I Am in Art Class Looking for Watermelon Pictures

Giovanni Stanchi'southward painting from the 17th century shows how much watermelon has changed.

Christie Images LTD 2015

Look in the bottom right corner of this painting. If you've never seen a watermelon like that before, you're not lonely. This 17th-century painting by Giovanni Stanchi, courtesy of Christie's, shows a blazon of watermelon that no 1 in the modernistic globe has seen.

Stanchi's watermelon, which was painted sometime betwixt 1645 and 1672, offers a glimpse of a time before breeding changed the fruit forever.

The watermelon, then and now.

Christie Images LTD 2015/Shutterstock

James Nienhuis, a horticulture professor at the University of Wisconsin, uses the Stanchi painting in his classes to teach about the history of crop breeding.

"It'due south fun to go to art museums and come across the still-life pictures, and come across what our vegetables looked like 500 years ago," he told me. In many cases, information technology'southward our but chance to peer into the by, since nosotros can't preserve vegetables for hundreds of years.

The watermelon originally came from Africa, but afterwards domestication information technology thrived in hot climates in the Middle Eastward and southern Europe. It probably became common in European gardens and markets around 1600. Old watermelons, like the one in Stanchi's picture, likely tasted pretty good — Nienhuis thinks the sugar content would accept been reasonably high, since the melons were eaten fresh and occasionally fermented into wine. Merely they still looked a lot different.

That'south considering over time, nosotros've bred watermelons to accept the bright red colour we recognize today. That fleshy interior is actually the watermelon'south placenta, which holds the seeds. Before information technology was fully domesticated, that placenta lacked the high amounts of lycopene that give it the cerise color. Through hundreds of years of domestication, nosotros've modified smaller watermelons with a white interior into the larger, lycopene-loaded versions nosotros know today.

Of form, nosotros haven't only changed the color of watermelon. Lately, we've also been experimenting with getting rid of the seeds — which Nienhuis reluctantly calls "the logical progression in domestication." Future generations will at least take photographs to sympathize what watermelons with seeds looked similar. But to run into the small-scale, white watermelons of the past, they too will have to look at Renaissance art.

Update: No, it isn't only unripe or underwatered

Since this article was commencement published, people have responded on Reddit and other social networks with a couple of questions: Couldn't this just be an unripe or underwatered watermelon? Or is it ane with hollow center, which tin wait like? The pictures readers submit look pretty convincing:

To cheque, I contacted professor Todd Wehner, a professor at N Carolina Land University who studies watermelon convenance.

At first glance, the photos look a lot like the painting. Simply the Stanchi painting gives us a inkling with its black seeds, which Wehner says indicate the melon was ripe :

A closeup of Stanchi watermelon seeds (Christie Images LTD 2015)

"In the painting, the blackness seeds point that the fruit has reached maturity," Wehner says. "If they had waited longer for harvest, the fruit would have connected to break down, the flesh would take gotten softer and stringier, and the sweetness and redness would not have improved much." A melon that wasn't ripe wouldn't accept those black seeds.

"Museum paintings are an interesting method for studying old cultivars [varieties], and the one y'all indicated certainly shows the sort of watermelons that Europeans had to eat in the Middle Ages during their summertime harvest season," Wehner says. "We accept cultivars like that i in the painting available to usa now from our germplasm collections[ a sort of genetic sample library that includes many different varieties ] ."

He notes that those samples, when grown today, have "large white areas, low sugar content, [and] frequent hollow middle." Hollow heart can cause a starring appearancesomewhat similar to an unripe or underwatered melon.

Curiously, readers also noted some paintings from the same time menses of normal-looking watermelons, including Brueghel's "Still Life of Fruit and Flowers." Even so, the diversity of watermelons available doesn't disprove that uncultivated watermelons, like the ones in Stanchi's painting, were significantly dissimilar from the ones we consume today. Brueghel'south watermelon may have been all red — only Stanchi'south ripe watermelon was considered worthy of existence painted besides. Over time, breeding helped united states of america define the ideal watermelon.

And that process of breeding continues today. It was only over a long history of cultivation that a normal watermelon came to look less like Stanchi's and more like Brueghel's.

Read more than: Hither's what 9,000 years of breeding accept done to corn, peaches, and other crops

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/28/9050469/watermelon-breeding-paintings