Still Life with Meat and the Holy Family Pieter Aertsen, Studio 1551

Still Life with Meat and the Holy Family
Pieter Aertsen, Studio 1551
From the collection of
Fundación Banco Santander
Trained in his native city of Amsterdam, from 1535 Aertsen was also notably active in Antwerp, at that time the commercial and artistic capital of the Low Countries and one of the leading urban centres in Europe.

Aertsen’s works, which were generally executed for private clients, are extremely original in nature. Compositionally, the principal space is generally occupied by a still life painted in a markedly naturalistic manner while most of these scenes also include a religious episode in the background.

One of Aertsen’s best-known works is Still Life with Meat and the Holy Family (also known as The Meat Stall or The Butcher’s Stall), which the artist signed and dated in 1551. The present version in the Colección Santander is of notable quality and was painted in Aertsen’s own studio.

The most innovative aspect of this artist’s work is undoubtedly his inversion of traditional thematic hierarchy, a concept that would prove highly influential throughout Europe. In early seventeenth-century in Spain the young Velázquez produced still lifes that are indebted to this approach.

The combination of a religious scene and a still life implies a commentary on moral issues and correct behaviour. In this case the scene of the Virgin’s charity as she gives out alms is relegated to the background. No known contemporary document explains the significance of this work but it may well be that the artist’s intention was to present an image in which the excessive abundance in the foreground contrasts with the Virgin’s charitable actions.
Details
Title: Still Life with Meat and the Holy Family
Date Created: 1551
Studio: Pieter Aertsen, Studio
Place Part Of: Spain
Physical Dimensions: w1650 x h1110 mm (Complete)
Exhibition: Madrid, Spain
Type: Painting
Rights: Fundación Banco Santander, www.fundacionbancosantander.com
External Link: Fundación Banco Santander
Medium: Oil on panel

Fundación Banco Santander
Boadilla del Monte, Spain

The Fundacion Banco Santander has a strong cultural, humanistic and scientific vocation. Thus developing a labour of cultural patronage through some basics, amongst which making the art more accessible to the public, collaborating in that necessary approach between the humanistic and scientific world stand out. Multidisciplinary projects serve as bridge between both fields; restoring the memory in art, literature and history, as well as sounding out current affairs and thinking over the transformations to which our society is undergoing and a very special work is being done in the area of sustainability and recovery of Natural Heritage through programs that help to sensitize citizens with the need of a more fair and sustainable society.

www.fundacionbancosantander.com

Statens Museum for Kunst
København, Denmark

The collections at the National Gallery of Denmark comprise three main collections: The Royal Collection of Painting and Sculpture, The Royal Collection of Graphic Art, and The Royal Collection of Plaster Casts. As the names suggest, these collections have their roots in the art collections of Danish monarchs; they are believed to date back to King Christian II and the mid-16th century.

The Collection of Sculpture and Painting comprises approximately 10,500 paintings and sculptures, while the Collection of Graphic Art houses more than 245,000 works of art on paper. In addition to this, approximately 2,500 plaster casts are housed at the Royal Cast Collection.

New works are added to the collections every year. Generous donations and acquisitions have shaped the profile of the collections in recent years, but the starting point remains the collections built by Danish monarchs.

Pieter Aertsen
1508 - 1575

Pieter Aertsen, called Lange Pier because of his height, was a Dutch painter in the style of Northern Mannerism, who invented the monumental genre scene combining still life and genre painting, and very often also including a biblical scene in the background. He was born and died in Amsterdam, in his lifetime a relatively minor city, and painted there but mainly in Antwerp, then the centre of artistic life in the Netherlands. His genre scenes were influential on later Flemish Baroque painting, and also in Italy, and his peasant scenes preceded by a few years the much better-known paintings produced in Antwerp by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
http://hisour.com/art-medium/paintings/still-life-with-meat-and-the-holy-family-pieter-aertsen-studio-1551/