Dijon

Thursday

Jane Stannus

The glorious versatility of Dijon mustard

Not just salami, air conditioning and dental fillings: among their many contributions to civilization, the Romans also gave us Dijon mustard. Somewhere about the 4th century, it seems, the vinegar makers of Dijon were granted the right to use the exclusive mustard recipe composed by Palladius, son of Exuperantius, Prefect of the Gauls (or so Samuel Chamberlain informs us in his Bouquet de France of 1952). Palladius was one of those fascinating Roman gentleman-farmers who are also poets and scientists. He owned farms in Italy and Sardinia and had a particular interest in fruit trees. He penned a popular treatise on agriculture that stayed on the best-seller (or at least most-read) list until well into the Middle Ages.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

On the trail of one of the first artists to paint ordinary things

From our UK edition

There are many marvellous things to be seen in the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Dijon. But when I paid a visit a couple of years ago (in those days you could just step on a train and do such things), it was a little picture of the Nativity that particularly caught my eye. Its date, artist and original owner are all uncertain, but its beauty and originality were clear at a glance. Here, for almost the first time in European art, the appearance of ordinary things and people were the subject of close, rapt observation. Not of course that there was anything ordinary about the Nativity itself, which was a miraculous, world-changing event — signalled in the painting by the bright golden sun rising over distant jagged hills.