The Prodigal Son

In 1536, in the boom city of Antwerp, Jan Sanders van Hemessen took a Bible parable and set it in a tavern. The foreground is all appetite, the prodigal son squandering his inheritance among women, wine, cards and music, everyone leaning in close. At first it reads like a straightforward scene of low life. But look through the small window at the back and the rest of the story is there in miniature, the young man ruined, feeding pigs, then kneeling as his father takes him back. Painters were just beginning to build whole pictures around ordinary drinking and gambling, and van Hemessen uses that new taste to carry an old warning. The pleasures fill the front, and the consequences wait in the window.