem­lins, of­ten look­ing like Bar­bie dolls with wings. These imag­i­nary fig­ures are seen ca­vort­ing on the for­est floor, of­ten around or over mush­rooms. Mys­ti­cal mush­rooms?

Wal­ter Jenks Mor­gan, British, 1847–1924. A Fairy Ring.

The reg­istry is clas­si­fied by pe­riod and re­gion of ori­gin. It pro­vides a brief de­scrip­tion of the mush­rooms and, we hope, will en­tice schol­ars to probe more deeply into the his­tor­i­cal ques­tions that mush­rooms elicit.

Why do I bring this up now? The rea­son is that the reg­istry has re­cently been moved to the web­site of the North Amer­i­can My­co­log­i­cal As­so­ci­a­tion and, thanks to its web­mas­ter David Rust and with the help of Mar­jorie Young, has been ex­panded con­sid­er­ably. You are wel­come to visit it and taste the de­lights of "artis­tic" mush­room hunt­ing in cy­ber­space.