A Journey Between Science and the Arts: Templates for the Depiction of the Pineapple (Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries)

ABSTRACT Native to America, the pineapple— Ananas comosus (L.) Merr.—delighted the Europeans who came across it. The fruit was mentioned by the voyagers and missionaries who observed and tasted it in the Americas and, from the 1500s onwards, infused reports, chronicles and natural history treatises with colour and flavour. As the fruit was unable to withstand Atlantic crossings, it could only reach Europe as a preserve or in the form of textual descriptions or illustrations. In this essay, I will suggest the origin of the printed images which served as templates for two eighteenth‐century pieces produced in the East. I will propose a justification for using these illustrations as sources of inspiration.