Robert Baldwin, Thoughts on the Slaughtered Pig in Renaissance and Baroque Art: From Courtly Cosmos to Burgher Prosperity (March 29, 2009)
I dedicate this essay to Barry Bauman, friend, painting conservator, and mentor at the Conservation Department of the Art Institute of Chicago where I spent two happy summers. Barry’s recent on-line study of van der Poel’s Interior with a Butchered Pig(1640s) led me to rethink the slaughtered pig/ox as a subject in Northern art and to conclusions which complement those found in his essay. [1] Note: Most of the images mentioned here can be found on line.
Introduction
The slaughtered pig, cow, or ox appeared as an artistic motif, and at times, an autonomous subject, in a variety of contexts from the 15th to the 17th century. A chronological and social analysis suggests three distinct strands and leads me to a more secular interpretation that that usually found in the scholarly literature.
The Medieval Christian Tradition
Medieval Christian tradition sometimes interpretedslaughtered animals other than lambs as images of the Crucifixion. This was especially true for the “fatted calf” consumed at the feast welcomingthe prodigal son. If that parable was universally understood as an allegory of the Fall and Salvation, the fatted calf was frequently compared to the crucified Christ in commentaries through the seventeenth century. Although visible in the typological imagery of thirteenth-century illuminated bibles, the slaughtering of the fatted calf rarely took on Christological meaning in sixteenth and seventeenth-century depictions of the prodigal son. The only clear-cut case known to me is Cornelis Anthonisz’s heavily allegorized woodcut of the 1540s where the slaughtered calf and the Crucifixion appear as small motifs in the distant background. In most scenes of the returning prodigal, the slaughtering of the fatted calf (or, rather, a fully-grown cow as most artists chose to depict), takes place as a small motif in the background with no special visual or allegorical significance. Even in Marten van Heemskerck’s 1562 composition engraved by Philip Galle where the slaughtered cow assumed a monumental compositional importance in the foreground, the artist avoided overt references to the Passion. Perhaps he didn’t need to underscore what was already familiar to Christian viewers. Or perhaps Heemskerck’s slaughtered cow worked more on a simpler narrative level to amplify the full reconciliation between estranged father and son. In any case, later artists did not follow Heemkerck’s lead. In almost every seventeenth-century image of the prodigal’s return, the slaughtered cow was reduced to a minor but important narrative detail glimpsed in the distance.
In my view, the rise of the slaughtered pig, ox, or cow as a motif and, occasionally, a separate subject in later sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish art, did not draw on Christian imagery or the story of the prodigal son. With the possible exception of Rembrandt’s oddly tragic and meditative painting in the Louvre, Passion references seem out of place in this prosaic images of every life. Indeed, they are highly unlikely in images of the slaughtered pig, an unclean animal never compared to the crucified Christ but frequently used in anti-Semitic imagery, satires of peasants, and allegories of gluttony. Since half of the Dutch and Flemish images at stake in this discussion depict slaughtered pigs, we should look for alternative cultural traditions to explain the new imagery of butchered meat. In my view, these paintings make more sense within the secular courtly and burgher traditions outlined below.
The Courtly Calendar Tradition and the Slaughtered Pig as Nature’s Wealth
The first images to make the slaughtering of pigs into a prominent motif were courtly calendar illuminations depicting November and December. Here the slaughtered pig appeared alongside hunting in the same months and culminated in the traditional feasting depicted in January. By 1515, the slaughtering of pigs could sum up the activities of December in Simon Bening illumination in the Da Costa Hours (c. 1515).
Simon Bening, December, c. 1515, Da Costa Hours
The slaughtered pig also appeared in a third subject tied to cosmic imagery in depictions of the activities of Saturn in planetary cycles. Examples include prints by Maso Finiguerra (1470-90), the Housebook Master (1480s), Pencz (1530-50) and Solis (1530-60). As indicated by the inscription attached to the Housebook Master’s print, the slaughtering of pigs, along with plowing, exemplified the menial physical labor governed by this malign planet.
“My children are vicious, dry and old, envious, weary, wretched, cold. They grub the dirt, dig graves, plow land, in foul and stinking clothes they stand, always needy, never free."[2]
In part, the slaughtered pig of Saturnine allegory plays on a long tradition of anti-peasant satire seen in sixteenth-century Flemish representation such as Bruegel’s painting depicting peasants shoved into a pig sty for their meal. Yet framed by the larger cosmic theme of Saturn, the slaughtering of pigs assumes a nobler significance within the larger theme of celestial order and divine reason. Even the meanest levels of existence in the cosmic hierarchy reflect a higher purpose and government.
We might sum up the slaughtered pig as an important motif in courtly cosmic imagery, especially Labors of the Months, cycles of the Four Seasons, and images of the Planets. To recognize the nobler significance of this motif, we need to step back for a moment and consider court culture in general and court landscape in particular.
In general, the aristocracy patronized a culture elaborating hierarchical social, political, and economic values. And as a land-owning class, they heavily invested in literary and artistic representations stressing nature’s cosmic hierarchy, unchanging order, rule, peace, and prosperity (including sexual fertility). Equally important was the courtly ideal of nature as a pastoral pleasure park devoted to refined leisure, privacy, dalliance, courtly love, music, poetry, dance, and feasting. Here even wild forests were transformed into unembarrassed gardens of earthly delights.
With the comprehensive humanist revival of classical values, Renaissance and Baroque court culture reinterpreted nature’s mutability from medieval monastic vanitas, penitential piety, and triumph of death to new courtly humanist ideas of change as cosmic rotation, as a reassuring stasis within a larger order. Imbedded in cosmic cycles and circular orders, mutability and death now revolved back into life just as old empires, kingdoms, and golden ages gave way to new ones following the eternal cycles of courtly world history.
To be sure, medieval vanitas never disappear entirely in Renaissance and Baroque court culture, especially in Christian subjects. It was carefully preserved in courtly and especially in burgher spirituality right through the seventeenth century. But it was largely replaced in the new courtly landscape imagery of Renaissance and Baroque art with classical and renaissance humanist ideas of continuity, renewal, rebirth (renaissance), metamorphosis (a newly popular classical subject), and peaceful, reassuring change as a larger stasis under an all-embracingcosmic reason.
Within the cosmic cycles of the Months or Seasons, the slaughtering of pigs took their place alongside hunting scenes in November and December and feasting scenes in January as courtly images of nature’s cornucopian abundance even amidst winter dearth and hardship. And even in the lowly, earthly nature elaborated in allegories of Saturn, we still see the courtly theme of nature’s productive labor and abundance in plowing and animal husbandry.
Cosmic Imagery and Slaughtered Pigs in Sixteenth-Century Burgher Culture
Although initially seen in courtly art forms such as illuminated manuscripts and frescos depicting the Months and Seasons, courtly calendar imagery migrated quickly to the less expensive cultural medium of burgher prints after 1475. Here it was just one of many courtly subjects eagerly taken up by a social-climbing middle class. Following the fifteenth-century tradition of courtly manuscripts, sixteenth and early seventeenth-century engravings of November, December, and Autumn, along with images of Saturn,continued to single out the slaughtered pig as a prominent visual motif. Scenes of November or December include works by Sebald Beham, Zephelius, Amman, Collaert (after Bol), Callot (after De Momper), De Bruyn (after Marten de Vos), and de Passe (after de Vos). The last two engravings are particularly important because they include not just the bleeding of the horizontal pig’s throat and collecting of the blood for blood pudding but a separate scene where with the fully butchered pig strapped vertically and upside down to a wooden frame. Dating to the early seventeenth century, these two engravings laid out the basic imagery of later Dutch and Flemish genre painting which abandoned the cosmic allegory of earlier seasonal imagery.
De Passe, After Marten de Vos, November, 1600-1625
The slaughtered pig also appeared in sixteenth-century engravings of Autumn by Heemskerck (1563)and de Bruyn (after Marten de Vos) and in a painted Flemish table clock from mid-century now in the KunsthistorischesMuseum in Vienna.
To be sure, burgher culture inscribed its own values when taking up the cosmic imagery of court landscape culture. Instead of social hierarchy, cornucopian wealth, refined leisure, privacy, and liberated sexuality, burgher cosmic landscape focused on more Stoic, sober ideas of cosmic order, communal harmony, modest, shared prosperity, diligent labor, and a sexual fertility bounded by marriage and family. No artist developed this burgher nature more richly than Pieter Bruegel as seen in his Labors of the Months(1565) and in his unfinished cycle of engravings on the Four Seasons (1568-9). Bruegel used grand worldscape compositions to continue the courtly theme of a larger, cosmic order even as he stripped out all of the dominating castles and proudly equestrian nobles featured in traditional calendar landscapes such as the Limbourg Brothers. The result was a burgher cosmos with a burgher view from above, tied not to courtly land ownership, wealth, and political power, but rather to an inner, burgher “power” of cosmopolitan humanist mind wisely contemplating the universe in line with the Stoic inscriptions on contemporary Dutch world maps (Ortelius). In this way, burgher culture fashioned an inner, microcosmic reason, morality, and virtue – what Northern humanists like Erasmus called a “natural nobility” or “inner nobility”- to challenge traditional courtly ideas of nobility as blue blood and natural law.
After 1600, we can see this Bruegelian burgher universe compressed into a much simpler terms, without the grand compositional formula, in works such as Marten de Vos’s November, engraved around 1600-1625 by de Passe. As in later Dutch genre paintings and prints, pig-slaughtering is imbedded into the communal life of the village. And by giving the work of butchering over to two young married couples, de Vos quietly elaborated nature’s cosmic abundance and fecundity in the human terms preferred by burgher culture. Here cosmic imagery continued only in the larger calendar theme, in the presence of twelve engravings, and in their circular format and Latin inscriptions. If we remove these, we have the essential imagery – largely secular - of the Dutch and Flemish genre paintings of slaughtered pigs and oxen which emerged between 1640 and 1670.
The most unusual sixteenth-century burgher representations of the slaughtered pig are the two paintings by Beuckelaer and Martin van Cleve which took up the alternate moment of the pig strapped to a vertical frame. This important change in the imagery of the slaughtered pig, repeated in later seventeenth-century genre painting, allows burgher representation to exploit the monumental compositional possibilities unavailable in traditional depiction where the slaughtered pig was placed horizontally on the ground or on a table (as in Bening’s miniature reproduced above). Stretched out vertically on a rectangular frame paralleling the picture plane,the butchered pig took on a new grandeur, aesthetic dignity, and “inner nobility” seen in the peasant paintings of Bruegel, Beuckelaer, and Aertsen, among others, which soon gave birth to an ocean of genre painting in the seventeenth century.
One of the hardest things for modern, middle class art lovers to comprehend is the unvarnished depiction of butchery which most of us find unattractive if not downright ugly and therefore incompatible with art. In at least one case, van der Poel’s Interior with Slaughtered Pig (CalvinCollege) was later repainted to remove the problematic carcass and transform the Dutch rustic interior into a more attractive setting compatible with tastefully decorated eighteenth and nineteenth century homes. [3]
Lowly, rustic themes like the slaughtered pig appealed to burgher sensibilities within a larger burgher landscape of simple, down to earth, hard-working native peasants, recognizably Flemish in their buildings and attire, as seen above all in the work of Bruegel, Aertsen, Beuckelaer, Martin van Cleve and the other early peasant and genre paintings of the 1560s and 1570s. Instead of courtly landscapes dominated by castles and noble riders – as seen in the Limbourg Brothers’ famous calendar cycle for Duke of Berry, Bruegel’s landscapes hung in the homes of merchants, bankers, and tax collectors. Here nature’s abundance was toned down with Erasmian moderation, infused with a strong work ethic and communal sharing, and offset by genuine hardship glimpsed in Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow and Dark Day. In the case of Aertsen and Beuckelaer, nature’s abundance was also heavily allegorized with burgher values of moderation and sobriety appearing in the reverse world of peasant excess and unbridled appetite.
Although Beuckelaer’s Slaughtered Pig of 1563 (Cologne) is somewhat enigmatic in its minimal setting, Marten van Cleve’s Slaughtered Ox of 1566 (Vienna) develops a cozy and reassuring domestic interior with a robust peasant family. With his butchering complete, the father rests at left by drinking from a large jug while his wife finishes up storing animal parts in a basket. Their children play with an inflated bladder at right which does not, to my mind, suggestvanitas through the emblematic theme of Homo Bulla. Here it also helps to distinguish the between fragile, evanescent soap bubbles used to allegorize Homo Bulla, and the sturdy pig bladders taken from slaughtered pigs as children’s toys. In one case we have explicit vanitas imagery. In the other, we have yet another example of burgher practicality and frugality, converting dead farm animals into a variety of useful products. Even if the pig bladder blown up by children allows intimations of mortality and vanitas to circulate, the painting seems to place its emphasis squarely on the continuation of life with its vibrant family scene and its slaughtered ox testifying to prosperity and hard work (no less than the animal and especially cattle landscapes favored by Dutch landscape artists such a Potter, Berchem, and Cuyp). In Marten van Cleve’s painting, the father and mother are young and fertile, as evidenced by their young children and by the phallic placement of the father’s butcher’s knifes.
In my mind, a similar concern with family fertility and regeneration informs Fabritius Slaughtered Pig (1656) and Ostade’s engraving, Peasant’s Slaughtering a Pig. In both scenes, adults work diligently to prepare food while smiling children look on, learning the proper adult roles and responsibilities they will someday take up. Children are present not as vanitas emblems on the fragility and shortness of life but as living proof of a larger theme of human fertility, prosperity, and continuity. They exist in a larger village continuum where death is constantly recycled into new life. Their smiling faces alone displace darker notions of death and vanitas.
This doesn’t mean that paintings of slaughtered oxen and pigs, especially those with children and pig bladders didn’t occasionally invoke moralizing reminders of life’s brevity. Burgher culture routinely combined optimistic and pessimistic views of life and death in single texts, sermons, emblems, and paintings. With allowance for the coexistence of a contrary vanitas tradition, I believe I believe most Dutch and Flemish genre scenes with slaughtered pigs and oxen either minimized the Christian theme of vanitas (whether Calvinist or Catholic) or looked beyond it altogether.
Teniers’ House with Slaughtered Ox (1642, Boston) is a case in point. Here an industrious farm woman works at right, preparing cuts of meat which are cooked by two peasants in the background over a roaring fire. Sometimes misidentified as a butcher’s shop, this painting depicts a farmhouse where a family has just butchered an ox and is busy preparing and cooking the meat. As in the other paintings cited above, the slaughtered pig shows the simple and modest prosperity and diligence of peasant life, on the one hand, and the simple lesson of how animal death nourishes continuing human life. Instead of vanitas, these works affirm a burgher humanist sense of work, continuity and larger cycles ultimately derived from the slaughtering and feasting imagery in courtly (and later, burgher) calendar cycles.