Arts, Faculty of
Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Chapplow, Richard
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
In 1551, Pieter Aertsen produced a painting that would cause a paradigm shift in the discipline of painting. In the midst of the Protestant Reformation, Aertsen pushed the previously dominant religious subject matter into the background while having earthly foodstuffs dominate the foreground of his panel. This form came to be known as the “inverted still life” and allowed Aertsen to infuse the work with religious symbols while also conforming to the new structures of the Reformation. Aertsen’s panel, covered with a panoply of representations of meat would serve a dual purpose: the legitimization of the secular world as a subject worthy of painting and it would be inspiration for artists for centuries to come. Indirectly influenced by Aertsen, Annibale Carracci would soon after paint a scene of a butcher’s stall. One hundred years after Aertsen, Rembrandt would directly quote a hanging carcass from the background of Aertsen’s work. These works while tied together thematically through representations of animal flesh and meat, can create within a viewer a vastly different experience from one another. This thesis examines the reasoning behind such differences: the materiality of paint. How paint is applied to canvas or panel can drastically alter a viewer’s perception of the represented scene. Thinly applied paint allows for finer details, but can present a more static image. Thick impasto, piled into peaks and valleys that catch and block light forestall detailed representations, but do instill a physical, visceral experience in a viewer. Paint becomes a physical trace of the artist’s hand, a hand which ultimately wrests the power of incarnation away from God and instilling it within His own creation: the artist.
OF FLESH AND PIGMENT: EARLY MODERN PAINTING AND REPRESENTATIONS OF MEAT by Richard Chapplow D.A.H.Y., The University of British Columbia, 2018 B.F.A., Emily Carr University of Art + Design, 2016 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Art History and Theory) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) January 2021 © Richard Chapplow, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Of Flesh and Pigment: Early Modern Painting and Representations of Meat submitted by Richard Chapplow in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art History and Theory Examining Committee: Dr. Joseph Monteyne, Associate Professor, Dept. of Art History, Visual Art & Theory Supervisor Dr. Catherine Soussloff, Professor, Dept. of Art History, Visual Art & Theory Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract In 1551, Pieter Aertsen produced a painting that would cause a paradigm shift in the discipline of painting. In the midst of the Protestant Reformation, Aertsen pushed the previously dominant religious subject matter into the background while having earthly foodstuffs dominate the foreground of his panel. This form came to be known as the “inverted still life” and allowed Aertsen to infuse the work with religious symbols while also conforming to the new structures of the Reformation. Aertsen’s panel, covered with a panoply of representations of meat would serve a dual purpose: the legitimization of the secular world as a subject worthy of painting and it would be inspiration for artists for centuries to come. Indirectly influenced by Aertsen, Annibale Carracci would soon after paint a scene of a butcher’s stall. One hundred years after Aertsen, Rembrandt would directly quote a hanging carcass from the background of Aertsen’s work. These works while tied together thematically through representations of animal flesh and meat, can create within a viewer a vastly different experience from one another. This thesis examines the reasoning behind such differences: the materiality of paint. How paint is applied to canvas or panel can drastically alter a viewer’s perception of the represented scene. Thinly applied paint allows for finer details, but can present a more static image. Thick impasto, piled into peaks and valleys that catch and block light forestall detailed representations, but do instill a physical, visceral experience in a viewer. Paint becomes a physical trace of the artist’s hand, a hand which ultimately wrests the power of incarnation away from God and instilling it within His own creation: the artist. iv Lay Summary This thesis examines the work of early modern painters Pieter Aertsen, Annibale Carracci, and Rembrandt van Rijn and their paintings of animal flesh. Each artist tackles similar subject matter, but paints in a markedly different manner from the others. I argue that the particular method of application of paint can radically change a viewer’s reception of the work, ranging from the scientific to the highly visceral. While the physical nature of Rembrandt’s later paintings has been discussed by previous scholars, neither Aertsen nor Carracci have had this aspect of their work scrutinized. v Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Richard Chapplow. vi Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Preface .............................................................................................................................................v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... viii Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... ix Chapter 1: Introduction: Flesh and Alchemy .............................................................................1 Chapter 2: Incarnation: Reforming the Body .............................................................................7 Chapter 3: Materiality: Paint as Flesh.......................................................................................25 Chapter 4: Affect: Blurring the Boundaries .............................................................................36 Chapter 5: Conclusion: Artist as Incarnator ............................................................................50 Figures ...........................................................................................................................................52 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................59 vii List of Figures Figure 1. Pieter Aertsen, A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms, 1551, oil on panel, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) .................................................................................................................................... 52 Figure 2. Pieter Aertsen, The Fat Kitchen. An Allegory, 1565-1575, oil on panel, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) ................................ 53 Figure 3. Pieter Aertsen, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 1553, oil on panel, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) ........................ 54 Figure 4. Annibale Carracci, The Butcher's Shop, 1583, oil on canvas, Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) ........................................................... 55 Figure 5. Rembrandt van Rijn, Slaughtered Ox, 1655, oil on panel, Louvre, Paris. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) ............................................................................................................. 56 Figure 6. Vincenzo Campi, Fishmongers, c. 1580, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) ....................................................................................... 57 Figure 7. Bartolomeo Passerotti, The Butcher's Shop, c. 1580, oil on canvas, Galleria Nationale d'Arte Antica, Rome. Wikimedia.org ........................................................................................... 58 viii Acknowledgements My sincerest thanks go to Dr. Joseph Monteyne, my primary supervisor for guiding me down the path of this project. His mentorship and insight have proven invaluable to my seeing this thesis to fruition and my growth as a scholar. I also greatly thank Dr. Catherine Soussloff who as my second reader helped immensely in the development and completion of this thesis. I am exceptionally grateful for having been a recipient of the Canada Graduate Scholarships-Master’s Program SSHRC for the second year of my Master’s program. The financial support relieved much of the stress inherent with a graduate program, but almost more importantly, it served as a concrete indication that I was in fact, on the right path regarding my studies. I would like to thank two members of the faculty of the Emily Carr University of Art + Design: Art Perry and Neil Wedman. Art Perry, you instilled in me a sense of wonder and enthusiasm with regards to art of all forms. Neil Wedman, you taught me to always look outside the box and approach things on my own terms; to make every assignment my own. Special thanks to my mother Wendy who has always believed in me and has always given me the support to move forward. My eternal gratitude and love go to my partner Paz Pino. You have always been such a rock for me. You’ve always been there for me, helping me push through the most stressful of times. ix Dedication For Wendy and Paz.1 Chapter 1: Introduction: Flesh and Alchemy This thesis examines early modern renderings of animal flesh in paint. Pieter Aertsen, Annibale Carracci, and Rembrandt van Rijn form the main pillars of my examination because these three artists each painted images structured around visualizations of dead animal flesh. Differing ways of applying paint on canvas or panel present multiple views of flesh and subsequently provoke varied reactions from viewers. Flesh, paint, and the materiality of both become intimately intertwined and inextricable from each other upon the canvas or panel. Unlike other forms of image-making such as drawing, photography, or even forms of painting such as the use of watercolours, oil painting holds a unique possibility in that it can become sculptural through its materiality. Oil paint allows an artist to incorporate additional dimensions to their work; both literal and figural. Thick layers of impasto can be built up lending a painting more of a sculptural element not found in other pictorial artforms, one tied to the bodily presence of the subjects represented. This physical nature can be employed by an artist to great effect, creating a work that is much more than merely an image in the viewer’s space, but an actual form protruding into that space as well. The physicality of oil paint can radically alter the affect generated by a given work, especially when portraying flesh and meat, thus creating a visceral and embodied experience within a viewer. Within Christology or the study of Jesus Christ and his teachings, there are two important concepts centered around the body: hypostasis and incarnation. Hypostasis refers to the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as all being one, but simultaneously distinct beings. Incarnation is the son of God, Jesus Christ being born into mortal, human flesh or to be put another way, the Word of God becoming flesh. These notions of the body of Christ containing 2 multiple states of being can be applied to painting through the writing of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his posthumously published work The Invisible and the Visible, Merleau-Ponty delineates his most elaborate conception of flesh. For Merleau-Ponty, flesh is comprised of all the associations a viewer has accumulated regarding any particular aspect of a given work, or the “repeated index.”1 The example of the color red is given by Merleau-Ponty. Where one person sees red and is subconsciously reminded of roof tiles, another may think of a woman’s dress or the ribbons on a soldier’s uniform.2 It is this flesh that every viewer brings to a work, enveloping the base structure with their own understandings of the elements presented. Both concepts of hypostasis and incarnation can be applied directly to painting. Through the concept of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, one can understand a painting as being one object, but also a multitude of possible objects simultaneously. There may be only one physical object hanging in a museum or gallery, but for every viewer, that painting becomes their own through virtue of how they personally experience and mentally apply meaning to the work. Merleau-Pontian flesh also shifts the viewing experience from merely intaking information into an embodied experience when the viewer mentally recreates the represented objects, recalling the feel of a certain fabric or the taste of a particular foodstuff. One must note the difference between a modern understanding of the human senses and that of people living during the Renaissance. For as Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker recently wrote, for Renaissance thought, the senses were divided into two distinct orders: the lower comprised of thought, taste, touch, and smell, due to their requirement of closeness, while sight 1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Claude Lefort, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. (Evanston [Ill.]: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 130. 2 Ibid., 132. 3 and hearing, able to function at a great distance were regarded as of a higher order.3 Thus, the works to be discussed in this thesis take on a level of complexity that might not be readily apparent to a modern viewer. For with the importance placed upon the foodstuffs on display, Aertsen, Annibale Carracci, and Rembrandt effectively collapse the Renaissance understanding of the status of the various senses. As Walker argues, paintings such as these perform a double function: they work to raise the status of the “lower” senses while simultaneously raising the worthiness of portraying the lowly subjects seen.4 The senses of thought, taste, touch, and smell are all elevated to the level of sight through the production of Merleau-Pontian flesh within the viewer’s mind. This elevation of status occurs most poignantly in Aertsen’s work, but is also to be seen through the hand of Annibale Carracci and Rembrandt. American art historian James Elkins offers another understanding of hypostasis. For Elkins, hypostasis is a movement from the incorporeal to the physical or the act of instilling the spiritual into the earthly.5 According to Elkins, dead material such as paint, may be alive and full of intention and expression.6 It is this hypostatic movement, coupled with the artist’s layering of their Merleau-Pontian flesh, that makes every painting an act of incarnation. Following the Reformation and the determination that God is able to be represented through the body of Christ, 3 Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker. “Appetites: Food, Eating and the Senses in Sixteenth-Century Italian Art.” In Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice, edited by Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker, (Farnham, Surrey, England;Burlington, VT;: Ashgate, 2012), 109. 4 Ibid., 110. 5 James Elkins What Painting Is. 2nd ed. Routledge, (2019), 48. 6 Ibid. 4 no longer is the transformation of thought into matter purely the realm of God, but this ability also clearly resides within the hands of the artist. The term incarnation becomes particularly apt when discussing the works of the artists mentioned for not only are they depicting meat and flesh, but there are direct ties to the biblical Incarnation to be found in both Aertsen’s and Rembrandt’s works. Annibale Carracci, on the other hand, ties his paintings of flesh more directly into an aesthetic debate about the physicality of paint and realism versus an abstracting metaphysical position of idealism. As a physical object, a painting is typically comprised of multiple layers of material. As an aesthetic object, by nature of the image portrayed and most notably its physicality, a painting can prompt the production of many layers of experience and understanding for a viewer. Kenneth Craig’s 1982 essay, “Pieter Aertsen and The Meat Stall” presents a thoroughly fleshed out examination of Aertsen’s 1551 work, The Meat Stall also known as A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms. The symbolism found throughout the painting is explained as is the possible patron of the work. According to Craig, Aertsen included several elements regarding the socio-political landscape of Antwerp of the time, but for the purposes of this thesis, I will keep my focus primarily upon the meat on display and what it represents. In her 2004 essay “Foods and the Body in Italian Genre Paintings, about 1580: Campi, Passarotti, Carracci,” Sheila McTighe examined the figures and their accompanying foodstuffs found in the works of sixteenth century Italian artists Vincenzo Campi, Bartolomeo Passerotti, and Annibale Carracci as well as their Dutch and Flemish predecessors Pieter Aertsen and Aertsen’s cousin and student, Joachim Beuckelaer. McTighe primarily discussed two aspects of these works: the relationship between lower-class figures and the foods that surround them and the differences between the use of symbolism and realism. The suitability of certain foods for 5 either lower-class peasants or the upper-classes and nobility is discussed at length but is outside the focus of this thesis. I will center on McTighe’s argument regarding the symbolism in Aertsen and the movement toward realism in Annibale Carracci and Rembrandt. For it is the shift to portraying a more realistic scene, painted with a lively, painterly style, that would allow for a more deeply engaging, embodied experience for a viewer. In speaking to Rembrandt’s work, I will primarily refer to the work of two authors: Svetlana Alpers and Avigdor Poséq. Through Alpers’ 1988 book, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market, I will discuss Rembrandt’s sculptural use of paint on panel which not only enhances the visual experience of his work, but more importantly heightens the affective nature of a viewer’s application of Merleau-Pontian flesh which in turn creates an embodied experience within a viewer. Poséq’s extensive research found in his 2009 essay “A Proposal for Rembrandt's Two Versions of Slaughtered Ox” regarding Rembrandt’s personal life, particularly his financial and familial issues towards the end of his life proves crucial in the reading of Rembrandt’s panel as a possible commentary on his own life at the time of production. The comparison that Elkins makes between the alchemists’ attempting to transmute one element into another and artists having the capacity to change the immaterial into the physical is fruitful as a starting point of discussion, but it is fatally flawed. Whereas the alchemists of centuries past were never actually able to transmute lead into gold or produce the fabled Philosopher’s Stone, artists are able to make their thoughts tangible. Further, when a viewer applies their layer of Merleau-Pontian flesh to a work, the mental experience becomes highly personal and embodied through the association of remembrances of touches, tastes, and smells. An artist surpasses the alchemist twice: first by giving their thoughts physical form, and secondly by being instrumental in the formation of their own thoughts as a visceral experience within a 6 viewer’s mind. Within the viewer, the artist accomplishes what the alchemist could not; one element becomes another – paint becomes flesh. 7 Chapter 2: Incarnation: Reforming the Body The Incarnation of Christ weighs heavily upon the discussion of painting, particularly when the subject matter involves flesh. The Christian Church has experienced two predominant periods whereby the worship of images became of great concern: the years between the eighth and ninth centuries and the sixteenth century. These two durations of iconomachy differed quite radically. For the Byzantines of the eighth to ninth centuries, the main concern was that of whether Christ could be depicted at all. Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century questioned the use of all religious imagery, not just that of Christ. Earlier, representation itself was of concern, followed centuries later by how representations may or may not be used. The depiction of Christ was initially problematic due to his dual nature born out of the Incarnation; that being of both God and man in a single being. The question of the Incarnation was one aspect of the First Council of Nicaea, a gathering of bishops summoned by Constantine in 325CE. As a doctrine of correct Christian belief, the Nicene Creed, later known as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed after its amendment at the First Council of Constantinople in 381CE established four main points: Christ as having both divine and human natures, Christ having been “begotten” from the substance of God and specifically not made by God, Christ as taking on the flesh of man, enduring suffering in his name so as to provide salvation for humankind, and finally the establishment of the consubstantial nature of the Trinity or that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are of the same substance.7 Iconoclasts and iconophiles of the 8th century 7 Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young, eds. The Cambridge History of Christianity: Origins to Constantine. Vol. 1. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 561. 8 were able to agree upon the distinct, dual nature of Christ, but the very possibility of depicting his dual nature was highly problematic. Iconoclast understanding was that icons could only represent material things; they could not depict the divine nature. Iconophiles viewed the icon as only resembling its prototype and argued that just as a painting of a human does not separate the body from the invisible soul, neither would a painting of Christ divide the human and divine natures.8 Saint John of Damascus (675-749), a monk and vocal proponent of images wrote in the eighth century on the defense of images in his essay, On the Divine Images: “If we made an image of the invisible God, we would certainly be in error … but we do not do anything of the kind; we do not err, in fact, if we make an image of God incarnate who appeared on earth in the flesh, who in his ineffable goodness, lived with men and assumed the nature, the volume, the form, and the colour of the flesh.”9 Thus, John argued that it is through God becoming flesh on earth via the Incarnation, that images of Christ become permissible, as it is the earthly form being represented, not the divine nature. Through the eighth and ninth centuries several Councils were held to discuss amongst other topics, the proper use of images. It was the 843 Council of Constantinople that saw iconophile Empress Theodora (815-867) restore the use and veneration of holy images. The 843 Council of Constantinople accepted that images were not idols and annulled the Second Council of Nicaea because it “confounded worship by arbitrarily affirming that what is fit for God should be offered to the inanimate matter of icons” and that it “bestowed exaggerated honor to painting 8 Barbara Catherine Raw, Trinity and Incarnation in Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought. Vol. 21;21. (New York, NY, USA;Cambridge [England];: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 54-55. 9 Jeremy Begbie. Beholding the Glory: Incarnation through the Arts. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000), 89. 9 [chrômasi, literally, “to colors”], namely, the lighting of candles and lamps and the offering of incense, these marks of veneration being those reserved for the worship of God [latreia].”10 By the sixteenth century, the hypostatic or dual nature of Christ had been fully integrated into the Christian doctrine. The ontological question of Christ shifted to the epistemological: how should Christ be represented and worshipped? An answer to this question became the forefront of the movement that came to be known as the Protestant Reformation. On October of 1517 in Wittenberg, Germany Martin Luther (1483-1546) published the Ninety-Five Theses or Disputation on the Power of Indulgences which disputed the practice of the clergy selling indulgences or certificates that would reduce the time one would remain in Purgatory before Judgement. After being excommunicated by Pope Leo X and declared an outlaw by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Luther fled and Andreas Karlstadt (1486-1541), a vocal iconoclast, took his place as city preacher.11 On January 23, 1522 Karlstadt published the pamphlet On the Removal of Images, railing against an idolatrous church, specifically citing the Old Testament passage, “Thou shall not make unto thee graven images.”12 Days later a mob entered the City Church, stripping altars, breaking images, and burning the debris. This prompted a return of Luther on March 6, whereby he gave several sermons decrying the actions of Karlstadt, even though many of these were initially promoted by Luther himself. In 1525 Luther recommended 10 Jaś Elsner, “Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium.” The Art Bulletin 94 no. 3 (2012), 382. 11 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 84. 12 Ibid., 86. 10 images for Christian books, homes, and churches by stating that, “They should be painted on walls for the sake of better remembrance and better understanding.”13 The actions of the sixteenth-century German iconoclasts again bring the issue of the Incarnation to the forefront for, even though the reasoning behind their actions is ideological, they attacked the physical manifestations of the Church. Many images; statues, paintings, and mosaics were simply defaced with the eyes, mouths, and hands of figures being primarily targeted. This left the identity of the figure intact but altered, so that their sources of purported power were removed.14 Iconoclasts also attacked images in the same manner as criminals were disciplined at the time: scarring, burning, enucleation or the removal of the eyes, and dismemberment.15 Thus, by treating images essentially as people, the iconoclasts granted them a hypostatic nature; both an image made of wood, stone, or paint, but also a fleshly body to be corporally punished and tortured. Further, as Joseph Leo Koerner argued, by the act of the incomplete destruction of images and leaving a merely defaced image behind, iconoclasts became image-makers themselves.16 This could be construed as yet another layer of Incarnation; the image-breaker manifesting their ideology in a physical, tangible form upon the Earth. As such, the issue of the image was a complicated one for sixteenth-century Reformers. For Luther, it was not images per se that were the issue, it was the potential for them to be abused, to lead to adoration and idolatry that was cause for concern.17 John Calvin (1509 – 13 Koerner, Reformation, 159. 14 Ibid., 108. 15 Ibid., 108-109. 16 Ibid., 111. 17 Sergiusz Michalski. The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe. 1st English ed. (London;New York;: Routledge, 1993), 19. 11 1564), a French theologian and reformer living in Geneva, Switzerland, similarly felt that it was the possibility of idolatry, and specifically idolatry towards images in a sacred setting and not the home, was the issue.18 In contrast, iconophobes such as Karlstadt called for the complete removal of images.19 It would be a movement to secular spaces that would see artists explore new possibilities for incorporating religious themes into their works. The first in a series of four almost identical canvases, Pieter Aertsen’s A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms (North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina) (Fig. 1) from 1551 is such an example. Although the patron of this massive canvas is unknown, undoubtedly it was not produced for a church setting. In this work, the religious themes are pushed to the background and hidden allegorically within the proliferation of meat that dominates the scene. As such, A Meat Stall conforms to the needs of the church in that God is not represented, but would still appeal to a secular audience where according to Adam Morton images like this would not only aid in instilling piety in the viewer, but would also be a marker for their wealth and place within society.20 For Calvin, images made by man were considered “dead images” while God produced “living images.”21 Aertsen’s minutely detailed rendering of flesh would appear to be an almost direct rebuttal. In the mid-sixteenth century, Aertsen was at the forefront of developing a new form of still-life painting that came to be known as the inverted still-life. After the Protestant Reformation in the beginning of the century, artists had to turn to different subject matter as 18 Adam Morton. "Images and the Senses in Post-Reformation England." Reformation 20, no. 1 (2015), 85. 19 Michalski, Reformation, 169. 20 Morton, “Images and the Senses,” 84. 21 Ibid. 12 overtly religious works were no longer in favour. Many patrons still wanted to have religious teachings present in their lives so it meant that artists had to develop new ways to do so. Aertsen was able to incorporate religious themes in his works in a subtle, masterful way. By taking the genre of still-life and incorporating religious iconography throughout and most notably by using a form of a picture-in-picture technique whereby religious themes were present in small scenes in the background, Aertsen fused the secular and spiritual in one image. Aertsen’s A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms is a massive oil painting on wooden panel measuring 115.6 cm × 165 cm. Throughout the panel, Aertsen employed a finely detailed, highly polished method of painting. Brushstrokes are rarely visible if at all and the surface appears uniform with no areas of impasto to be seen. The foreground of the image is comprised of a variety of meats, dairy products, and baked goods. There are examples of land animals such as cows and pigs, fowl in the form of hens, and aquatic animals are seen in fresh and cooked forms of fish. Thick cream and cheese are the dairy products on display while pretzels and small pies comprise the baked goods. The veritable riot of foodstuffs verges on being overwhelming. This sense in exacerbated by Aertsen pushing the flesh on display nearly to the picture plane, leaving the viewer no recourse, but to engage with the meat. Through the open walls of the meat stall there are multiple scenes visible. For Kenneth Craig, the painting is comprised of two different levels; the still-life and the scenes behind.22 On this point, I disagree with Craig. I argue that the importance of the man collecting water, to whom I will return shortly, is such that he should be considered to be a separate scene from the 22 Kenneth M. Craig, "Pieter Aertsen and the Meat Stall." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 96, no. 1 (1982): 4. 13 oxen and group seen much further behind him. The central opening allows the viewer to see a depiction of the Holy Family. Joseph leads a mule while the Virgin Mary rides, carrying the infant Christ, and handing out bread to a young peasant boy. Behind the Holy Family, a stream of peasants makes their way towards the distant chapel seen in the smaller opening at the left edge of the panel. The opening on the right side of the panel depicts two scenes. The closer of the two shows a peasant collecting water from a well, surrounded by a scattering of mussel shells. Further behind the man collecting water there is a small tavern scene with two men and women engaged in conversation as well as the butchered and hanging carcass of an ox. As complex as the image is visually, I will discuss how the symbolism contained within the abundance of meat and background scenes simultaneously is equally, if not more intricate, but is also able to engage a sixteenth-century viewer with a simple religious ideal: earthly foods sustain the body, but spiritual foods are required to nourish the soul and prepare oneself for the afterlife. Dominated by the dead flesh found for sale in a butcher’s market stall, A Meat Stall initially presents itself as a finely detailed study of flesh. Mammals, fowl, and fish are represented as are various goods made from animal products such as cheese and butter. Aertsen painted the meats and animal products with great care and naturalism. The viewer’s eye is drawn predominantly to the meat, painted in an almost photorealistic manner, while in the background can be found a representation of a biblical scene of the Holy Family. The biblical scene is almost lost within the background as the blue of Mary’s cloak, the white of the Christ child’s swaddling, and the brown of the mule they ride blend into the blue of the sky, the white of the clouds, and the brown of the dirt road and the ruddy clothing of the peasants. Even once one recognizes the 14 scene shown through the uprights of the meat stall, the eye is drawn back to the flesh with the help of the large, black eye of the cow’s head, staring outward, as if directly at the viewer. While the biblical scenes and allusions would be of great importance, the flesh surrounding it visually takes priority in this work. Not merely a picturesque framing device for the Holy Family, the meat stall’s flesh demands attention from the viewer. To the right side of the canvas is to be found another scene deep in the background. Here we see a group of people, two men and two women in the midst of a party, and as Ethan Kavaler notes, the garb of the women would indicate that a night of pleasures awaits the group.23 Slightly in front of the group is hanging the carcass of an oxen. This hanging flesh serves multiple purposes. Given its similar register as the Holy family it is possible to make a correlation between the oxen and the Crucifixion of Christ. The splayed limbs secured to a crossbeam and the white cloth hanging at the oxen’s midpoint harken directly to the crucified Christ, nailed to the cross wearing only a loincloth. This allows Aertsen to show scenes of both the beginning and end of Christ’s worldly life which effectively bookend or envelop the secular world. By placing the oxen in front of the peasants, Aertsen presents us with another picture within a picture. For the main layer is the secular world of the meat stall, behind that is the religious world of the Holy family and the Crucifixion, but even further behind that is to be found the secular world yet again. The hanging ox is far from the only reference to the religious to be found in A Meat Stall. The foreground is replete with religious symbols in the form of meat and foodstuffs. For as Kavaler notes, the abundance of luxury meats refers to the feasting of Carnival and also an allusion to the human 23 Ethan Matt Kavaler, "Pieter Aertsen's Meat Stall Divers Aspects of the Market Piece." Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 40, no. 1 (1989), 67. 15 indulgences of the flesh, while the fish and pretzels speak to the foods consumed during the fasting of Lent.24 Thus, we can see Aertsen commenting on the interrelated and integrated nature of the secular and religious sides of life in the sixteenth century. The religious imagery of the background and the proliferation of meat in the foreground do provide an important point of contemplation within the work: the correlation between corporeal food and spiritual food. For as Kenneth Craig notes, certain food items are presented to the viewer in a very specific way; for example, the fish are in the form of a cross and the sausages are shown on a cloth much like what a priest would use to present the Eucharistic Host or chalice.25 It is through this connection that the viewer is meant to further contemplate how while the body must subsist upon earthly foods, the spirit will be equally nourished by the spiritual food of Christ’s sacrifice.26 The meat on display verges on being photographic in its realism, producing a very visceral scene. In his 1896 book, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, Bernard Berenson wrote at length of the human capacity of a “tactile imagination,” or our ability to imagine the physical sensations of touching an object that we see represented before us.27 Berenson, in speaking of the work of Florentine painter Giotto, argued that form in painting is capable of producing within a viewer the sensation of an object that is seemingly more real than the real object in question.28 It is this level of tactile imagination stimulation that I would argue Aertsen’s 24 Kavaler, “Pieter Aertsen,” 71. 25 Kenneth M. Craig, "Rembrandt and the Slaughtered Ox." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46, (1983), 7. 26 Ibid. 27 Bernard Berenson. The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, with an Index to their Works, by Bernhard Berenson. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1896), 7. 28 Ibid., 10. 16 work provides a viewer; a hyper-real view of a meat stall. A non-real space occupied by recognizable objects that while imparting an imaginary understanding of their physical forms, at the same time are also known to be outside the realm of normal reality. Even though the term is used quite frequently in the fields of robotics and movie special effects, I argue that the flesh and meat of Aertsen’s Meat Stall enters into what has been called “the uncanny valley.” The term, originally coined in the 1970s by Masahiro Mori, a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, “the uncanny valley” refers to the eerie feeling that arises when a viewer sees and is deceived by an almost perfect replica of a living being, but then realizes they are looking at a replica.29 The “valley” refers to a graphed representation of a viewer’s affinity for a given object that increases as the object appears more like that which it is representing, but radically drops as it gets to be almost life-like.30 Sigmund Freud understood there to be several drivers for a feeling of the uncanny all of which stemmed from something familiar suddenly becoming unfamiliar and therefore, frightening.31 For our purposes, and in direct relation to Mori’s work, we shall focus on Freud’s discussion of the uncanny regarding automatons and a viewer’s inability to be certain that what they are seeing is a living being or a machine.32 An automaton, a digital recreation of a deceased actor in a movie, or a highly realistic painting, can appear to be the real thing at a glance, but under scrutiny small details begin to 29 Masahiro Mori, Karl MacDorman, and Norri Kageki. "The Uncanny Valley [from the Field]." IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19, no. 2 (2012), 98-99. 30 Mori, MacDorman, and Kageki, “Uncanny Valley,” 99. 31 Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb, Angela Richards, and Scientific Literature Corporation. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 219. 32 Ibid., 229. 17 belie the true nature of the representation. While Aertsen’s depicted meats do not necessarily appear frightening as per Freud’s definition of the uncanny, by applying a modern understanding of the term, they reside withing the “uncanny valley,” oscillating between appearing almost real and hyper-real. It is this constant shifting of realness that I argue can forestall a truly visceral, embodied experience for a viewer as they grapple with the uncanny appearance of the meat. Aertsen’s finely detailed rendition of flesh coupled with the smoothness of the canvas gives the painting a sense of a natural history illustration. The foreground of Meat Stall presents the modern viewer with less of a scene walked in upon by the viewer, but more of a scientific display and catalogue of numerous cuts of meat. In 1435’s De Pictura, Leon Batista Alberti described painting as an open window looking upon a scene.33 Initially Aertsen’s Meat Stall appears to be an Albertian window. The mimetic nature of Aertsen’s painting style grounds the work in a sense of realness and a feeling that the majority of the scene could have been painted from life which accentuates the power of the biblical scenes and iconography found throughout. Upon further inspection there are elements that draw it away from a reading of a depiction of a real scene; there are many elements to be found that could not occur, especially in terms of being painted in the moment. The first regards the architecture of the stall itself. The beam from which the pig’s head hangs, attaches under the roof of the staff in an odd manner as does the beam just to the left of the pig’s head. The scale and perspective of these elements are simply not correct. By looking to other works by Aertsen, notably The Fat Kitchen, An Allegory (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) (Fig. 2) from 33 Leon Battista Alberti. On Painting / Leon Battista Alberti; Translated by Cecil Grayson, with an Introduction and Notes by Martin Kemp. (London: Penguin,1991), 54. 18 1565-1575, we see equally impossible architecture. Is this simply a matter of Aertsen incorrectly rendering the architecture, or more likely is the artist intentionally distorting perspective in order to present to the viewer not a painting of an Albertian window, but a painting about painting? The second possibly jarring element is the positioning of some of the foodstuffs. In particular, almost in the center of the panel, the uppermost sausage links, one red, the other white hang impossibly in the air as if caught mid-fall by Aertsen’s brush. This is more than likely a result of Aertsen using as models pre-drawn (from where?) images of common foods, sketches prepared by the artist in order to speed up the compositional process.34 Given the highly realistic nature of the vast majority of the canvas, one must question how these aspects came to be. Did Aertsen have a lapse in his understanding of perspective and architecture or are the slightly off-kilter elements made on purpose, possibly to more aptly incorporate the fantastical biblical scenes and thereby producing a more cohesive whole? Upon closer inspection though, even the flesh on display is of a nature not entirely realistic. With the level of detail and polish Aertsen employed, the flesh verges on being too perfect. The scene, while comprised mainly of dead animal flesh is largely quite clean and almost antiseptic. The goods themselves are all exemplars of form. The meat is clean with no sign of blood. The fowl have only the slightest of marks on their throats to indicate they have been killed. The only foodstuff not shown in perfect form is the bowl of cream, marred by the spoon used to take portion from the otherwise smooth surface. 34 Yvette Bruijnen. "Fruits and Vegetables: New Information on the Workshop Practice of Pieter Aertsen." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 108, no. 3 (1994), 122. 19 These factors present a modern viewer with elements that speak clearly to the process of painting as opposed to the capturing of reality. For a viewer of the work in the sixteenth century, such anomalies and apparent “mistakes” would have been viewed quite differently. For as Charlotte Houghton notes, sixteenth century Antwerpians were especially attuned to a “tradition of microscopic realism” and some artists worked in such a manner whereby they would hide within their paintings small images and self-referential symbols for viewers to find.35 Thus, what a viewer of the work in the twenty-first century might see as mistakes, viewers in Aertsen’s time would possibly have seen these as artistic choices striving for perfection, which, in turn, provide the viewer with a level of entertainment and an exercise in close-viewing. Aertsen’s panel is highly detailed and the paint is applied thinly and evenly, giving the panel a smooth, polished surface. This particular application of paint, coupled with the over-abundance of forms of meat would to a more modern viewer, possibly recall natural history specimen drawings or even cabinets of curiosities. As such, Aertsen’s work can take on a more scientific, clinical aspect for a modern viewer. The abject nature of such a proliferation of meat and animal parts is tempered by the cold, analytical nature of the presentation. The scene of the Holy Family and the allusion to the Crucifixion add another layer of complexity to the image in terms of the potential generation of affect and consequent feelings. For both scenes are quite traumatic; the holy Family fleeing into Egypt to prevent the Christ child from being killed by King Herod and the Crucifixion of Christ. As with the dead flesh, the potential affect of these 35 Charlotte Houghton. "This was Tomorrow: Pieter Aertsen's "Meat Stall" as Contemporary Art." The Art Bulletin 86, no. 2 (2004), 290. 20 scenes is partially mitigated by Aertsen pushing them into the background of the work along with the more clinical approach to how the panel was painted. When one takes into account the image as a whole, the reasoning behind the almost scientific display of meat and flesh, presenting no sign of the painter’s hand at work, becomes clear. For Craig, by coupling them with the religious imagery in the background, the foodstuffs on display are to serve as a metaphor; prompting the viewer to be reminded that while the food on display will sustain their bodily life, it is the spiritual food in the background that will sustain their spiritual life.36 If God is the ultimate creator and artists are merely striving to present as faithful a rendering of that perfection as possible, there would be very little room or need to insert the hand of the artist into the work. A more painterly style might also propel a viewer to think of the artist at work as opposed to contemplation of God. As such, Aertsen’s non-inclusion of his own hand within the work, makes it potentially more affective for a sixteenth-century viewer. Thick impasto, scumbled paint, or highly visible brushstrokes would ground the work in the earthly realm of paint and panel, man and labor. By removing himself from the work, Aertsen presents a work clearly focused on promoting a relationship between the viewer and the sacred. To further accentuate this relationship, Aertsen also added many anomalies within the work, prompting viewers to spend even more time with the canvas, deeply concentrating upon the earthly and spiritual foods on display. The complexity of Aertsen’s Meat Stall lies not only the proliferation of objects and scenes presented, but also in the painting’s possible patronage and the impact thereof on the represented subject matter. For while there has been no surviving documentation confirming the 36 Craig, "Pieter Aertsen,” 7. 21 painting’s patron, Craig made a compelling argument for who it might have been through three facets found in the painting. The first is the man gathering water from the well. Craig notes the fact that this man is the largest human figure within the painting, marking his importance, but most notably is his clothing and tools; he is dressed in work clothes and carries the tools of a butcher.37 The second is the particular telling of the Flight into Egypt that is depicted. The Virgin Mary presenting a gift of bread to a beggar child while a row of pilgrims pass behind them is not to be found in any Church scriptures or writings and has only been represented by two other artists from Antwerp.38 The last is a very small detail of two disembodied hands seen to be painted on a placard in the upper left of the canvas. The hands are from the coat of arms of the city of Antwerp and refer to a legend regarding the giant, Druron Antigon, who as a guardian of the river into Antwerp would sever the hands of merchants who refused to pay their taxes.39 The combination of these three elements alongside the myriad forms of meat on display led Craig to surmise that The Meat Stall was commissioned by the Butcher’s Guild of Antwerp.40 Another connection to the Butcher’s Guild is that of the date of the canvas. For Aertsen specifically dated the work to March 1551, which marks the fiftieth anniversary of the building of the Vleeshuis, the Butcher’s Guild Hall in Antwerp.41 A final possible marker for the panel being made for the Butcher’s Guild comes from Victor Stoichiță. As Stoichiță explained in his 1997 book The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, through Aertsen bringing the point of view of the panel back from the religious scene in the background, which would have 37 Craig, "Aertsen,” 10-11. 38 Ibid., 5. 39 Ibid., 8. 40 Ibid., 11. 41 Ibid., 11. 22 previously been the sole subject of a painting, the profane world surrounding it was now included.42 By bringing the profane into what would normally be a religious space, Aertsen effectively blurs the boundary between the panel and the viewer’s world. To further this connection between panel and reality, Stoichiță notes that later Aertsen works such as Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) (Fig. 3) from 1552, present a kitchen scene in the foreground and were typically displayed in the kitchen of a home.43 Thus A Meat Stall being commissioned by butchers becomes a distinct probability. Svetlana Alpers argued that the difference between Dutch and Italian art of the seventeenth century was that Dutch art centers on the descriptive while Italian art focuses on the narrative.44 Aertsen’s Meat Stall resides within the mode of description even though its date precedes Alpers’ discussion. The proliferation of minute details throughout the canvas speaks not to merely presenting a casual view through an Albertian window, but a thorough examination of a cacophony of objects. To a modern viewer accustomed to pre-packaged meats, the sight of a cow’s head on display may very well be off-putting, but as Charlotte Houghton notes, such a sight would have been commonplace to a sixteenth-century citizen of Antwerp.45 Thus, the previously noted correlation between earthly and spiritual food takes position of great importance as the viewer is easily drawn into examining the fine details afforded the display of 42 Victor Ieronim Stoichiță. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting. (Cambridge;New York, NY, USA;: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 43. 43 Ibid., 41. 44 Svetlana Alpers. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1983), xx. 45 Houghton, “Tomorrow,” 282. 23 meat. If Aertsen had painted the meat with less detail, relying on the viewer to mentally bring their own Merleau-Pontian flesh to bear on the image, thereby filling in details themselves, the morally instructive aspect of the work might very well have been lost. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, Annibale Carracci and Rembrandt included a trace of their production, a showing of the hand of the artist within their work through the way they applied paint to canvas and panel respectively. At first glance, Aertsen would seem to have removed any trace of himself through a largely mimetic style of painting. This is not entirely the case. While we may not see Aertsen’s hand in the form of brushstrokes, as a painter his craft is displayed across the panel. As Stoichiță explained, at the time Aertsen painted A Meat Stall, religious scenes and those with figures were considered to be a painting, while what we now know as still-life, was not understood to be a genre, let alone even considered to be painting as such.46 Stoichiță put it quite simply: Aertsen’s inverted still-lifes are “paintings whose theme is painting.”47 For, how could such a monumentally-sized work, a size typically reserved for religious and historical images, painted with a level of skill also usually reserved for such works, not be about painting? In A Meat Stall we find Aertsen deviating from the accepted norms for subject matter at the time but employing the markers of traditional painting. A Meat Stall is a rallying cry to artists to take up new subject matter and is also simultaneously a statement of legitimation of said subject matter for the art of painting. To return to Walker and her discussion of the status of the senses during the Renaissance, I would therefore argue that Aertsen skillfully collapsed the senses into the same order while also elevating lower subject matter to that of fine 46 Stoichiță, The Self-Aware Image, 40. 47 Ibid., 39. 24 art through his painting technique. The trace of the body of the artist may not be found within the paint, but Aertsen and painting as an art form are to be found throughout the panel. No longer constrained by the patronage of the Church and needing to paint figures and settings from scripture, artists could paint purely from life, including all manner of details. The reality surrounding an artist could be portrayed; could be brought to life upon the canvas. By rendering reality on canvas or panel, either through extremely fine details, such as Aertsen used, or later through a more gestural, less precise, and textured style of painting such as that employed by Annibale Carracci for his 1582 work Butcher’s Shop (Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford) (Fig. 4) and taken even further by Rembrandt for his 1655 Slaughtered Ox (Louvre, Paris) (Fig. 5), artists viscerally transformed paint into flesh, bone, and the world surrounding themselves. 25 Chapter 3: Materiality: Paint as Flesh As a more painterly style of painting where brushstrokes and the very material properties of paint were made visible became more widespread during the sixteenth century, and techniques such as dragging a pigment-laden dry brush across the canvas, or scumbling were developed and popularized, the hand of the artist became more readily visible. Annibale Carracci employed this method to great effect in The Butcher’s Shop, giving the work a more spontaneous feel as opposed to Aertsen’s much more static scene presented in A Meat Stall. Annibale Carracci’s Butcher’s Shop was one of two canvases painted of the same subject matter of a butcher’s market stall. The smaller canvas now resides in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The larger, far more ambitious canvas is to be found in Christ Church Picture Gallery of Oxford. The Kimbell Butcher’s Shop is 59.7 x 71 cm, while the Oxford painting is a monumentally sized 185 x 266 cm. The specific dates of production are unknown for both paintings; the Kimbell is attributed as being produced in the early 1580s and the Oxford in 1582 or 1583. Likewise, while the original patron of the work is unknown, the probable patron will be discussed shortly. The earliest information available about the Oxford canvas is that it was sold to Charles I (1600 – 1649) from the Gonzaga Collection. Alessandro Luzio (1857 – 1946) described in his 1913 book La Galleria dei Gonzaga venduta all’Inghilterra, a canvas as “Un 26 Quadro grande dipintovi una Beccaria opera del Caratio.”48 It was through receiving the collection of John Guise in 1765 that Christ Church acquired The Butcher’s Shop.49 For this thesis, I will focus primarily on the larger Oxford canvas as I view it to be a more mature rendering of the same subject matter. The Kimbell picture is not only smaller, but far less grand in scope regarding the number of figures, as well as the lack of socio-political commentary. The large size of the Oxford canvas enabled Annibale Carracci to expand the image greatly; several figures are added and very importantly they are life-size, offering the possibility for a more personal relationship between the viewer and the butchers and their depicted patrons. While the Kimbell canvas only portrays two butchers, the Oxford canvas expands the count of figures to four butchers, two patrons, and a dog. The painting is roughly arranged into four vertical columns of figures. The uppermost left is a halberdier clumsily trying to pull coins from a coin purse. To the right in the foreground is a butcher clad all in white, weighing a cut of meat with a scale. In the same column, but in the background is what appears to be an elderly matron waiting for her order to be fulfilled. The central column is comprised of two butchers. One in a while shirt and red vest prepares to slaughter a ram at the bottom of the canvas. Leaning over the table of cuts of meat is another butcher with a white shirt and black overshirt reaching upwards to an unseen point. Also, within this column is what appears to be a deer carcass hanging from the rafters. The last column on the right side of the canvas contains a butcher in a 48 Alessandro Luzio. La Galleria Dei Gonzaga: Venduta all'Inghilterra Nel 1627-28. (Roma: Bardi, 1974), 126, n.576. 49 Donald Posner. Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting Around 1590. Vol. 2. (London: Phaidon, 1971), 3. 27 dark shirt hanging a carcass on a hook in the rafters and a dog sitting under the table, obscured by shadows. By using this columnar arrangement, Annibale Carracci balances the canvas. Further, by splitting the central column between the foreground and background butchers, the viewer’s eye is drawn over the entirety of the canvas. To help facilitate such movement, Annibale employed the bright white of the butcher’s shirts and aprons, as well as the bright reds and deep blacks of the halberdier’s jerkin and the butcher’s vests, to pull the eye back and forth. The manner in which Annibale painted this canvas is markedly different from Aertsen. Detail is present, but not to the extent to which Aertsen painted his figures. In the Butcher’s Shop, much of the finer detail work is relegated to the carcasses. The figures and the stall are painted in a more painterly fashion, with brushstrokes and scumbled paint seen throughout. The color palette, much like Aertsen’s, is limited to earth tones, variations of red, flesh tones, and white and black. The Oxford Butcher’s Shop can be seen as a middle ground between Aertsen and Rembrandt in terms of his use of the materiality of paint to generate a particular affect within the viewer. For in the Oxford canvas, the uncanny plays very little part. While the scene portrayed is realistic, albeit appearing somewhat staged and static, Annibale did not employ a highly realistic or mimetic method of painting. Brushstrokes are readily apparent throughout, speaking directly to the action of painting and the medium of oil paint. The closest conceit given to a portrayal of true realism is that of the life-size figures shown which gives the painting a sense of vitality. Whereas we shall see that Rembrandt imparts a visceral, tactile sensation through heavy impasto, Annibale creates the same sensation in his work through the direct bodily connection between the viewer and the butchers and patrons represented on the canvas. It was through fellow Italian painters Bartolomeo Passerotti and Vincenzo Campi, that Annibale Carracci was indirectly influenced by Pieter Aertsen. Sheila McTighe proposes that 28 Campi would have seen works by Aertsen and Beuckelaer by virtue of both the Affaitati and Farnese families importing market scene paintings, some of which made their way from the Farnese collection into the collection of the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples.50 As such, Passerotti and Campi were both influenced by Aertsen’s representation of lower class life, adapting the genre to their own needs. Of the two, Campi remained the most faithful to Aertsen. Campi’s 1580 work Fishmongers (Fig. 6), part of the collection of the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, is highly reminiscent of Aertsen’s Meat Stall with two notable differences: the religious themes have been removed and humor has been made a critical theme of the painting. The inverted still life genre remains in place, although the religious scenes are replaced with peasants at work, bent over with their buttocks prominently displayed toward the viewer. Campi also largely retained the highly detailed, polished painting style of Aertsen. To accentuate the humorous side of his subjects, Campi created a largely monotone image consisting of earth tones and greys with bright whites, reds, and yellow being reserved for the fishmongers, a small rambunctious dog, and the peasants working in the background. Passerotti deviated from Aertsen far more greatly than Campi but retained the base subject matter of the butcher’s stall. In his canvas, The Butcher’s Shop (Fig. 7), painted in the 1580s and now residing in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome, the naturalistic fine detail of Aertsen is replaced with a softer, more painterly style of paint application. Like Campi, Passerotti infused his work with humor at the subject’s expense, making his butchers appear brutish and conniving at worst, sly and manipulative at best. Whereas Aertsen and Campi created 50 Sheila McTighe. "Foods and the Body in Italian Genre Paintings, about 1580: Campi, Passarotti, Carracci." The Art Bulletin 86, no. 2 (2004): 301. 29 a large space stretching out to the far landscape in the background, Passerotti’s work shows almost no depth. The butchers and their flesh for sale is pressed forward; almost right to the picture plane. The canvas is a claustrophobic mass of flesh; human and animal. This apparent proximity to the men and meat makes for a highly visceral experience, arguably making the flesh feel more real, almost tangible in comparison to either Aertsen or Campi. Annibale Carracci, already a highly skilled painter in his early twenties when he painted the two Butcher’s Shop images, drew inspiration from Campi and Passerotti, and by proxy of the former artists, Aertsen, for his canvases. From Campi, Annibale would appear to have borrowed the reduced color palette and use of white and red to accentuate his figures. Passerotti’s influence can be seen in Annibale’s painterly, thicker application of paint to canvas. From Aertsen we see not only the use of monumental size, with Annibale greatly exceeding even the size of Aertsen’s canvas, but also the implementation of multiple layers of narrative. Howard Hibbard relates an anecdote that Italian sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598 – 1680) once remarked to French collector Paul Fréart de Chantelou (1609 – 1694), that Annibale Carracci’s aptitude for combining elements from previous masters was not unlike how “a cook blends diverse ingredients.”51 Carl Goldstein would later refer to this mixing as a type of stew.52 I argue that the specificity of a stew is more fitting than simply a chef combining ingredients to make a dish, for with a stew, the constituent parts such as carrots, potatoes, and meat, are properly incorporated into the dish while also retaining much of their original forms and flavours. 51 Howard Hibbard. Bernini. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), 62-63. 52 Carl Goldstein. Visual Fact Over Verbal Fiction: A Study of the Carracci and the Criticism, Theory, and Practice of Art in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. (New York and Cambridge [Cambridgeshire];: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 186. 30 It is through Annibale’s stew of flesh that he was able to create a much more visceral and relevant image compared to his influences. Although there are elements within the Butcher’s Shop that strike a viewer as being posed or somewhat outrageous such as the Swiss guard at the left of the canvas, overall the scene presented could be understood to have taken place in reality. Much like Passerotti’s canvas, Annibale gives equal importance to both forms of flesh; the living and the dead, the human and the animal. Unlike Aertsen or Campi, the meat for sale is not given prominence, nor is it visually separated from the figures by way of proximity to the viewer or by use of color differentiation; the scene’s elements are fully integrated with one another. This gives the Butcher’s Shop a sense of a moment caught in time. This feeling is accentuated by the monumental scale of the work whereby the figures are almost life-size. The way the subjects are presented combined with their realistic size, makes Butcher’s Shop an excellent example of Alberti’s concept of painting being analogous to a window looking upon the world.53 While Aertsen’s rendering of meat may arguably be more realistic thanAnnibale’s, the smaller size of Aertsen’s panel forestalls the more bodily connection a viewer can have with the flesh as is to be found with theButcher’s Shop. With Butcher’s Shop, Annibaleseemingly moved entirely into the realm of the secular and the political. Even though Annibale was more than capable of a highly polished, finely detailed form of painting as evidenced by his many religious works, for The Butcher’s Shop he chose a more painterly style, which I argue is more fitting for the presented subject matter. With the apparent absence of the religious, Annibale’s canvas focuses on daily labor. Although, as John Rupert Martin elucidated, Annibale used both Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s renderings of 53 Alberti, On Painting, 54. 31 The Sacrifice of Noah as inspiration for multiple figures in his Butcher’s Shop.54 Donald Posner notes that while they provide inspiration, the figures are not meant to be direct quotations as would be typical of the then popular Mannerist form.55 Thus, while the religious is still hauntingly present in the Butcher’s Shop, the true subject of the painting is the secular and even more, a lower-class portion of everyday life. While finer details are included, specially in the side of meat being hung on the right side of the canvas, the rest of the canvas is painted more loosely. By relegating the finer details to the meat and keeping the rest of the canvas painted in a more painterly manner, the focus is shifted upon two important aspects of the butcher’s trade: the meat and the butchers. The detail afforded to the meat marks it as the most important aspect of the shop, for without meat, the shop would not exist. The butchers, represented with a more painterly style, but also appearing to be young, handsome men, cleanly and seriously going about their tasks indicates that they are respectable, honorable businessmen even though they are of a lower class than the crone and halberdier. The butchers can therefore be viewed as trustworthy and possibly relatable by viewers of lower to upper classes. Although Annibale Carracci did use previous masters’ works for inspiration for the poses of his figures, part of what makes this work so infused with a feeling of life is that he was dedicated to artistic study from life. Annibale, along with his brother Agostino and his cousin Ludovico, founded the Carracci Academy in 1582.56 The academy placed a focus on studies from life, not only of live and clothed models, but also of muscle and bone, animals and 54 John Rupert Martin. "The Butcher's Shop of the Carracci." The Art Bulletin 45, no. 3 (1963), 265. 55 Posner. Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting Around 1590. Vol. 1. (London: Phaidon, 1971), 15. 56 Carl Goldstein. Visual Fact. 49. 32 produce.57 Human anatomy was of great importance to Agostino who made models of parts of corpses.58 Even though no completely verifiable examples are to be found, Annibale Carracci is credited with inventing the genre of caricature, arguably a style of drawing which requires a very keen eye of a subject’s physical form in order to properly and convincingly exaggerate them.59 All of these factors point to Carracci’s intense study of the human form and an expertise in the handling and manipulation of a human figure. Thus, even when using works by Michelangelo and Raphael, which were in turn inspired by ancient statuary, Annibale is still able to infuse his figures with a level of life that is palpable. Annibale Carracci’s Butcher’s Shop might initially appear to be a simple genre scene, but he incorporated aspects of his own life into the work enhancing the narrative potential. The importance and power held by the butcher’s guild of sixteenth century Bologna is detailed in Raw Painting, C. D. Dickerson III’s study of Butcher’s Shop. As the population of Bologna rose and the demand for meat increased accordingly, the butcher’s guild steadily rose in power and influence.60 Although no definite patron has been identified for the work, Clare Robertson has speculated that the Canobbi family may have been the original owners.61 By building and controlling a new butcher’s complex in 1564, the Canobbi family controlled upwards of one third of all meat sales in Bologna.62 The Canobbi or a similarly wealthy family in the butcher’s 57 Carl Goldstein. Visual Fact. 49. 58 Ibid., 38. 59 Posner, Annibale Carracci, 66. 60 C. D. Dickerson, Raw Painting: "The Butchers Shop" by Annibale Carracci. (Fort Worth, TX: Yale University Press, 2010), 38-39. 61 Clare Robertson, The Invention of Annibale Carracci. Vol. 4;4., (Cinisello Balsamo, Milano: Silvana, 2008), 31. 62 Dickerson, Raw Painting, 38-39. 33 trade would seem to be the most viable prospects for commissioning such a massive painting and as such would have greatly influenced the subject matter. To add to the level of respect offered to the butchers’ representations, Annibale himself was closely tied to the butcher trade through his uncle Vincenzo and Vincenzo’s second son Giovanni Maria who were both butchers.63 Thus we see the reasoning behind the painting of the butchers as handsome men going about their work, but why paint the shop’s patrons in a comedic manner? With the rise of wealth and influence afforded to the butcher’s guild of Bologna, so came the attention of the local government.64 To curb the possibility of unfairly high pricing or short-weighing of product, the government instituted a form of butcher’s police known as the straordinari di carne who would verify peoples’ purchases and issue fines to the butchers if discrepancies were found.65 To aid the straordinari di carne, common citizens would report potentially dishonest butchers.66 Thus, two markers for the interference of the government into the butcher’s trade are represented comedically. The halberdier stands in for the straordinari di carne and clumsily tries to maneuver around his enlarged codpiece to retrieve some coins for his purchase. The elderly woman in the background is portrayed as a crone with a crooked nose. Donald Posner notes that Passerotti’s butchers “belong to a tradition of low comedy,” “clownish,” and even “grotesque.”67 Annibale has given the patrons the same level of representation, marking them as being worthy of less respect than the butchers. 63 Dickerson, Raw Painting, 35. 64 Ibid., 32. 65 Ibid., 41. 66 Ibid. 67 Posner. Annibale Carracci, Vol. 1, 11. 34 While Annibale’s own ties to the butcher’s trade and his probable patron determine the subject matter, likewise the subject matter itself determines how it is painted. Being a genre scene of a market stall, Annibale’s talent for finely detailed painting as found in his religious and mythologically based pieces would not necessarily be the best choice. The more painterly style, highlighting the materiality of paint and the random nature of dragging a loaded paintbrush across a canvas, fits the expectations of a working merchants stall. The scumbled paint and visible brushstrokes speak to the dirt on the floor and blood wiped on aprons that would normally be found in a market stall. Conspicuously, these realities of the butcher’s trade are not to be found in Butcher’s Shop, marking the piece as less of a realistic portrayal of a group of butchers and more of a statement of the notoriety and importance of the butcher’s trade. Posner states, “The power of the painting lies precisely in the freshness, the vigour, and the apparent spontaneity of its realization.”68 It is this spontaneity that infuses the work with a liveliness that is not to be found in Aertsen’s canvas. Even though the poses found in Butcher’s Shop can appear stiff and static, the way that Annibale applied paint to canvas gives the final work a sense that he could almost have painted the scene from life. Sheila McTighe argued that the common factor between the market scene works of Annibale Carracci, Campi, and Passerotti is the “juxtaposition of low-born human bodies with foodstuffs.”69 The same argument could be made for Aertsen’s Meat Stall, but how the works affect the viewer are radically different. While Aertsen commands the viewer to contemplate the foods on display, Annibale Carracci places much more importance upon the human figures. 68 Posner. Annibale Carracci, Vol. 1, 13. 69 McTighe. "Foods and the Body,” 301. 35 Annibale’s massive canvas containing near life-size figures fosters a direct, bodily connection between the viewer and the butchers. To further a sense of embodiment between viewer and viewed, he painted the butchers naturalistically, while the patrons antagonistic to the butcher trade verge on being caricatures. To return to McTighe, the correlation between the lower-class figures and food is vitally important because if as we shall see, the patrons for the work were butchers themselves, a positive, respectful representation of the butcher’s trade would be vital to their own prosperity and standing within the social hierarchy of sixteenth-century Bologna. By creating a bodily connection, and hence a possibility for a closer understanding between the viewer and the represented butchers’ lives, Annibale enabled a space where a viewer would more readily be sympathetic to the butchers’ plight. Aertsen wished viewers to contemplate the importance of earthly and spiritual foods. Annibale Carracci aimed to have viewers gain a deeper understanding of what it meant to be a butcher in Bologna, and to make them laugh at their own society. Now we shall see that some 80 years after Annibale, Rembrandt presented the viewer with a feat of incarnation: turning paint into flesh. 36 Chapter 4: Affect: Blurring the Boundaries Even though the main works with which I have already dealt engage a similar subject matter, the way in which the paint has been applied to the panel or canvas greatly determines how each is received by a viewer. Even if we were to remove one’s reactions to the displays of meat, the materiality of the paint itself still has an impact upon the viewer. By taking into account both the paint and the imagery portrayed, we are presented with a group of images that show the differing potentials for an image to produce affect and thereby provoke feelings and emotions. It is through the intense production of affect and an embodied experience within the viewer, that the boundaries of pigment, flesh, and the self become porous and intertwined. By piling up oil paint upon a panel or canvas, an artist grants a painting a physical form in the viewer’s space. The support material, be it a wooden panel or a stretched canvas already imparts to a painting a pronounced three-dimensional, physical form as opposed to other image forms such as prints.70 I would argue that this particular aspect of painting is largely missed when viewing reproductions of works. Shadows and highlights are no longer strictly painted, but also become the by-product of lighting and the movement of the viewer in relation to the canvas or panel. By producing its own shadows and highlights, the painting not only becomes a physical object in space, but it also imbues the represented subject matter with perceived physicality as well. Thus, in a work such as Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox the blobs of creamy and ruddy paint 70 André Krebber, "The Materiality of Painting and the Suffering Animal." Antennae no. 25 (2013), 37. 37 phenomenologically become touchable glistening fat and slick muscle tissue within the viewer’s mind; another form of Incarnation that produces a myriad of reactions within a viewer. Affect, feeling, and emotion are tightly intertwined with one another, but are quite distinct reactions within a person. For Eric Shouse, they occur in that order: affect, feeling, emotion.71 Affect occurs first; an intensity experienced pre-consciously by the body.72 Thus, affect is the most abstract of the three because it occurs before conscious experience. As Brian Massumi explains though, these pre-conscious experiences are not simply brought into the body, but they are infolded with contexts.73 It is the inclusion of these contexts that promote the development of feelings. According to Shouse, a particular feeling develops by comparing the present experience to past experiences that have been labeled and as such, feelings are always highly personal and ultimately truthful.74 Feelings remain truthful because they have not yet been expressed. Unlike affect, they enter the realm of consciousness, but remain internal; feelings are not outwardly expressed. When feelings become externalized, they become emotions. A key difference between feelings and emotions, other than emotions being externalized, is that emotions are not necessarily truthful and can easily be faked or performed by a person.75 Aertsen, Annibale Carracci, and Rembrandt approached similar images with very different styles of painting which have the potential to initiate the formation of very different forms of affect and feelings within a viewer. It is through Rembrandt’s sculptural application of paint to panel, that 71 Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” Media / Culture Journal. Vol. 8 (6) Dec. 2005. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php 72 Brian Massumi, "The Autonomy of Affect." Cultural Critique no. 31 (1995), 94. 73 Ibid., 90. 74 Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” 75 Ibid. 38 the Slaughtered Ox is able to prompt a strikingly visceral and embodied understanding of flesh within a viewer. One hundred years after Aertsen’s painting, Rembrandt produced a panel of a hanging, butchered ox, which one could see as referencing the ox hanging in the background of Meat Stall. Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox of 1655 (Louvre, Paris) is essentially a mirror image of Aertsen’s ox. While ostensibly a secular work, there is one notable, possible religious reference to be found in the Slaughtered Ox panel: its shape. The upper edge of the panel support is not square but rounded, much like a panel created for an altar piece.76 Like Aertsen’s work, the religious connotations are present, but the main focus of the panel is that of the flesh. Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox is smaller than both Aertsen’s and Annibale’s works at 95.5 x 68.8 cm. While not nearly as physically imposing as Meat Stall or Butcher’s Shop, I argue that Slaughtered Ox is as engaging through the very way that Rembrandt painted the panel. Unlike the riot of flesh that makes up Aertsen’s panel, or the grouping of near-life size figures of Annibale’s canvas, Rembrandt’s work is minimal in comparison. The viewer shares the dark, claustrophobic cellar with only the looming carcass of an ox and a glimpse of a maid in the background. The provenance of the painting prior to 1781 is uncertain, with several documents regarding paintings by Rembrandt concerning an ox or slaughtered ox, but these entries have not been confirmed to be the Louvre panel.77 In 1781 the painting was seen by Joshua Reynolds in 76 The rounded top was also used by Rembrandt for two paintings from 1633, The Raising of the Cross and The Descent from the Cross. Rembrandt’s works directly reference the works by Rubens: The Elevation of the Cross, 1610-1611 and The Descent from the Cross, 1612-1614, both of which were commissioned as altarpieces for the Cathedral of our Lady, Antwerp. 77 Ernst van de Wetering. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings V: The Small-Scale History Paintings. Vol. 5. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2010), 561. 39 the collection of Pieter Locquet, who subsequently sold it to Louis Viardot, who in turn sold it to the Louvre in 1857 for 5000 francs.78 The ox hangs from a cross-beam, the butchered, headless body hangs toward the floor, its rear legs splayed wide above. Turned slightly off-center from the viewer, reminiscent of a three-quarter view used for portraiture, the cavity of the empty chest is as visible to the viewer as is the outer musculature of the carcass. The carcass’ interior and exterior are shown to be of equal importance. The body is lit from above, casting a deep shadow below and behind. To accentuate the light hitting glistening tissue, Rembrandt made liberal use of bright white highlights upon the darker creams of the flesh and fat. Through a doorway in the background, we see a maid looking directly at the viewer, light from the room behind her spilling into the cellar. Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox is a painting with a limited palette consisting of browns, creams, and muted reds. Even though Rembrandt used a similar palette for many of his paintings, particularly in the later years of his career, for this work, the choice is quite apt given the subject matter. For in the seventeenth century, many artists would sketch out their compositions in grays or browns which was known as “dead coloring.”79 Although this nomination is in some ways quite ironic in that Rembrandt’s dead flesh appears so vital and very recently deceased by means of Rembrandt’s application of paint. When viewed from a distance, the carcass of the ox appears coherent in its visual presentation. Up close, the body loses all coherence, dissolving into a mass of color and texture. Through high quality reproductions, the thickness and layering of Rembrandt’s paint is still 78 Ibid. 79 Steven Goldsmith. "Almost Gone: Rembrandt and the Ends of Materialism." New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014), 416. 40 visible. The scumbled paint shows the layers below it through the breaks in the paint and the thick impasto casts shadows upon the painting’s own surface. To return to Berenson’s argument regarding the capacity for tactile imagination, by virtue of the physicality of thick paint, Rembrandt provokes the tactile imagination differently than Aertsen. Even though the scene is not nearly as mimetic as Aertsen’s, the Slaughtered Ox instills a far more visceral experience in a viewer. The paint more readily becomes flesh in the viewer’s imagination because it not only creates a two-dimensional form on the panel, but it most importantly has a physical form that extends into the viewer’s physical reality. No longer is a viewer standing in front of merely an image; they are in the presence of an object, a thing with an actual physical form, a mass of meat. Paint applied to panel does not merely create the illusion of meat, the paint transforms into the flesh and bone, physically intruding into the viewer’s space, catching light and casting shadows. Whereas Annibale Carracci presents a view onto a world through a window, Rembrandt’s application of paint breaks the glass, forcing the viewer to directly confront the dead flesh before them. Rembrandt’s Ox is not a mimetic painting. Fine details are absent, and blotches of paint must coalesce within the viewer’s mind into the carcass, maid, and darkened room. Likewise, notions of the uncanny do not apply. There is no denying that what a viewer is looking at is oil paint piled upon a panel, applied and moved around with brushes, palette knives, and fingers. Unlike the hyper-real of Aertsen’s canvas, Rembrandt presents the viewer with a decidedly unreal image. If the viewer moves closer to Meat Stall further details become visible much the same as if they were closely examining a real calf’s head. Upon closing the distance with Slaughtered Ox, the scene disintegrates into its constituent splotches of pigment. Finer details are also to be found; not of the represented objects but of the artist’s process. The ridges and valleys 41 of paint, the shadows they cast, and the highlights they catch instill a very visceral, tactile quality to the work. As the impasto’s depth becomes more apparent, so do the movements of Rembrandt’s hand in the production of the work. This gives Slaughtered Ox three levels of vitality. The work becomes a physical object protruding into the viewer’s space; not simply a flat image hanging on the wall. The physicality of the paint imparts a sense of volume and solidity to the represented flesh and its surroundings, creating a sense of tactility. Finally, the obvious inclusion of the artist’s hand and process speaks to the fact that the image was produced by a living person, but also allows the viewer to envision how their own body might need to move to produce such movement of paint. One might also add that with the inclusion of the viewer’s own Merleau-Pontian flesh, their living memory and embodiment thereof is also an integral part of viewing Slaughtered Ox. James Elkins likened paint to a cast of not only the painter’s hand, but also their body and thoughts.80 To further expand upon this notion, I will turn to the research of Frédérique de Vignemont. In her 2018 book Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness, de Vignemont examines the relationship between the mental self and the physical body. Of particular interest to this thesis is her discussion on what is known as “referred sensations in tools.”81 The example is given whereby if a blindfolded person is holding a stick in each hand, their hands uncrossed but with the sticks crossed, a vibration on the tip of a stick will prove difficult to ascertain which stick was vibrated.82 For de Vignemont, this indicates that the 80 Elkins What Painting Is, 5. 81 Frédérique de Vignemont. Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness. First ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 37. 82 de Vignemont. Mind the Body, 36. 42 sensation of the vibration is being experienced as being in the stick and not the hand holding the stick.83 If we then apply the notion of referred sensations in tools upon the artist wielding a brush, the act of painting becomes deeply embodied. Elkins’ proposal for paint being a cast works in one direction: the paint captures the artist. With the understanding of referred sensations, painting becomes a cyclical endeavour. No longer is painting merely an outpouring of an artist’s thoughts and Merleau-Pontian flesh, but through the sensations the artist receives through the brush, those thoughts and flesh are reinforced and accentuated within the artist’s mind. This applies to all painting, but with Rembrandt’s use of thick, built up layers of paint, it becomes all the more exaggerated. For an artist such as Aertsen, the referred sensation would be minimal due to the thinness of the paint. Conversely, the sensations experienced by Rembrandt as he moved mounds of oil paint on canvas would be closely analogous to the fat, blood, and flesh he was painting. I argue that this is an essential element as to why viewing Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox can be such a visceral experience. Rembrandt was not only painting what he thought, but he was simultaneously experiencing moving his hand across the butchered carcass. This intense level of embodiment on Rembrandt’s part becomes ingrained within the painting, which is then transferred to the viewer. Even though Aertsen’s finely detailed canvas presents its objects more as they might appear in reality, Rembrandt’s panel is innately more physically present; it feels as if the flesh shown was recently a living being, not just a representation of one. It is through Rembrandt’s daubing and dragging of volumes of paint that the image is infused with himself. As is typical for Rembrandt’s paintings, the artist’s hand is visible throughout, but in this particular work, the 83 Ibid. 43 brushstrokes are more pronounced in the flesh of the ox. The reproductions available make it readily apparent that the surrounding cellar and servant in the background are painted in a much smoother style. The surface of the background appears to cast no shadows whereas the ridges of paint comprising the carcass readily catches light and produces shadows. The viewer is drawn to the “realness” of the flesh as opposed to the flat, merely “imageness” of the background. The Slaughtered Ox, categorized as a genre work, moves subtly into the realm of the portrait by placing the utmost importance on the figure while the background is merely that; background and setting for the figure. I am not arguing that Slaughtered Ox is a portrait as such, but that Rembrandt has used some of the conventions of portrait painting in order to instill the animal flesh with the vitality of a living sitter to further the sense of embodiment between viewer and subject. As is to be found in many portraits, Rembrandt paints his figure within a setting that compliments and delineates the figure’s station in life. When reading this work as a portrait opposed to being a still life, the background becomes a pivotal facet in giving the figure a sense of having once been alive. For one of the main goals of a portrait is to stand in for the absent sitter.84 The objects seen in a still life tend to feel exactly that: still. The blank backgrounds typically employed remove the objects from the real world and place them in a fabricated landscape, posed and placed carefully solely for the purpose of being painted. Rembrandt’s work does not do this. The included background brings a vitality and realness to the work, creating a sense that the scene is one Rembrandt happened to find and painted it thusly. 84 Cranston, Jodi. “Touch of the Blind Man: The Phenomenology of Vividness in Italian Renaissance Art,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey, 224-242. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 227. 44 The flesh as represented in The Slaughtered Ox presents the viewer with the conundrum of what is actually being represented. For at first glance it does appear to be a type of still life. The dead animal flesh is clearly the focus of the image; its centrality and the spotlight-like lighting indicate its importance. Much like Aertsen’s inverted still-life, Rembrandt included a scene of sorts in the background; the woman peering at the viewer. Whereas Aertsen presents the viewer with a panoply of flesh, Rembrandt gives us but one carcass. Thus, the simplicity of Rembrandt’s panel slightly moves the image away from the genre of still-life from which it is clearly inspired and subtly into the realm of the portrait, but one must ask; a portrait of what? A most obvious answer would be a portrait of Christ. On its own, The Slaughtered Ox can recall the Crucifixion of Christ by virtue of the carcass being hung with its legs splayed wide. The interpretation of the Slaughtered Ox as image of the Crucifixion was argued for by Howard Davis during discussions at Columbia University in the 1970s.85 I argue that the direct visual reference to the hanging ox carcass in Aertsen’s Meat Stall which resides in the religious background of the canvas strengthens this reading. The curved top of the panel would further indicate the ties to the Crucifixion of Christ as this particular shape was regularly used for altarpiece paintings. Another possible answer is that this is simply a portrait of meat. As Rembrandt painted numerous portraits throughout his lifetime, it may be that in combination with wanting to quote previous masterwork of Aertsen, Rembrandt also chose to elevate this particular flesh to the realm of the portrait. The glistening, globular fat and flesh of the ox carcass suits Rembrandt’s painting style quite well and provides further opportunities to show 85 Kenneth Bendiner. Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present. (London: Reaktion, 2004), 226, n. 12. 45 the suitability such style beyond that of the human figure. I argue that another possibility of who The Slaughtered Ox stands in for is that of Rembrandt himself. 1649 saw the beginning of legal troubles for Rembrandt. Claims of promised marriage were made by Geertghe Dircx, the nurse who was hired to care for Rembrandt’s infant son after the death of his wife.86 Eventually a settlement was agreed upon which would see Geertghe receive 200 gilders per year from Rembrandt.87 In 1651 Geertghe Dicx was sent to a House of Correction in Gouda, but in 1655 she was due to be released and would then be able to demand the yearly payments that Rembrandt had been unable to pay up to that point.88 For, in 1653 Rembrandt was forced to officially declare insolvency.89 After the death of his wife, Rembrandt also hired the services of Hendrickje Stoffels as a servant, but she eventually became his mistress as well, becoming pregnant; giving birth to a daughter in 1654.90 Shortly before her giving birth, Hendrickje and Rembrandt were called before the Reformed Church Council to answer for charges of practicing whoredom to which Rembrandt refused to appear.91 Thus, in the very short span of five to six years preceding his painting of The Slaughtered Ox, Rembrandt saw his life enter a serious state of turmoil. Through his actions, Rembrandt’s personal, financial, and spiritual (how so?) matters all were in serious jeopardy. The image of the hanging ox carcass could easily stand-in for how Rembrandt was feeling at the time: eviscerated and hung out not only for display, but also to let the body be drained of blood. The stakes holding wide the ribs of 86 Avigdor W. G. Poséq, “A Proposal for Rembrandt's Two Versions of Slaughtered Ox.” Artibus Et Historiae 30 (60) (2009), 275. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 272. 90 Ibid., 275. 91 Ibid. 46 the ox carcass represent the judiciary splaying of his gutted financial life. All the while, in the background, a servant woman observes the freshly hung flesh. It is due to these series of events that Avigdor Posèq argues that Rembrandt “… invested the imagery with personal feelings” and Rembrandt’s worry for his own future.92 To further this particular reading, The Slaughtered Ox can be seen to reference the parable of the Prodigal Son. There is a long tradition of employing the slaughtered ox imagery to refer to the Parable of the Prodigal Son.93 The parable, found in Luke 15:11–32 tells the tale of a son, who upon wasting his family fortune, begs to become his father’s servant as punishment. The father welcomes the son back, forgiving him and to celebrate his return, calls for a feast which centers around the preparation of a “fatted calf.” As Rembrandt was in the throes of financial insolvency, it seems reasonable that such matters and the anxiety they produce would make their way into Rembrandt’s works. Given Rembrandt’s propensity for painting portraits especially at this point in his career, replacing his own image with a reference to the dispensation of forgiveness becomes highly plausible given his legal troubles at the time. Thus, by turning back to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh we see Rembrandt infusing Slaughtered Ox with his personal life, but at a level where the causal viewer may not realize it. The thickly layered paint intrudes upon the viewer’s space much like Rembrandt’s personal life directly impacted his business life. S. Brent Plate likens the yawning opening of the carcass as “… a void which was once filled with life is now the emptiness of death.”94 Given Rembrandt’s 92 Poséq, “Proposal,” 275. 93 Craig, “Rembrandt,” 235. 94 S. Brent Plate, "Seeing the Body of Death: Sacrifice and Giving in Rembrandt's "The Slaughtered Ox" Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 85, no. 3/4 (2002), 239. 47 prior notoriety, being on the verge of bankruptcy at the time of painting Slaughtered Ox must have felt like falling into a bottomless chasm. The hanging carcass could also be read as Rembrandt feeling equally skinned and trussed up after the settlement regarding Dircx. The visceral nature of Rembrandt’s painting style becomes all the more fitting in this work. For unlike the precise, calculated nature of Aertsen’s canvas which obfuscates any emotional understanding of Aertsen as an artist and person, much like the carcass depicted, Slaughtered Ox lays Rembrandt bare for the viewer. The daubs of paint built up and apparently worked quickly speak to the emotional state of the artist. A calm and collected mind is not perceived to be behind the production of this panel. There is an energy driving the manipulation of the paint used to create Slaughtered Ox. Due to the interiorized personal nature of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh, the precise reasoning for Rembrandt’s painting the panel wouldn’t be readily apparent, but the emotional charge fueling its creation possibly would be. At once seemingly simple, but simultaneously quite complex, Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox offers multiple points of affect generation. Of greatest importance is the application of the paint itself. The thickness of the paint, sometimes manipulated by Rembrandt’s fingers amplifies the haptic nature of the work. As Svetlana Alpers contends, it is through his sculptural way of painting that Rembrandt heightened a viewer’s sense of touch, suggesting that seeing is an active sense, not just a passive intaking of information.95 The active nature of viewing Rembrandt’s work is heightened and extended by virtue of his chosen color palette and the application of paint to panel. As Alpers argues, Rembrandt’s subjects tend to be found enveloped in darkness, 95 Svetlana Alpers. Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 22. 48 emerging from the shadows into the light, and thusly are difficult to fully discern immediately.96 This in turn, causes the viewer to linger on the meat, just as the figure in the background of the painting must. As the eyes and brain come to terms with what the splotches of paint are representing, the mentally projected sensation of touch begins to take over. The glistening fat and creamy flesh can almost be felt, and further, smelled by the viewer. Plate describes this blurring of the boundaries of sight as a “sacrifice that is required of the viewer.”97 This sacrifice of what one’s senses are actually intaking is a result of a layering of Merleau-Pontian flesh upon the work. For when a viewer’s vision coalesces Rembrandt’s blotches into a mass of hanging flesh, the remembrances of previous confrontations with meat will flood forth. The smells of the butcher’s stalls in the market, the feeling of handling meat while preparing a meal, even the taste of meat can all become entangled within Rembrandt’s paint. Thus, we see that even though Rembrandt directly quoted Aertsen, he took the image in a very different direction. Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox is a personal, visceral experience for painter and viewer alike. Even though Aertsen’s ox is but a small part of a much larger whole, Aertsen’s canvas had a much different goal compared to Rembrandt. Aertsen’s intentions were arguably loftier in showing the relationship between earthly pleasures and spiritual salvation, while Rembrandt’s primary goal was to provoke all manner of earthly sensory associations through the specific application of paint to panel. In conclusion, Aertsen’s focus was that of spiritual food. Through the placement of secular foods infused with religious symbology in conjunction with a religious scene he urged 96 Ibid., 14. 97 Plate, “Seeing the Body,” 244. 49 the viewer to contemplate the importance of faith for the afterlife. Annibale Carracci centered his work on the butcher’s trade and the struggles to be found within that particular profession in sixteenth-century Bologna. Rembrandt, even though he was quoting Aertsen, dispensed with the thought of spiritual food in order to focus on bodily food. His sculptural method of painting the ox carcass creates such a visceral scene it is primarily thought of as feeding the eyes, not the soul. The spiritual is taken over by the earthly and the carnal, verging on the sensual or erotic in the depiction of glistening, creamy flesh. The spiritual is not entirely absent, for the form of the ox recalls the Crucifixion of Christ, and as Kenneth Bendiner so eloquently put it, Rembrandt presents “… God as dead meat,”98 Bendiner argues that through the representation of food, images such as Slaughtered Ox speak to earthly material existence.99 I would push the reading further: that by infusing such vitality into a dead material such as oil paint Rembrandt was making a statement about the artist’s ability to perform incarnation upon the canvas or panel. 98 Kenneth Bendiner. Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present. (London: Reaktion, 2004), 43. 99 Ibid. 50 Chapter 5: Conclusion: Artist as Incarnator Flesh and its portrayal in paint has posed a significant issue for art particularly from medieval times. Whether or not the formlessness of God could be painted was followed by whether or not the earthly form of God as Jesus Christ should be painted at all. The answers to these questions provoked artists to move in a new artistic direction: the secular. Initiated by Pieter Aertsen in 1551, paintings of meat have continued to be produced to the present day. For some, these images of bloody, antiseptically clean, or even highly abstract masses of flesh are immediately repulsive simply for what they portray. The very method of their being painted can also accentuate or assuage said repulsion. The use of thick impasto denies the painter the possibility of finely detailed, mimetic work, which in turn forces a more impressionistic portrayal of a scene. Fine details are replaced by the artist’s vision and understanding of their subject matter. It is through this idea of paint as a cast of the artist’s mind that we turn to the Christological understanding of hypostasis. While any form of art can possibly be thought of as a form of hypostasis, or the formation of thought into matter, the connection to the Incarnation becomes particularly pronounced in the use impasto. For it is within the built-up layers of pigment that a truly physical manifestation of the artist’s thoughts takes form. It was also during the late quattrocento and early cinquecento that artists were known to use their own hands to blend and apply oil paints.100 Rembrandt in particular was known to use a palette knife and his fingers.101 Thus in many works, the inclusion of the artist’s hand was not just a figural expression, but also one to be taken literally. 100 Cranston, “Touch,” 233. 101 Alpers. Art of Describing, 15. 51 The goals of ancient alchemists were quite lofty indeed. The transmutation of base elements into others is still an impossible feat some centuries later. Artists have in a sense, been the only successful alchemists in history. Pieter Aertsen transformed paint into earthly foodstuffs, but through careful framing and juxtapositions, changed it yet again into spiritual food. Annibale Carracci observed the world around him, forming it anew as paint on canvas which recreated lively flesh infused with the politics of the time. Rembrandt van Rijn possibly succeeded the most thoroughly of this selection of artists, as he was able to transmute the chemicals of paint into dead flesh with such vitality that within the viewer’s mind it came alive once more. The Reformation codified the relationship between the Incarnation and the artist. It was through this permission to paint the Holy Body, that artists wrenched the power to incarnate away from God, firmly wielding the power of incarnation within their brushes, palette knives, and fingertips. 52 Figures Figure 1. Pieter Aertsen, A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms, 1551, oil on panel, 115.6 x 165 cm. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) https://library.artstor.org/asset/ARTSTOR_103_41822000681880. 53 Figure 2. Pieter Aertsen, The Fat Kitchen. An Allegory, 1565-1575, oil on panel, 111 x 213 cm. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) https://library.artstor.org/asset/AKUNSTIG_10313757056. 54 Figure 3. Pieter Aertsen, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, 1553, oil on panel, 126 x 200 cm. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) https://library-artstor-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/#/asset/ARTSTOR_103_41822000681815 55 Figure 4. Carracci, Annibale, The Butcher's Shop, 1583, oil on canvas, 185 x 266 cm. Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) https://library.artstor.org/asset/ARTSTOR_103_41822000488633. 56 Figure 5. Rembrandt van Rijn, Slaughtered Ox, 1655, oil on panel, 95.5 x 68.8 cm. Louvre, Paris. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) https://library.artstor.org/asset/LESSING_ART_10310119770. 57 Figure 6. Vincenzo Campi, Fishmongers, c. 1580, oil on canvas, 145 x 215 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. (©2000-2020 ITHAKA, by permission) https://library.artstor.org/asset/SCALA_ARCHIVES_1039614781. 58 Figure 7. Bartolomeo Passerotti, The Butcher’s Shop, c. 1580, oil on canvas, 112 x 152 cm. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. Wikimedia.org, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bartolomeo_Passerotti_-_The_Butcher%27s_Shop_-_WGA17071.jpg 59 Bibliography Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting / Leon Battista Alberti; Translated by Cecil Grayson, with an Introduction and Notes by Martin Kemp. London: Penguin, 1991. Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Alpers, Svetlana. Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Begbie, Jeremy. Beholding the Glory: Incarnation through the Arts. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000. Bendiner, Kenneth. Food in Painting: From the Renaissance to the Present. London: Reaktion, 2004. Berenson, Bernard. The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, with an Index to their Works, by Bernhard Berenson. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1896. Bruijnen, Yvette. "Fruits and Vegetables: New Information on the Workshop Practice of Pieter Aertsen." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 108, no. 3 (1994): 120-126. Craig, Kenneth M. "Pieter Aertsen and the Meat Stall." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 96, no. 1 (1982): 1-15. Craig, Kenneth M. "Rembrandt and the Slaughtered Ox." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46, (1983): 235-239. Cranston, Jodi. “Touch of the Blind Man: The Phenomenology of Vividness in Italian Renaissance Art,” in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey, 224-242. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. de Vignemont, Frédérique. Mind the Body: An Exploration of Bodily Self-Awareness. First ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Dickerson, C. D. Raw Painting: "The Butchers Shop" by Annibale Carracci. Fort Worth, TX: Yale University Press, 2010. Elkins, James. What Painting is. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2019. Elsner, Jaś. Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium. The Art Bulletin 94 no. 3 (2012): 368-94. 60 Freud, Sigmund, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb, Angela Richards, and Scientific Literature Corporation. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press, 1953: 217-256. Goldsmith, Steven. "Almost Gone: Rembrandt and the Ends of Materialism." New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014): 411-443. Goldstein, Carl, Agostino Carracci, Annibale Carracci, and Lodovico Carracci. Visual Fact Over Verbal Fiction: A Study of the Carracci and the Criticism, Theory, and Practice of Art in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. New York;Cambridge [Cambridgeshire];: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Hibbard, Howard. Bernini. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965. Houghton, Charlotte. "This was Tomorrow: Pieter Aertsen's "Meat Stall" as Contemporary Art." The Art Bulletin 86, no. 2 (2004): 277-300. Kavaler, Ethan Matt. "Pieter Aertsen's Meat Stall Divers Aspects of the Market Piece." Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art / Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 40, no. 1 (1989): 67-92. Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Krebber, André. "The Materiality of Painting and the Suffering Animal." Antennae no. 25 (06, 2013): 37-45. Luzio, Alessandro. La Galleria Dei Gonzaga: Venduta all'Inghilterra Nel 1627-28. Roma: Bardi, 1974. Martin, John Rupert. "The Butcher's Shop of the Carracci." The Art Bulletin 45, no. 3 (1963): 263-266. Massumi, Brian. "The Autonomy of Affect." Cultural Critique no. 31 (1995): 83-109. McTighe, Sheila. "Foods and the Body in Italian Genre Paintings, about 1580: Campi, Passarotti, Carracci." The Art Bulletin 86, no. 2 (2004): 301-323. Michalski, Sergiusz. The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe. 1st English ed. London;New York;: Routledge, 1993. 61 Mori, Masahiro, Karl MacDorman, and Norri Kageki. "The Uncanny Valley [from the Field]." IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19, no. 2 (2012): 98-100. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice and Claude Lefort. The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes. Evanston [Ill.]: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Mitchell, Margaret M., and Frances M. Young, eds. The Cambridge History of Christianity: Origins to Constantine. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Morgan, David. The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Plate, S. Brent. "Seeing the Body of Death: Sacrifice and Giving in Rembrandt's "The Slaughtered Ox"." Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 85, no. 3/4 (2002): 235-259. Poséq, Avigdor W. G. “A Proposal for Rembrandt's Two Versions of Slaughtered Ox.” Artibus Et Historiae 30 (60) (2009): 271-6. Posner, Donald. Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting Around 1590. Vol. 1. London: Phaidon, 1971. Posner, Donald. Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting Around 1590. Vol. 2. London: Phaidon, 1971. Raw, Barbara Catherine. Trinity and Incarnation in Anglo-Saxon Art and Thought. Vol. 21;21.;. New York, NY, USA;Cambridge [England];: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Robertson, Clare. The Invention of Annibale Carracci. Vol. 4;4.;. Cinisello Balsamo, Milano: Silvana, 2008. Shouse, Eric. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” Media / Culture Journal. Vol. 8 (6) Dec. 2005. http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php Stoichiță, Victor Ieronim. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting. Cambridge;New York, NY, USA;: Cambridge University Press, 1997. van de Wetering, Ernst. A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings V: The Small-Scale History Paintings. Vol. 5. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2010. Walker, Siv Tove Kulbrandstad. “Appetites: Food, Eating and the Senses in Sixteenth-Century Italian Art.” In Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice, edited by Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandstad Walker, 109-128. Farnham, Surrey, England;Burlington, VT;: Ashgate, 2012.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Art History
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Of flesh and pigment : early modern painting and representations of meat
Text