Looking Askance: The Changing Shape of “Meat” in Dutch Still Life Painting

This chapter explores the creative iconography of living and dead food animals as emblems of prosperity in Dutch kitchen/banquet scenes. The butchered dead animal bodies represented in the large “market” and “kitchen” still life paintings first popularized during the iconoclastic mid-1500s by artists such as Pieter Aertsen, Joachim Beuckelaer, and Peter Wtewael, and are compared with later artists working during the resurgence of the Dutch Golden Age. Artists such as Frans Snyders, David Teniers, and Pieter Claesz altered kitchen spaces and disguised food animals in various culinary constructs to avert viewers from the gluttonous consumption of meat. In this act of sublimation, the abundance of food animals (however concealed as objects) would be sanctioned in a Protestant ideology as symbolic blessings in a humble mercantile economy, rather than gluttonous objects of greed.