*Carving Methods* Starting in the sixteenth century, illustrated books provided pictures and diagrams explaining the methods of carving. The pages on view share a similar approach to the representation of these skills which were both technical and performative. Woodcuts and copperplate engravings instructed readers and users without limitations of language and were reproduced freely since copyright or other intellectual property laws were difficult to enforce, if they existed at all. Topics for illustration included carving tools, techniques for carving different cuts of meat, whole fowl, and fish; and methods for peeling fruit and fashioning it into animals and geometric forms.

*Capon* This diminutive book with woodcut images of carving meats, fowl, and fruits is unsigned and undated. An introductory chapter, written in French “for the benefit of the traveler,” outlines the methods for carving and serving the foods illustrated, with detailed instructions for each. The capon is the first of the birds, shown together with the hand of the carver holding the knife. Some of the numbers indicating the order of attack have been added by hand, evidence that the book was used.

This Dutch carving manual, “The graceful carving of all dishes for the table,” follows the oblong format established by Mattia Giegher. The title page shows a diner sitting at a square table covered with various small dishes and one large pie garnished with a flower. To his left, a carver holds some kind of winged roast, poised to slice it in aria.

*Fruits* Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, a seventeenth-century literary figure, adapted Italian carving manuals for his learned German audience, among many other projects. These images introduce a subsection on the carving of fruit. Shown on top, a dais of solid rectangular blocks anchors a stout column draped with swags of skillfully carved fruits. Atop the column rest carving tools, a book, and two matched pairs of apples and pears. The meaning of this puzzling illustration is revealed by a rhyming verse on the following page: the knife is there to slice the fruit, not the hand nor the truth, since lies should melt into the air without effect and would not therefore need a knife. Several pages of introductory text follow, in which the author gives credit to “Mathematischer Wissenschaften” (mathematical sciences) as the wellspring of knowledge on how to slice and present fruits. Displayed below, a page from this section of the book demonstrates “the way to carve stars and figures of fruits,” inscribing geometric forms onto the abstracted fruit.

Mattia Giegher was a Bavarian carver who worked for the German community at the law school of the University of Padua, according to his own preface. Giegher’s carving manual, the first to be profusely illustrated, contains a number of engravings that suggest how to serve fruit as well as meats, fish, and fowl. Here, the skin of the oranges has been skillfully peeled back, leaving flourishes and curlicues of flesh, partially revealing the underlying pith to create a color contrast.

Fruits, like flesh and fowl, might be sliced in real time in front of the diners. In this late seventeenth-century treatise, “The Modern Steward or the Art of Preparing Banquets Well,” the fruits are labeled with letters that correspond to a legend inserted into a cartouche at the bottom of the page. The fruit labeled “I” depicts “the last cut that one gives for fruit that is carved ‘in aria.’” According to another treatise, the fruit must be sliced quickly without falling from the fork, with the hands barely touching it, making the carver more like a “giocatore di mano” (conjurer) than a carver. With their spiraling peels, these fruits are reminiscent of Dutch still life paintings in which twisting rinds dangle from gleaming platters, symbols of the inexorable passage of time.

This early seventeenth-century edition of Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera is bound together with Vincenzo Cervio’s Il Trinciante. The printer’s device that appeared on earlier editions is replaced with this more marketable title page, giving potential buyers a taste of the book’s contents. The right-hand panel depicts a kitchen with an elaborate clockwork rotisserie on which three spits turn, laden with roasting viands. In the left panel, a carver stands before a table laid for a meal. Demonstrating his skill, he proffers a bird on a fork in aria with his left hand, holding a knife in his right, as instructed in the manuals. The bundling of texts addressing various aspects of food service seems to have been a successful strategy among publishers of manuals or handbooks for both Italian and German markets.