The Butcher's Shop

By 1603 this canvas was in Rome, one of a series of four by Bartolomeo Passarotti in the villa of Ciriaco Mattei, a Roman nobleman, on the Celian hill. Passarotti had painted it in Bologna between 1578 and 1580, and the museum calls it the first butcher's shop in Italian painting. Two sellers with grins that are not altogether reassuring show off their goods behind a well-stocked counter, with sides of beef and cuts of meat hanging from the rack. The older one holds out a choice piece to you. The younger one winks and takes a wild boar by the nose, and the museum suspects he means it in more than one sense, since in Italian to take someone by the nose is to make a fool of them. Under the comedy it reads a warning, a question about how wise it is to give in to the temptations of the flesh. High up on the left, in the background, a sparrow watches the scene unnoticed. It is the painter's signature in picture form, because a passerotto is a little sparrow.