A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms (1551) by Dutch painter Pieter Aertsen, North Carolina
A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms (1551) by Dutch painter Pieter Aertsen, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. This artwork consists of a large painting on panel in oil, depicting a profusion of foodstuffs in a highly realistic style, while the narrative is hidden in the background, seen through the stall windows and openings. Pieter Aertsen’s paintings were often made in an “inverted still life” style in which the still-life aspects were in the foreground and the narrative aspects in the background. The viewer’s senses are distracted by the rich display of various foods – plates in the foreground, meats, ham, lard, smoked fish, pigs’ legs and head, bread, butter, milk, cheese and hanging pretzels (in the left corner) – that are spread out in front of the viewer while the figure subject is overhelmed by the still-life composition. Almost unnoticed at first are glimpses through the stall windows of an imaginary landscape with a road. Through the smaller window in the middle is a second landscape with a distant view. These small landscapes are hiding a religious narrative: they depict the Holy Family distributing alms on their journey to Egypt to escape from Herod’s harassment. The other people depicted on the road are walking in the direction of the church. Both those people and the Holy family are dressed in contemporary Netherlandish clothing. On the right side, behind a figure drawing water from the well, there is a tavern with genre figures depicting a merry company eating oysters and mussels. In front of the tavern hangs a pig carcass that is very similar to Rembrandt’s painting of a slaughtered ox. In the upper right-hand part of the painting, a handwritten sign is posted on a wood placard. In Flemish, the variety of the Dutch language spoken in Flanders in northern Belgium, it reads: "Behind here are 154 rods of land for sale immediately, either by the rod according to your convenience or all at once“. Scholarly discussion about the sign has reached a general consensus that the message functions as a metaphorical commentary on this scene, conveying a warning about society losing spiritual wealth by placing too great an emphasis upon material gain. Pieter Aertsen (Amsterdam, 1508 – 3 June 1575), called Lange Pier ("Tall Pete”) because of his height, is credited with the invention of the monumental genre scene, which combines still life and genre painting and often also includes a biblical scene in the background. He’s also regarded as one of the founders of the still life painting Aertsen was active in his native city Amsterdam but also worked for a long period in Antwerp, by then the centre of artistic life in the Netherlands. His genre scenes were influential on later Flemish Baroque painting, Dutch still life painting and also in Italy. His peasant scenes preceded by a few years the much better-known paintings produced in Antwerp by Pieter Bruegel the Elder -- source link