AERTSEN, Pieter

Earlier the painting was attributed to Joachim Beuckelaer, Aertsen’s pupil.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 3 minutes):

Guillaume Dufay: Aurea luce, hymn for the feast of Sts Peter and Paul

In the 16th and 17th centuries it was quite common for theologians to see a slaughtered animal as symbolizing the death of a believer. Allusions to the ‘weak flesh’ (cf. Matthew 16:41) may well have been associated with Aertsen’s Butcher’s Stall where - like on his fruit and vegetable stalls - a seemingly infinite abundance of meat has been spread out.

In this picture, the viewer’s senses are immediately assaulted by the profusion of life-size comestibles. Amid fowls, sausages, beef, pork, fish, butter, cheese and pretzel, the eye of a flayed ox’s head disconcertingly seems to watch the viewer. Each object is a masterful still-life. Like Lucas van Leyden and some other Netherlandish artists, Aertsen inverted the traditional foreground-subject relationship; his narrative occurs in the background. Almost unnoticed at first, the stall permits glimpses of a tavern on the right and a landscape behind. The ground around the inn is covered with oyster and mussel shells, which in some context - as here - allude to their consumption as an aphrodisiac. Among the tavern’s revellers is a prostitute with a possible customer.

Meanwhile, groups of people, dressed in contemporary Netherlandish attire, walk through the countryside towards the church visible at the far left. Only the mother riding the donkey stops to give alms to the poor. She is the Virgin Mary. Led by Joseph, she and her son are journeying to Egypt, to escape Herod. This is a very different presentation than the standard flight into Egypt since no idols fall, no miracles occur, no angels or servants direct the way. Although beset by their own troubles, the Holy Family shares what they have with the less fortunate. No halos signal their divinity, rather, Aertsen accented their humanity to construct a moral about daily personal decisions. His pilgrimage of life offers a choice between a materialistic and morally questionable existence on the one hand and the spiritual path of the Holy Family on the other.

Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer, his nephew and pupil, popularized peasant and market scenes such as this, which typically contain half-hidden moralizations and religious themes. Through their impetus in Antwerp and Amsterdam, where they painted, peasant and market scenes evolved into a separate artistic specialization around the mid-sixteenth century.

The fruit and vegetables presented in Aertsen’s paintings are peasant foods, but they are a feast for the eyes. His market scenes are not slices of everyday life, but plausible inventions. Many of the fruit and vegetables depicted in his work have sexual connotations and some of them were eaten as aphrodisiacs.

In the present painting, the artist juxtaposes the biblical narrative with a market scene, encouraging beholders to ponder the relationship between love and lust, between sexual attraction and visual seduction. The foreground of the painting is filled with sexual innuendoes. On the left side, a man shows a woman his strings of onions. Although this may look innocent and mundane, onions were commonly used as aphrodisiacs. Furthermore, according to proverbial folklore, peeling an onion was like peeling off clothes, for it could easily result in tears. On the right, a man grasps a black rooster, a phallic allusion, in one hand, and an egg basket, a vaginal allusion, in the other.

In the 16th century Antwerp rose to the position of the most significant trade and banking centre in Europe. In the area around this town there was an extensive cottage industry for the processing of English cloth and the production of glassware, soap, sugar, and other goods. The changing conditions in agriculture were almost equally revolutionary. The population increase at the beginning of the 16th century meant a greater demand for food, which had to be satisfied buy an agricultural system that was now no longer catering merely to itself but also to the market.

After years of inadequate supplies the increase in food production was experienced by the general public as a great improvement - so much so, in fact, that it virtually demanded some form of artistic expression. Celebrating this new wealth in an almost solemn manner, the Amsterdam-born painter Pieter Artsen, who lived in Antwerp in 1555-56, depicted market scenes as part of biblical illustrations. However, instead of following traditional conventions and playing only a minor part in these illustrations, these market scenes dominate the biblical motifs so much that the latter are literally pushed into the background.

In this painting Christ and the Adulteress, the biblical event takes place at the back, on the left, while the foreground is dominated by a market scene with peasants offering clay pots, baskets laden with fruit, vegetables such as onions, carrots, cucumbers and cabbages, as well as eggs, loaves of bread and large jugs of milk. It is this foreground which attracts our attention. There is also a peculiar mixture of time levels: the biblical scenario (with people wearing the clothes of antiquity) and the contemporary market scene (with sixteenth-century peasants) are intricately interwoven, as is shown in the Roman soldiers storming past the market stall. The same feature can be found in numerous other paintings of Aertsen.

A kitchen scene combined with a religious subject is set within Renaissance architecture. The background depicts the story of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary. This painting marks the transition from the late mediaeval practice of depicting religious subjects to a new era, in which art depicts the everyday life of the self confident bourgeoisie.

Firmly positioned in front of the imposing chimney-piece, the cook stands surrounded by the food she is preparing to cook: voluminous cabbages in a basket, and fowls and a leg of meat skewered on a spit which she holds firmly in one hand, whilst with the other she grabs a skimming ladle. The sculptural silhouette with its powerful arms, its solid body and vigorously modelled face radiates a strong sense of assurance. The fact that she is looking towards the unseen part of the room suggests that something is going on there that the viewer is unable to see. Pieter Aertsen made use several times of this form of composition in which a single, solidly-built figure occupies the entire panel in a vertical format which accentuates his or her solidity. This is an invention by the artist, which although originating in the foregrounds of the works of Jan van Hemessen, has no real precedent in the Antwerp painting of the period.

Even though he never painted a picture not containing a human figure, Pieter Aertsen played an essential role in the emergence of the still-life by granting a dominating place to objects and to victuals, which he represents in all their triviality. Whilst every element appears to have been observed with attention to real-life detail, the image has nonetheless been recomposed in the studio. What cook would place small fowls and a heavy leg of lamb on the same spit? We also find the same kitchen utensils, furniture and victuals, differently interlinked, in many of the artist’s compositions. Whilst the household objects are drawn from life, the classical lines of the chimney are taken from the architectural treaty of the Italian Sebastiano Serlio, whom Aertsen would have known from the Antwerp edition of his works in 1549.

The total absence of religious subject matter, which still underlay all genre scenes at the time, is another stroke of daring by the painter, even if 16th century viewers would have immediately recognised, in the cook, the Martha of the gospel narrative, who is busy preparing the meal whilst her sister Mary is listening to Christ’s words. This image also has a moralising content and should be read as a warning against the dangers of the pleasures of the flesh, “voluptas carnis”.

The left panel shows the Procession of the Magi. The reverse side is also painted, it depicts the scene of Circumcision (or the Presentation in the Temple).

The reverse side of the panel depicts the scene of Circumcision (or the Presentation in the Temple).

Genre-painting, as an independent subject, originated in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century. Before then scenes from everyday life had often been depicted in the background of pictures with a primarily religious content, but it was only after about the middle of the sixteenth century that many painters began to feel their principal task was to represent everyday life for its own sake. With Pieter Bruegel the Elder, also called Peasant Bruegel, genre painting came to be generally accepted and found a great many adherents in the Netherlands. Pieter Aertsen, who was born in Amsterdam and worked mainly in his native city and in Antwerp, was one of the most eminent of these. Most of his works depict market vendors, scenes at fairs or kitchen interiors, with an abundance of carefully painted still-life motifs.

In this painting he depicts an old Dutch peasant taking his produce to the market, on his head a heavy tub, in his right hand a brace of mallard and a basket of eggs. A peasant girl in the background kneels by a tray of pasties or loaves. The painter has achieved an effect of monumentality by using large spots of colour and clear outlines and by enclosing his powerfully modelled figures within the confines of a narrow space. Aertsen’s great virtue lies in his sincerity and simplicity, particularly noticeable if we compare his work with later genre-scenes.

This Market Scene - a painting in vertical format - shows a column of sea food on the left, building up and culminating in a ray and - directly opposite, on the right - a large number of fruits of the field and the garden. Wedged between this enormous abundance of produce, the farmer and his wife appear to be mere appendages whose job is only that of proudly pointing with silent gestures to the victuals that are on offer.

The ostentatious wealth of fruit and vegetables in the market scenes of Aertsen and Beuckelaer may lead to the false conclusion that the population had plenty to eat. But although more was being offered on the markets, this did not meet the demands of the urban population, who had to pay exorbitant prices for agricultural produce in comparison to what they actually earned. And so, the horn-of-plenty motif of these market pictures reflects far more the perception of those who benefited, that is, the newly-rich farmers. In this way the artist emphasized the commercial aesthetics of agricultural products from the farmers’ fields and gardens, products that were meant to arouse in the viewer the desire to buy, though not in the sense of present-day advertising.

However, this does not exclude the possibility of ambivalent reasoning behind such paintings. While stimulating people’s cravings and appealing to their needs, they often contained a subtle element of criticism, particularly in Aertsen’s biblically motivated pictures. This criticism concerned the contradiction between people’s consumer habits and the demand of temperance (“fasting”). While this critical element was still obvious in Aertsen’s paintings, it seems to have disappeared almost completely in Beuckelaer’s.

This painting has a multiple theme. The abundance of the market could be at the same time a representation of the Four Elements and an allegory of the Five Senses. Also the market woman is being pestered by a bird-catcher, who is gripping a duck round the neck with obvious erotic overtones - as well as a realistic representation. The painting is also a moral lesson, extolling moderation and restraint in contrast to the physical and sensual pleasured offered, for instance, in the plumpness of the fruit. In other paintings Aertsen introduced a religious scene in the background by way of admonition.

The painting is an Ecce Homo fragment. Similarly to other biblical paintings of Aertsen, the biblical event takes place at the back, while the foreground is dominated by a market scene.. Somewhere in the background, the picture - cut off at the top - affords a small glimpse of the platform where the masses are shouting ‘Barabbas’ (John 19:4-6). This is optically overlaid by the bow-shaped arrangement of carts and market stalls - a reversal of emphasis which is typical of Aertsen.

The painting demonstrates a wide range of agricultural products, made possible by the improvements in production methods. Offering her fruits and vegetables, the woman is almost an appendage to her produce. Despite all exaggeration, the picture quite adequately shows the new economic prosperity of the time. At the same time, however, it still contains a background scene in genre style of embracing lovers in a stable, thus relating the painting to late medieval peasant satires. Peasants were regarded as lustful, sensuous and carnal by the middle classes.

Formerly the painting was attributed to Marten van Cleve.

Pieter Aertsen was a Dutch painter who had a workshop in Antwerp for several years. He painted altarpieces, but also peasant scenes with a moralizing undertone and kitchen still-lifes with religious themes in the background. He continued this work following his return to Amsterdam in around 1557, concentrating henceforth more on the latter genre. This painting may have been produced during his Amsterdam period.

The subject of the work has long been debated, although we can be sure it is not simply a peasant scene. it was once believed to be a portrait of the artist’s family, but that hypothesis was rejected some time ago. The scene has all the elements of a rural booze-up. Much drink is being consumed, sausages grilled and bacon fried. There are festive biscuits on the table and a tray of waffles. Crowns like the one worn by the boy were used on the Feast of Epiphany, but also during other winter festivities, including Shrove Tuesday. Neither holiday is being celebrated here, however. The bird-cage next to the door on the left tells us that the scene is taking place in a house of ill repute, such as a tavern or brothel. Other elements combine to suggest the latter - the way the young man places his arm around the girl’s waist, the copious eating and drinking, the aggression symbolized by the man with the two weapons, and the foolishness reflected by the king’s crown. Like many of Aertsen’s paintings, this work has both a moralizing and admonitory content, revealed by the presence of three men of different ages, each symbolizing a generation, around one woman.

There is some remarkable innovation in this painting. The figures in the foreground are shown full-length in the middle of the small space, which, together with the monumental format, testifies to the emancipation of non-religious themes in painting around this period.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 26 minutes):

Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata BWV 212 (Bauernkantate)

Interiors with merry companies or drunken brawls became very popular in the 17th century, and the work of Pieter Aertsen was seen as the first step on that path. This picture shows a merry company at an egg dance. The object was to keep dance while kicking the egg round in a circle without breaking it, then covering it with a bowl, again using only one feet.

The still-life genre was created by Pieter Aertsen in an Antwerp that was the leading commercial centre in Europe at the time. To Aertsen, the arrangements of food - the symbolism of which was explained in the figure scenes in the background - were a necessary alternative to religious painting. During the early years of his career he created a number of altarpieces that he, to his great wrath and sorrow, saw destroyed during the iconoclastic riots of the Reformation.

In the 16th century pancakes and waffles were typical Shrovetide fare. The figures may be preparing for the coming festivities, but they do not look very happy. The painting may have hung in the dining room of a wealthy citizen in Antwerp or Amsterdam. The peasants’ frugal meal would have stood in stark contrast to the lavish dinners that took place there.

In the 1550s Pieter Aertsen produced several major altarpieces, however, little remains of them, since many were destroyed in the Iconoclasm of 1566. Two panels are in the Rijksmuseum which once belonged to the same triptych with the Adoration of the Magi: the larger being the central panel, the other the left wing. On the reverse side of the left wing the scene of Circumcision (or the Presentation in the Temple) can be seen.

A remarkable feature of this painting is the the still-life and a biblical scene (here Christ with Mary and Martha) composed together. The effect of the compostion was strongly disturbed by cutting the lower part of the painting (about 9 cm was cut for unknown reasons).

One of the several one-figure compositions of the artist painted in the 1560s and showing the influence of the Italian painting transferred to the Low Countries by the Romanists.