Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary

In the kitchen of a great house two women prepare a feast, and the whole foreground is given over to a sumptuous still life of plucked poultry, game and joints of lamb, rendered with a realism that turns the larder into a display of prosperity. Behind them, almost lost in the depth of the room, Christ sits with Martha and Mary — the Gospel episode that gives the picture its title and its moral, a warning against letting the abundance of the world crowd out the things of the spirit. Joachim Beuckelaer, the leading painter of Antwerp kitchen and market scenes in the generation after Pieter Aertsen, made this large panel in 1565, loading it with the erotic and comic allusions the genre was expected to carry, so that the picture works at once as pantry, sermon and social satire. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.