Christ and the Adulteress

religious

The fruit and vegetables presented in Aertsen's paintings are peasant foods, but they are a feast for the eyes. His market scenes are not slices of everyday life, but plausible inventions. Many of the fruit and vegetables depicted in his work have sexual connotations and some of them were eaten as aphrodisiacs.

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About the Artist

Pieter Aertsen

1508 – 1575

Netherlandish painter, active in his native Amsterdam and in Antwerp. A pioneer of still life and genre painting, he is best known for scenes that at first glance look like pure examples of these types, but which in fact have a religious scene incorporated in them ( Butcher's Stall with the Flight into Egypt, University of Uppsala, 1551). Aertsen was the head of a long dynasty of painters, of whom the most talented was his nephew and pupil Joachim Beuckelaer.

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