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Credit
A dinner party: a young man plays the lute while a young woman puts a piece of meat into the mouth of the man at the head of the table. Etching by Vivant Denon, 1793, after G. Honthorst. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection.
"... the Supper party with a lute player ... aptly referred to by the contemporary connoisseur Giulio Mancini as 'una Cena di buffonerie'. Whether it is a brothel scene, like his later Munich Happy company/Prodigal son ..., painted in lighter colours in 1622, is open to question, since it was painted for Cosimo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany. The costumes are less revealing than in his other bordello scenes, and the old woman is more of a servant than a procuress. As for what is being shoved into the right hand drinker's mouth, Papi's ingenious suggestion that it is a cloth to wrap a broken tooth, though consistent with a folklorish association between toothache and love, does not take account of the fact that in the preparatory drawing in Grenoble it is spaghetti or maccheroni. So perhaps it is, after all, pasta or a slice of ham"--Gash, op. cit., p. 375
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