Market Scene

The Painting has no religious undertones, as many of Aertsen´s work had, but divulges a highly erotic subject where the saucy looking woman holding a cabbage head – a symbol of female sexuality – bending forward in order do display her breasts to the viewer. The man holdning a carrot, and thus hinting rather unsubtly at his sexual capacity, also points towards the group of vegetables directly opposite the cabbage head: two spherical tomatoes and a veined, upright cucumber.