There is a sequence, in Robert Altman’s “The Player”, where major stars have been employed as extras in the background of a Hollywood’s power eatery while less known actors perform in the foreground. Likewise, in Pieter Aartsen’s “Butcher Stall”, the seemingly paramount display of foodstuff is actually not the focus of this painting.

If you are not a vegetarian and brave enough to look beyond the sausages, and the arrangement of pig’s feet, meat pies and hog’s heads, you’ll probably notice some activity in the distance. Look well. You may not see it, but there is in fact a family: a woman seated on a donkey, carrying a child, led by an older man. However, this is not the butcher’s family but nothing other than the Holy Family depicted in the characteristic “Flight into Egypt” theme, although hardly visible through the salami and cured hams! This very cinematic technique often goes under the name of “Mannerist Inversion”.

The term `Mannerism' is one of the most problematic in art history. Frequently used disparagingly to suggest affectation, often from an opposing `classical' point of view, it reflects a style in art and architecture (c.1520-1600) that originated in Italy as a reaction against the equilibrium of form and proportions characteristic of the High Renaissance.

Pieter Aartsen’s painting probably offers the best example of Mannerist Inversion of still life in Northern painting. Van Mander in his long article describes his realistic meat stall 'with the flayed head of an ox, just as seen on the slab of a butcher'. The oxhead theme, which is itself a religious symbol from antiquity, recurs many times in his work. He used and repeated certain images throughout his life in different paintings at widely different times.

So next time you make your purchase at your local butcher’s shop, or deli, look carefully behind the counter.

You’ll never know…

PIETER AARTSEN (1508-1575)

Netherlandish painter, active in his native Amsterdam and in Antwerp. A pioneer of still life and genre painting, he is best known for scenes that at first glance look like pure examples of these types, but which in fact have a religious scene incorporated in them. The work of Aertsen has occasionally been directly compared and indeed contrasted to that of Pieter Breughel the Elder, and his occasional inversion of still life elements with the religious narrative have even been described as "Mannerist" in its own way. But in fact his painting technique is formally closer to the gothicism of Bosch (probably via Mandyn) than to Breughel, while his brush work and colours are bolder and more 'realistic'.

Butcher's Stall, 1551; University Art Collection, Uppsala.