Those cool watermelons you just posted have insides that remind me of Renaissance paintings of watermelons when looking them up.
Aside from selective breeding creating a more uniform and flesh yielding fruit, do you think any subjects showcased in those paintings could've been suffering from the mosaic virus and the painters were just not aware due to lack of fruit medical knowledge and farmers at the time allowing the fruit to go to market more often since it'd still be edible and not recognized as a severe virus?
i had to go look up what you were referring to and oldtime watermelons did indeed have a pretty cool pattern to them:
vox actually published an article about this painting and how the melons look in them on account of being before their flesh was bred to be bright red and homogeneous in texture, but doesn't mention anything about the possibility of mosaic virus affecting the internal patterns of the melons.
but i did a bit more searching around and found this paper regarding mosaic virus in melons and one of the figures does seem to indicate that there is an effect on the flesh that does accentuate the more ancestral looking spiral patterns
it's also worth noting, as is briefly mentioned but then handwaved away near the end of the vox article, that some renaissance paintings including watermelons did appear more modern in their internal texture, like this one by brueghel:
which is all to say, in answer to your question... maybe? it seems like renaissance watermelons were probably not as bright red or homogeneous as modern melons for the most part, at least in some places, but i'd also readily believe that instances of disease were pretty high then and may have further affected the appearance of many melons, perhaps in such a way as to make them more appealing subjects for paintings, because i mean the spiral pattern is pretty cool. i'm just guessing though; i have a phd in bugs, not pepos, so i'll defer to any botanists or virologists with better ideas.
