Meat Stall
by Pieter Aertsen
Title
Meat Stall
Artist
Pieter Aertsen
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
Metzgerladen mit Flucht-nach- Agypten (Butcher shop with escape downstream EgyptButcher shop with escape downstream Egypt) by Pieter Aertsen.
Also known as The Meat Stall
A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms, 1551, oil on panel 45 1/2 x 66 1/2 inches / 115.6 x 168.9 cm (North Carolina Museum of Art). Other versions include one in the University Art Collections, Uppsala University, Sweden.
Even if you are not a vegetarian, this painting is bound to come as something of a shock. Anyone accustomed to purchasing meat in the clean, cold corridors of the supermarket—safely wrapped in plastic and utterly divorced from the living animal it once was—may feel the urge to shrink back from the vivid, frontal display of so much raw flesh, much of it with eyes, ears, mouths and tongues still attached.
The partially skinned ox head, in particular, seems to eye the viewer balefully, as if he or she were responsible for its death. You can almost hear the flies buzzing in the air…
Even more surprising, if you look in the background on the left, is a small scene depicting the Flight into Egypt (when Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus flee to Egypt because they learn that King Herod intends to kill the male infants in the area of Bethlehem). We see the Virgin Mary on her donkey reaching back to offer bread to a young beggar. Saint Joseph follows closely at her side. This charitable scene stands in stark contrast to the bloody abundance of meat in the foreground.
Uploaded
January 31st, 2017
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