Christ and the Adulteress by Pieter Aertsen

The market scene is an important stage in the development of Dutch still-life and genre painting. The ‘Christ and the Adulteress’ group in the middle ground is easy to overlook. Yet it provides the key to the painting’s purport – a caution against the world’s sensual dangers. Since the Dutch and German verb ‘vögeln’ (literally ‘to bird’ – the term was originally used to describe a rooster mating with a hen) alluded as much to the sex act then as it does now, the same is implied by the various birds among the wares. The market women gaze boldly out at the viewer in what contemporaries would have understood as a further allusion to shamelessness and erotic desire. The fruit and vegetables presented in Aertsen's paintings are peasant foods, but they are a feast for the eyes. His market scenes are not slices of everyday life, but plausible inventions. Many of the fruit and vegetables depicted in his work have sexual connotations and some of them were eaten as aphrodisiacs. In the present painting, the artist juxtaposes the biblical narrative with a market scene, encouraging beholders to ponder the relationship between love and lust, between sexual attraction and visual seduction. The foreground of the painting is filled with sexual innuendoes. On the left side, a man shows a woman his strings of onions. Although this may look innocent and mundane, onions were commonly used as aphrodisiacs. Furthermore, according to proverbial folklore, peeling an onion was like peeling off clothes, for it could easily result in tears. On the right, a man grasps a black rooster, a phallic allusion, in one hand, and an egg basket, a vaginal allusion, in the other.