There's More to ThatHow to Use Renaissance Paintings to Improve the Farming of TomorrowAn arboreal archaeologist roots around the Italian countryside and in centuries-old frescoes for a cornucopia of fruits long forgottenbut still viable to grow and consumeAri DanielHost, "There's More to That"January 23, 2025 7:10 a.m.Illustration by Emily Lankiewicz / Photos by Simona Ghizzoni / Images via the Metropolitan Museum of Art under public domainItalian researcher Isabella Dalla Ragione has a most unusual job. An arboreal archaeologist, Dalla Ragione scours Renaissance paintings and medieval archives, discovering endangered fruits that might be revived. Her lifes work offers a possible solution to the problem of monocrops. Year after year, agricultural giants cultivate the same varieties of the same fruits and vegetables, while many other varieties have fallen to the wayside. Monocrops contribute to climate change and are highly susceptible to its consequences, jeopardizing our food supply.In this episode, Dalla Ragione and Smithsonian contributing writer Mark Schapiro discuss the importance and challenges of protecting biodiversity and agriculture in the midst of a changing climateand why it matters.A transcript is below. To subscribe to Theres More to That, and to listen to past episodes on a plan to save Texas from deadly hurricanes, the wild story of Pablo Escobars hipposand how artificial intelligence is making 2,000-year-old scrolls readable again, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.Ari Daniel: Hi there. I am Ari Daniel, and Im on a Zoom call with Isabella Dalla Ragione. She looks like shes speaking to me from inside a Renaissance painting.Isabella Dalla Ragione: I have a church.Daniel: What do you mean you have a church? You live in a church?Dalla Ragione: Yeah, my house was a parish.Daniel: She sits in front of a huge stone mantle in her home, which is apparently a 600-year-old former church in Umbria, Italy. Perched above the mantel are bits of pottery baskets and other trinkets. Behind her is this long table with dozens of fruits strewn about in that kind of haphazard but deliberate way that you might expect to see in a still life.Dalla Ragione: Its a cool and dark room, and I use to keep the fruits.Daniel: Isabella is an agronomist, a person who studies crop production, but she says these fruits go beyond soil and seed cultivation. For her, theyre a deep connection to the past. She holds up a fruit the color of a Granny Smith apple, but the shape of a light bulb.What do you have there? That looks like a pear.Dalla Ragione: But its an apple.Daniel: Well, whats the difference between an apple and a pear? Because that looks just like a pear.Dalla Ragione: No, the pear has the stem here.Daniel: She points to the place where I imagine the stem should be based on my vast pear knowledgethat is, the narrower end at what looks like the top.Dalla Ragione: And instead this is the stem. The opposite.Daniel: She flips the fruit upside down and points to the fat, round end.Dalla Ragione: This is the point stem for the apple. The shape of the apple is this.Daniel: This isnt your garden variety apple. At least today its not. But if you lived in rural Italy several hundred years ago, it may well have been. We know that because Isabella has seen it in art museums across Italy.Dalla Ragione: This fruit is in many paintings of the Renaissance period because this kind of apple was very, very popular. They call it muso di bue. Cow-nose apple. Cow-nose because this is the shape of the cow nose.Daniel: Id never heard of a cow-nosed apple either. This fruit, once abundant in Italy, is now relegated to a few small, cloistered gardens, one of them Isabellas. But her goal is to change all this. Isabella happens to be a world-renowned fruit detective.Dalla Ragione: I look for these varieties, and I try to reconstruct their life just to demonstrate the richness that we had in the past. All my research, all my work is to demonstrate what kind of incredible patrimony we are losing. Because if a pear or an apple lived for 500 years, it means that these apples could be a very important and very interesting variety to save.Daniel: Isabellas goal is nothing less than resurrecting the fruits of the past. She uses archives, Renaissance paintings and a car she drives across the Italian countryside. Her passion isnt just cultural. She says our global food supply may well be at stake.From Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions, this is Theres More to That, the show where we compare apples and oranges to save the planet. Im your host, Ari Daniel. And in this episode: what paintings from the Renaissance can tell us about our agricultural future.Were calling Isabella Dalla Ragione a fruit detective, but she calls herself an arboreal archeologist.Dalla Ragione: An arboreal archaeologist is not a real profession. Its a name that my father gave to our activity because the similarity with the work of the archeologiststhe real archeologists look for some piece, pottery, some small piece from the soil, and they try to reconstruct the life of a civilization, a life of a community, a life of a place. So we did the same with fruits.These fruits were not only fruits. They are worlds. They are full of meanings, traditions, stories, links with the people. If we could find a special fruit, we could find all the stories, all the links with the people, all the traditions, et cetera, et cetera.Daniel: These ideas were a big part of Isabellas childhood.Dalla Ragione: I grew up in a small village, Sansepolcro, that still is a rural area. So the nature, the plants were a real part of my life. My father, in the 60s and 70s, he started this kind of incredible research work about the rural culture because just at that time, this rural culture completely changed, disappeared, really. So he started to try to save all the signs about this rural culture, and one of the most important things of this rural culture, of course, were the plants, the trees and the fruit trees. So I started with him to look for and to find these trees, these fruit trees. Of course, at the beginning it was like an adventure, like an adventurous trip. So then, of course, when I grew up, I could understand that to find these plants, I could understand our roots. This is the great things that my father passed to me.Daniel: But it was Isabellas own discovery that evidence of different fruits and plants could be found within frescoes and paintings across Italy.Dalla Ragione: To reconstruct the life of a variety of a fruit was like to do a puzzle, a piece of information from different parts. One of these parts is the art.Mark Schapiro: I was fascinated by Isabellas work. Of course, the fact that she did it with some of these most amazing paintings was truly eye-opening and extraordinary for me.Daniel: Mark Schapiro is a journalist and author who teaches at UC Berkeley. He recently visited Isabella in Italy to explore their shared interest in restoring biodiversity and wrote about it for Smithsonian magazine.Schapiro: As thrilling as it was to go with Isabella, who drives very quickly on those Italian highways, occasionally takes her hands off the steering wheel as were careening around and shes explaining a very important point. I have to say that this kind of effort to bring biodiversity back is happening in different parts of the world, but very few people are using paintings to identify where those lost crops are.Daniel: Mark has been writing about climate change and the loss of biodiversity for years.Schapiro: Ive been following the shrinkage of biodiversity when it comes to agriculture, and that is arising out of the very fast pace of consolidation in the agribusiness industries to the point where more than 50 percent of all commercial seeds are really controlled by four different companiesfour in the world. And so one of the effects that thats had, both in the United States and in Italy and around the world, is a dramatic constriction in the varieties of crops that are being grown.Daniel: When I think about my last trip to the produce section of the supermarket, I recall maybe half a dozen kinds of apples, one or two kinds of blueberries, green grapes, red grapes. But these are just a few of the varieties and species that people once consumed. And as weve come to rely more and more on big agribusiness, our connections to this richer, fruitier heritage have been lost.Schapiro: There was something Isabella said that I think is important to remember. If you think of biodiversity as a form of language, older varieties have what she calls a language that is a far more complicated language than the language that is associated with the current varieties. The new varieties she describes have maybe three, four or five words in their language. What were seeing in these paintings is evidence of these fruits with much more complicated language at their disposal.Daniel: Mark and Isabella say this more limited vocabulary jeopardizes our food supply.Dalla Ragione: The example of bananas. Bananas is incredibly unstable cultivation. Banana is not only one species, is one varietyCavendish. And not only this, it is a clone. Millions and millions of hectares of cultivation of bananas are based on one clone.Daniel: So we dont have a language. Youre down to a single word.Dalla Ragione: One word, and very short.Daniel: A lot gets lost when this language of biodiversity disappears, but the Renaissance paintings that Isabella studies provide clues to get some of it back, which means the fruits in these paintings arent merely decorative. Theyre a tether to a cultural and culinary heritage.Schapiro: I remember finding this painting with Isabella.Daniel: Mark described walking through the halls of the National Gallery. Thats the National Gallery of Umbria, in Perugia, Italy, where Isabella grew up.Schapiro: You are walking along a passage, and youre passing all these other masterpieces. And then she suddenly stops me and said, Weve got to look at this painting.Daniel: The painting was Piero della Francescas Polyptych of St. Anthony.Dalla Ragione: I was born in Sansepolcro. That is the birthplace of Piero della Francesca, so Im very close to him, because he is one of the most important painters of the early Renaissance.Schapiro: Its a big altar. Its probably six, seven feet tall. And so Im looking, and I see the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. She is in kind of a blue robe with a halo. And Im looking at that going, Yeah, this is a beautiful painting. Its incredible color, just radiates off the painting. And to be honest, I certainly wouldnt have noticed the fruit until Isabella pointed it out.Daniel: Blink and you miss it. Clutched in the hand of baby Jesus, whos sitting in Marys lap of blue robes, is a tiny bunch of cherries.Dalla Ragione: It is the only painting where Piero della Francesca painted fruit. So for me it was really a big surprise when I saw this painting. This is the way in our area how the grandmothers prepared small bunches of cherries to teach to the babies how to eat the cherries. So its very incredible for me to find the same way in the hand of the child in this painting. Maybe at the time of Piero della Francesca the grandmothers use it the same way. In any case, he used this kind of cherries because cherries are a very important symbol of Christs blood.Daniel: Those cherries have long since disappeared from most Italians diets. But something else gets lost with every variety of fruit we no longer grow and consume. Something incredibly precious.Schapiro: Lets say if we go back 500 years, which in this case in Italy, were talking about the fruits of 500 years ago, those trees, over the course of 500 years, theyve had to adapt to some years are colder, some years are warmer, some years have different pests, some years have different diseases. And those varieties that survive will have some resilience to those kinds of shifts. And now those shifts are getting to be more extreme. The new varieties are most often bred for a reliance on a precise set of chemicals to survive. The four big companies that dominate the seed trade are basically chemical companies. And so they breed seeds that are completely reliant on their chemicals to survive in a certain set of conditions. When those conditions change, the chemicals are not strong enough to enable them to actually withstand the enormous pressures and the enormous changes that have happened. What I began finding was that the new modern varieties of food crops have incredible vulnerabilities to these changes.Im here in California where thereve been enormous shifts in the yields of fruit crops. I did some work on cherries. And I saw that, just for one quick example, that its not cold enough for cherries to fully ripen. Usually, amazingly enough, cherries have to get cold in the November and December, in the winter months, in order to kind of almost hibernate for a two-month period before they can come out and fully blossom. So I think what was interesting about Isabellas work in this larger context is that study after study after study is showing that actually its crops that have actually evolved in a specific location that are best able to evolve and adapt to changing circumstances.Daniel: Isabella says that Renaissance paintings are particularly helpful when trying to identify fruits.Dalla Ragione: Especially from the beginning of 1400 to the middle of 1500, because before, the art was like a Byzantine art, not really close to the nature. So it was impossible to recognize the natural objects from these paintings. Instead, in the Renaissance period, each fruit that the painters choose it to put in the painting has a very important meaning, a very important symbolism. The painters used fruits that could be recognized from everybody because the message had to arrive to everybody, to the rich people, to the poor people, to the farmers, to the aristocratic. So for that, they use it a very well-known fruit.Daniel: Isabella offers another example, from the Palazzo Trinci in the town of Foligno.Dalla Ragione: And Palazzo Trinci is a place where there are incredible frescoes of Gentile da Fabriano. Gentile da Fabriano was an incredible painter, very precise. And at the end of 1300s, late Middle Ages, very early Renaissance. And this place is still a mystery also for me because Im still studying these frescoes, because the frescoes are a life cycleciclo della vita. And this kind of frescos is incredible because each age of the human life is represented with a fruit. For example, the child and teenager are going up in the pear tree, and elderly age is with peaches.Daniel: Mark really appreciates Isabellas unique approach, her process of moving between a painting and an actual location of where a fruit might still be grown, and how she uses archival records of landowners to figure out what kinds of fruits were growing five centuries ago.Schapiro: And she described going to monasteries, which often had these very old orchards still, where the very fruits that youd see in a painting would be growing in these old, ancient monasteries that had kind of been forgotten. Suddenly I started looking for fruit, too.Dalla Ragione: Yeah, this is my disease.Daniel: Once you found a fruit like this cow-nosed apple, how does this help us in terms of the biodiversity, the climate change? What does the cow-nosed apple allow us to achieve, or a fruit like it?Dalla Ragione: So this is the question, why I saved all these apples and pears.Daniel: Isabella says that Italy was once a place of rich agricultural biodiversity. But thats been replaced by the same consolidation she and Mark described earlier. This loss, when combined with a rapidly changing climate, endangers our food supply. But these cow-nosed apples, those cherries, et cetera have been around for centuries, and they likely could survive for centuries more.Dalla Ragione: We dont know what will happen. We dont know which is the variety that we will need. And the things are changing very, very fast. So I think that its very important to save all the richness in biodiversity. And instead, we are doing the opposite. We are the image that we are immortal. We are not immortal. We need this biodiversity. But if nobody saves this biodiversity, we lose, and we lose definitely forever.Daniel: A single type of plant or crop is called a monoculture. So one kind of corn or one type of bananathe same crop, farmed and harvested over and over, almost like a Xeroxed copy with very little genetic variation. Same taste, same quality, same abilityor inabilityto survive for generations. And its what most modern industrial farms are built upon.Dalla Ragione: I think that we have to consider that the monoculture is absolutely unstable. The stability of a system is gained from diversity. And the complex system, this is stable. But monoculture is absolutely not complex. If something happened, happened to the old field, old land. So we have to restore this agroecosystem means to restore complexity. Complexity means also to restore biodiversity. For example, in Italy now, we are starting to cultivate a mix of wheat, for example. Not only one species, not only one varieties, not only one ecotype, but mixed. Because in this way, if you cultivate different things, you have more stability. If something happenedan insect, a disease, a weather eventsomething happened, but doesnt destroyed everything, destroyed maybe one part, but you always have something.Schapiro: Its like survival of the fittest in the field. We dont apply it in the field, but imagine having numerous varieties in a field, in which case, some, yes, some will die, but some will survive. And those that survive have the ability to adapt over the course of shifting conditions. And that is, I think, why its critical to have this kind of biodiversity.And I would probably just add that theres growing awareness of knowledge of Indigenous communities in different parts of the world, including here in the United States, where you have very rich cultures of people whove been living there for thousands of years, growing foods, that we can actually learn from.Daniel: Mark says that biodiversity is a cause increasingly championed by scientists and policymakers. He points to the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global attempt to preserve the remaining diversity on the planet.Schapiro: And whats interesting about trying to hold on to levels of biodiversity, both in plant and animal life, is while its a big global challenge, its also extremely specific. It requires attention on a very local level to preserve these kind of local varieties over time, that essentially has to happen in regions like the one that Isabella lives in in Umbria. And we need to have similar kind of efforts in other parts of the world. And I think its actually important to understand that in this larger frame.Daniel: Before I let Isabella go, I cant help but ask Im wondering, are there any fruits that remain a kind of mystery to you that you really want to find in the world somewhere?Dalla Ragione: Im looking for a variety of fig that I never foundthat is a fico rondinino.Daniel: Rondinino.Dalla Ragione: Rondinino means a swallowa bird.Daniel: Yeah.Dalla Ragione: The black bird. A small swallow fig. Ive never found. And another very, very popular in the Renaissance, the carovella pear that is always named and described in the books of Renaissance period, the 1500s, 1600s, and then disappeared completely. But I never stop to look for, because always when I thought that, No, its impossible to find, I found. The research is a full of surprises.Daniel: Thank you both so much for just a really delightful conversation, and I wish you luck in your search for that rondinino and those other mysterious fruits that remain to be uncovered. Thank you.Dalla Ragione: Thank you.Daniel: Grazie.Dalla Ragione: You too, everybody. Ciao.Schapiro: All right. Thank you. Great talking with you.Dalla Ragione: Ciao, ciao. Ciao, ciao, ciao.Daniel: You can read more from Mark Schapiro about Isabella Dalla Ragione and see photos of all of these fruits and paintings online at SmithsonianMag.com. Well put a link in our show notes. Youll also find a link to subscribe to future issues of Smithsonian magazine.Theres More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the iHeart Radio App and wherever you get your podcasts.From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Genevieve Sponsler, Adriana Rozas Rivera, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Our music is from APM Music. Im Ari Daniel. Thanks for listening.I think Im going to go have an apple.Get the latest Travel & Culture stories in your inbox.Filed Under: Agriculture, Art, Climate Change, Farming, Food, Food Science, Italy, Renaissance, There's More to That