Pieter Aertsen

Pieter Aertsen did something odd and new in the 1550s. He painted huge canvases piled with food, a butcher's stall heavy with meat, a kitchen crowded with vegetables and game, and pushed the sacred story off into the far background, where Christ or the Virgin appears small behind all the groceries.

It looks like the birth of still life and genre painting, and in a way it is, though for Aertsen the meaning ran the other way. The mountain of worldly flesh and food in front was there to be resisted, and the tiny holy scene behind was the thing that actually mattered. His Meat Stall of 1551 makes you hunt for the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt behind the sausages.

Aertsen worked in Antwerp and then Amsterdam, and much of his most important work was religious altarpieces. Many of them were smashed in 1566, when Protestant mobs tore through the churches of the Low Countries destroying Catholic images. What survived best were the market scenes, and it is those, rather than the lost altarpieces he prized, that carry his name today.