Is it a butcher’s shop? Is it a kitchen? In this detailed view—likely Teniers’s earliest of slaughtered animals—the artist carefully rendered each component of the slaughtered ox: its head and hide in the lower left corner, the thickly painted flayed body front and center, and its lungs and liver on the chopping block. Since the early Middle Ages, slaughtering cattle and the use of the entire carcass had been regarded as a prudent provision for winter. The sieve hanging on the wall at left was a traditional attribute of the allegorical figure, Sapientia (Wisdom)—a possible nod of approval to the woman’s work.

---