Kitchen Interior and the Way to Emmaus

Behind a laid table, against the backdrop of an architectural frame, the figures of Christ and the pilgrims in Emmaus appear, as we can also read in the Gospel passage written in old Dutch at the top near the jug: «Stay with us, O Lord, as it is evening and the day is about to end» (Luke 24, 29). According to the iconographic scheme used in the composition, the first plane is entirely occupied by an arrangement of food and crockery while the sacred subject, which is an episode from the New Testament, appears in the background. Faced with this revolutionary affirmation of the food subject as a prominent theme – which took place abruptly in the mid-16th century – the criticism, in addition to recognizing the preliminary stages of the still life of food, essentially moves around two lines of interpretation. According to the first, this painting would have a didactic moral function which is expressed in the contrast between worldly life, food, and spiritual life, the example of Christ; for the second, these compositions would be economic metaphors of the prosperity of a pre-capitalist society on the rise, in which goods acquire the charm of an object with magical power around which social exchanges gravitate.