Reading through John Dickie’s highly readable Delizia! – The epic history of the Italians and their food, an episode jumped out involving a conflict of interest that would make modern day politicians – left and right – proud.
Platina, the author of one of the most popular cookbooks of the age (the mid-to-late 1400s), De Honesta voluptate et valetudine (Respectable Pleasure and Good Health), was a leading humanist in Rome, who has left us a good idea of some, perhaps, surprising approaches to cooking in Italy at the time. For example, the use of sugar was widespread, as a seasoning like salt – often being added to what we now consider savoury dishes like Lasagne. The distinction between sweet and savourty is a later invention – in the 1400s celebrity chefs were more concerned with the Galenic theory of the humours. Platina also gives us an idea of the average cooking time for pasta in the 1400s – an hour for vermicelli, and two hours for maccheroni…
This is all very well, but hardly likely to gain Platina a posthumous entry into any of today’s leading political parties. His public moralising would, no-doubt, perk up the ears of 21st century leaders like Cassini and Mastella, but moralising on its own a succesful politico does not make.
What would clinch the deal would be Platina’s suggested involvment in an assasination plot against Pope Paul II (not that criminal conspiracy is a pre-requisite for party membership, but it’s certainly no hindrance), and his able ‘image management’ afterwards.
The plot was discovered by Paul II and Platina and a number of his colleagues were locked up in the Castel Sant’Angelo, and subjected to torture. Paul II died in 1471, and his succesor Sixtus IV was quick to release Platina and his co-conspirators. And its here that Platina’s credentials as a modern day politico shine through. On his release he wrote extensively defending his reputation, and denouncing the dead Pope for, amongst other things, gluttony (Platina suggested that Paul II’s diet killed him, after he consumed two very large melons!).
Platina was appointed by Sixtus IV as head of the Vatican Library. We know very little about the true extent of the conspiracy of 1468 against Paul II, or what role Platina had in it, because in the late 1470s all the documentation relating to the case brought against the conspirators dissappeared – from the vatican library…