Pieter Aertsen’s Seven Works of Mercy: Charity and Salvation in the Age of Reform

Abstract

The author analyses the last painting by Pieter Aertsen (1508–75) and proposes that it was commissioned by the Amsterdam Masters of the Resident Poor, a charity organization which supported local impoverished citizens. She investigates three themes central to the painting’s iconography and functions. First, she analyses Aertsen’s Seven Works of Mercy in the context of 16th-century discourses of charity and attempts at reforming poor relief in the Low Countries. Second, she examines the panel as a response to the Reformation image debate and the 1566 Iconoclastic Fury, as well as the changing attitude towards meritorious almsgiving among the Protestants. And third, she interprets the Seven Works of Mercy as a site of architectural innovation. By relating the composition to Early Modern architectural treatises, she shows that Aertsen skilfully used Serlian designs to delineate a path to salvation marked by the acts of mercy. At the same time, his sophisticated allusions to symbolic meanings of architectural orders would have made his painting particularly appealing to the growing number of Dutch enthusiasts of architecture. Ultimately, the author presents the Seven Works of Mercy in the NMW as a complex argument on the religious and social importance of charity, and as an artistically innovative depiction of a traditional Catholic theme.