Lot and His Daughters

On the rock at the upper left a Latin line reads 1563, IOANES MASSIS PINGEBAT, meaning Jan Massys was painting this. The unfinished tense goes back to the Roman writer Pliny, who said the great Greek painters signed their works that way, as if they were never quite done, and Renaissance artists took up the formula.

The story comes from Genesis. After Sodom burned, Lot's daughters, believing no men were left on earth, made their father drunk with wine and lay with him, and their sons founded the Moabites and the Ammonites. Massys gives the foreground to the embrace and the cup, while the burning city fills the distance, a landscape the Kunsthistorisches Museum thinks his brother Cornelis may have painted. A small scene on the left probably shows Lot's wife turned to salt. That December the Council of Trent, closing its last session, decreed that religious pictures must avoid all lasciviousness.