Lest you think the eggplant emoji is a modern invention, let me draw your attention to the unsubtle composition of an eggplant penetrating a fig on the ceiling of the Villa Farnesina’s Loggia di Amore e Psiche, painted by Raphael and his workshop in the early 1500s. At first glance, it’s all myth and majesty, a wedding scene between Cupid and Psyche lifted from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass . But look a little closer, and you’ll see garlands of vegetables and fruits dangling overhead: girthy squashes, swollen eggplants, ripe cantaloupes. The story might be about divine love, but the ceiling tells a steamier tale.

The villa’s patron, Agostino Chigi, wasn’t commissioning art for art’s sake. He was trying to cement his social status—and his marriage to a Venetian courtesan who wasn’t exactly blue blood. By aligning himself with myth, Chigi was casting himself as a modern-day Cupid, fighting for love against the odds. But Raphael knew better than to keep it all PG. His botanical motifs transform the space into a Renaissance garden of earthly delights, heavy with the visual language of seduction, fertility, and appetite.

Chigi could afford the best, and he got it. Raphael brought in Giovanni da Udine to create garlands so lush and vivid they practically burst from the plaster. These weren’t your standard acanthus borders—they were a painted catalog of Rome’s expanding food world. Many of the fruits and vegetables had just begun to arrive in Italy via Mediterranean trade routes or voyages to the Americas. What you’re looking at is one of the first attempts at hyperrealistic botanical illustration in Western art, and it’s gloriously extra.

Some of the most eye-catching elements are cucurbits: fat squashes, curving gourds, melons hanging like ripe promises. Others, like the eggplant, had been introduced centuries earlier by Arab agronomists but were still exotic enough to suggest rarity and power. Lemons, oranges, and citrons—originally from Asia—symbolized wealth and fertility. And the pomegranate? An ancient stand-in for passion, death, and rebirth, split open to reveal glistening seeds that practically beg to be . . . eaten. Figs, always loaded with innuendo, dangle provocatively, conjuring up Dionysian indulgence.

Raphael’s genius lies in his ability to layer meanings without ever compromising beauty. Sure, the frescoes tell a mythological tale. But they also whisper about lust, power, and the delicious mess of human desire. The Villa Farnesina is a glorious Renaissance-era reminder that the line between feasting and fornication is seductively blurred. Just follow the eggplants.