Abstract
The kitchen and market scenes of Peter Aertsen constitute one of the most remarkable innovations in northern art of the sixteenth century. In this study it is suggested that while the paintings are carriers of Christian meaning, they owe their genesis to the literature of the ancient world and its popularity in the Low Countries. Pliny's Natural History, Martial's xenia, and the ancient genre of satire—championed, for example, in Erasmus's adage “to make a show of kitchen pots”—account for Aertsen's novel subjects and provide the conceptual framework that made these unprecedented paintings comprehensible to the original viewers.
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