Market Woman with Vegetable Stall

This late work by the Dutch painter Pieter Aertsen (c.1509–1575) is dominated by an amazing still life of the fruits and vegetables spread out over the market stand.

The simply overwhelming bounty of the harvest yield and the various products for kitchen and table are displayed as if tilted forward toward the viewer.

Amid the offerings, which engage all of the viewer’s senses, sits a young peasant woman.

Her outstretched arms invite viewers and passers-by alike to enjoy her wares.

The embracing couple in the background offer a counterpoint. They represent the excessive devotion to the senses, voluptas carnis, which threatens the health of the soul.

The empty carts and the unharnessed horse emphasize the lovers’ passion and abandon.

In contrast to the sensual lovers, the vegetable-seller and the farmer driving the oxen to the market, on the left, are shown to be sitting, both literally and metaphorically, amid the fruits of their hard labour.

Yet even hard labour is not the measure of all things. The lemons poised between the two figures, a symbol of external beauty, have sour flesh. They symbolise the dubious nature of pleasure.

Herring is a typical food for periods of fasting. Fasting was thought to strengthen people’s resistance to temptation and put them on the path to salvation.

The picture shows the dualism of human life in body and soul, and reminds viewers to use their earthly possessions wisely.

Pieter Aertsen was highly admired by his contemporaries for his still lifes.

Along with his nephew, Joachim Beuckelaer, Aertsen laid the groundwork for the development of still life as an independent genre.