Fish market (Tribute Money?)

For a long time this huge canvas carried a question mark in its title, as if the figures at the stall might be Christ and the tribute money. The museum now reads the scene through Seneca. The Roman emperor Tiberius had an enormous red mullet sent to market to see who would pay for it, and two gluttons bid against each other, the epicure Apicius and a rich young man named Octavius, who won at an absurd price. Rubens's circle knew the story from a book on eating fish published in 1616 by the Antwerp physician Ludovicus Nonnius, a friend of Rubens. So the figures were designed in Rubens's workshop, possibly painted by the young van Dyck, and Frans Snyders laid out the catch that fills most of the nearly four-metre width. In the 1630s the picture belonged to the Duke of Buckingham in England. By 1685 it was in Prague, and in 1721 it was brought to Vienna.