The Pilgrims at Emmaus

Frans Snyders was the great painter of dead game and heaped fruit in 17th-century Antwerp, the man Rubens called on when a canvas needed a larder. So when he took up the Supper at Emmaus, the moment the risen Christ is recognised as he breaks bread, he painted it the way he saw the world: as a kitchen. The whole front of the picture is a table of food, white bread, grapes, a hare, woodcocks, the plenty of a wealthy house. A young servant girl leans in, smiling, holding up a bunch of grapes and pointing back over her shoulder. Follow her hand and you find the real subject, small, in a room behind. Three men sit at a table, the one in the middle blessing the bread, the two pilgrims just realising who he is. This was a Flemish habit going back a hundred years, letting everyday abundance carry the sacred scene instead of announcing it. The holiest moment in the painting is the thing you have to hunt for.