A Renaissance painting reveals how breeding changed watermelons

8/5/2016
A Renaissance painting reveals how breeding changed watermelons - Vox
A Renaissance painting reveals how
breeding changed watermelons
Updated by Phil Edwards on August 3, 2016, 5:10 p.m. ET
@PhilEdwardsInc
phil.edwards@vox.com
Christie Images LTD 2015 ( http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/giovanni-stanchi-watermelonspeaches-pears-a-5765893-details.aspx)
Giovanni Stanchi's painting from the 17th century shows how much watermelon has changed.
Look in the bottom right corner of this painting. If you've never seen
a watermelon like that before, you're not alone. This 17th-century
painting by Giovanni Stanchi, courtesy of Christie's (
http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/giovanni-stanchiwatermelons-peaches-pears-a-5765893-details.aspx), shows a
type of watermelon that no one in the modern world has seen.
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A Renaissance painting reveals how breeding changed watermelons - Vox
Stanchi's watermelon, which was painted sometime between 1645
and 1672, offers a glimpse of a time before breeding changed the
fruit forever.
Christie Images LTD 2015 ( http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/giovanni-stanchi-watermelonspeaches-pears-a-5765893-details.aspx)/Shutterstock
The watermelon, then and now.
James Nienhuis ( http://horticulture.wisc.edu/faculty-and-staff2/faculty-and-staff/name/james-jim-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's fun to go to art museums and see the still-life pictures, and see
what our vegetables looked like 500 years ago," he told me. In many
cases, it's our only chance to peer into the past, since we can't
preserve vegetables for hundreds of years.
The watermelon originally came from Africa, but after
domestication it thrived in hot climates in the Middle East and
southern Europe. It probably became common in European gardens
and markets around 1600 ( https://books.google.com/books?
id=qroRAuJqpZIC&lpg=PA42&dq=watermelon%20europe&pg=PA42#v=onepage&q&f
Old watermelons, like the one in Stanchi's picture, likely tasted
pretty good — Nienhuis thinks the sugar content would have been
reasonably high, since the melons were eaten fresh and
occasionally fermented into wine. But they still looked a lot
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A Renaissance painting reveals how breeding changed watermelons - Vox
different.
That's because over time, we've bred watermelons to have the
bright red color we recognize today. That fleshy interior is actually
the watermelon's placenta, which holds the seeds. Before it was
fully domesticated, that placenta lacked the high amounts of
lycopene ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycopene) that give it the
red color. Through hundreds of years of domestication, we've
modified smaller watermelons with a white interior into the larger,
lycopene-loaded versions we know today.
Of course, we 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 have photographs to understand
what watermelons with seeds looked like. But to see the small,
white watermelons of the past, they too will have to look at
Renaissance art.
Update: No, it isn't just unripe or underwatered
Since this article was first published, people have responded on
Reddit (
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3f59j2/watermelons_17th_century_and_n
and other social networks with a couple of questions: Couldn't this
just be an unripe or underwatered watermelon? Or is it one with
hollow heart, which can look similar? The pictures ( https://s-mediacacheak0.pinimg.com/736x/51/8f/44/518f444e78507e28fe7915465936855f.jpg)
readers submit look pretty convincing:
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To check, I contacted professor Todd Wehner, a professor at North
Carolina State University who studies watermelon breeding (
http://cuke.hort.ncsu.edu/).
At first glance, the photos look a lot like the painting. But the Stanchi
painting gives us a clue with its black seeds, which Wehner says
indicate the melon was ripe:
A closeup of Stanchi watermelon seeds (Christie Images LTD 2015 (
http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/giovanni-stanchi-watermelons-peaches-pears-a-5765893details.aspx))
"In the painting, the black seeds indicate that the fruit has reached
maturity," Wehner says. "If they had waited longer for harvest, the
fruit would have continued to break down, the flesh would have
gotten softer and stringier, and the sweetness and redness would
not have improved much." A melon that wasn't ripe wouldn't have
those black seeds.
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"Museum paintings are an interesting method for studying old
cultivars [varieties], and the one you indicated certainly shows the
sort of watermelons that Europeans had to eat in the Middle Ages
during their summer harvest season," Wehner says. "We have
cultivars like that one in the painting available to us 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 heart." Hollow heart
can cause a starring appearance somewhat similar to an unripe or
underwatered melon.
Curiously, readers also noted some paintings from the same time
period of normal-looking watermelons, including Brueghel's "Still
Life of Fruit and Flowers ( http://imgur.com/a/zN8Kv)." However, the
diversity of watermelons available doesn't disprove that
uncultivated watermelons, like the ones in Stanchi's painting, were
significantly different from the ones we consume today. Brueghel's
watermelon may have been all red — but Stanchi's ripe watermelon
was considered worthy of being painted as well. Over time, breeding
helped us 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: Here's what 9,000 years of breeding have done to corn,
peaches, and other crops (
http://www.vox.com/2014/10/15/6982053/selective-breedingfarming-evolution-corn-watermelon-peaches)
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