The Fishmonger's Shop

In the Bologna of the 1570s the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi, a professor at the city's university, was building one of the great collections of natural specimens in Europe, and the museum links the counter in this picture to his research. Shells, molluscs, turtles and a lobster are laid out with a naturalist's curiosity. Bartolomeo Passarotti painted it between 1578 and 1580 as the pair to a butcher's shop of the same size. Behind the fish stand two elderly sellers. The woman is scolding, and the old man, her husband, listens in resignation. The museum reads more than a market scene in it. Shells were an attribute of Venus, and among them are three of the large fan mussels called Pinna nobilis, a byword for lust in the writing of the time. The old man holds one up, closed, while the one beside the woman lies wide open. Stranger still is the pufferfish she holds out, perhaps an ironic dig at her poor husband.