Image source: wikiart.org
Introduction
“Taste” (1618) stages an opulent allegory where appetite becomes a theater of culture. A long table glows with silver, crystal, oysters, lobsters, pies, gilded vessels, and sugared fruits. A young woman raises a tall cup while, across from her, a satyr—creature of appetite and misrule—leans forward with a brimming ewer. Behind them, the room opens through a colonnade onto a deer-park and a lakeside château, while the foreground swells with game, fish, and produce ready for the kitchen. Paintings within the painting, tapestries, and vessels of precious metal proclaim a household fluent in both luxury and learning. In this collaboration, Peter Paul Rubens supplies the warm, persuasive figure style, while the surrounding still life and landscape unfold with encyclopedic detail. The result is a panoramic meditation on pleasure, hospitality, and the civilizing—or destabilizing—force of taste.
Historical Context
The early seventeenth century in Antwerp was a golden age of allegory and collaboration. Collectors desired images that displayed abundance and wit, and workshops paired masters of figure painting with specialists in landscape and still life. The Five Senses provided an ideal framework: each sense could be personified by Venus and attended by emblematic objects. “Taste” belongs to this cycle, created at the moment when Rubens’s studio was humming with large commissions and when the city’s mercantile elites saw their ideals—worldliness, piety, conviviality—mirrored in art. The painting functions as both moral theater and showcase inventory, a visual banquet that flatters viewers who can decode its layers while indulging the eye in textures of every kind.
Allegory and Program
Taste, unlike sight or hearing, requires incorporation; it brings the world into the body. The composition dramatizes that intimacy by putting mouths, vessels, and edible surfaces at the center. The woman, interpreted as Venus, lifts an elaborate cup that catches light along its rim. The satyr, emblem of unrestrained appetite, grins as he pours, collapsing boundaries between civility and abandon. Around them, delicacies proclaim mastery over nature—oysters from the sea, game from the hunt, fruit from the orchard, birds from marsh and forest. The paintings on the walls extend the allegory: feasting scenes, mythic assemblies, and courtly banquets echo the theme that communities define themselves at table. The open landscape beyond offers the source of abundance and the leisure that allows refined tasting rather than crude hunger.
Composition and Spatial Choreography
The scene divides into three interlocking stages. On the left, a dark, luxurious interior stacked with pictures, silver, porcelain, and glass anchors the painting in cultivated possession. At center, the white-clothed table acts as a luminous island where figure and food meet; the warm carpet beneath it binds domestic ritual to material splendor. On the right, the arcade opens into air, a green world of deer, swans, and distant architecture. A cascade of game and fish spills diagonally across the foreground, linking kitchen supply to ceremonious consumption. The eye follows a spiral: foreground bounty up to the edge of the table; across the figures to the stone columns; through the ivy to the château and sky; and back by way of hanging game and peacock tails to the dishes again. The viewer’s gaze thus mirrors a taster’s path—sampling, comparing, returning.
Light, Color, and the Climate of Appetite
Light pools like clarified butter across the white cloth, leaps along rims of silver, and blooms warmly on fruit skins and pastry crusts. Cool northern daylight enters from the right, while a softer interior glow warms the left wall. Rubens’s flesh tones—peach and rose with amber half-tones—set a human temperature against the porcelain gleam of oysters and the lacquer of vessels. Color operates symbolically: reds of lobster and wine signal heat and celebration; greens of ivy and leaves temper the feast with freshness; blues of porcelain and distant water provide relief for the eye. The total effect is climatological: a weather of warmth and clarity that makes tasting feel like participation in a season.
The Woman and the Satyr
Rubens’s figures supply the heartbeat. The woman’s posture is poised but not aloof, her gaze focused on the cup as if weighing pleasure against propriety. The satyr’s body leans into the scene, his goatish ear and roughened skin contrasting the smooth shoulder across from him. Together they stage a contest central to Baroque allegory: is taste ruled by civility or by appetite? The woman’s hand steadies the cup; the satyr’s pours a little too eagerly; the gold of the ewer answers the gold of her goblet, suggesting that desire and refinement share a common metal. The tension remains playful, not punitive, allowing viewers to savor the possibility that good taste is pleasure domesticated rather than pleasure denied.
Still Life as Argument
The table forms a catalog of textures that argue, bite by bite, for human ingenuity. Oysters glisten with brine; lemon wedges flash wet light; a sugar-encrusted confection arches like architecture; pies promise hidden sauces; delicate glasses register the soft distortion of light through wine. Peacock, swan, and pheasant display not only culinary ambition but theatrical spectacle—plumage reassembled for the table as edible pageant. These arrangements are not merely trophies; they are essays in transformation: sea and field revised by kitchen art, raw vitality re-composed as cuisine. The painting insists that taste is a cultural power capable of converting nature into ritual.
The Foreground Bounty
At the very edge, game, poultry, and fish lie in organized profusion—rabbits, partridges, woodcocks, carp, pike, and eel. The sheen on fish scales differs from the matte nap of feathers; the slack weight of a hare contrasts with the rigid beak of a swan. This spillover signals the threshold between labor and display, where kitchen and larder spill into the ceremonial chamber for the sake of the allegory. The abundance approaches excess, prompting the moral counterpoint that always shadows Baroque feasts: appetite can turn glut. Yet the painter arrests the slide with order—bundles tied, species grouped, knives sheathed—suggesting that measure can govern plenty.
Paintings Within the Painting
Two large framed canvases hang above the table, while others cluster to the left. They show banquets, revels, and episodes where tasting is communal rather than solitary. These inset narratives elevate appetite into social virtue: feasting binds friends, settles alliances, and marks sacred festivals. The multiplicity of images also reflects on art itself as a form of taste. To curate paintings is to possess discriminating judgment; to enjoy them is to “taste” with the eye. The wall becomes a gallery where aesthetic and culinary pleasures converse.
Landscape, Park, and Country House
Beyond the colonnade, the painting breathes. A deer-park grazes below a pale sky; swans move on water; a château rises with turrets and gables. This vista grounds the feast ethically and economically. It shows the estate that sustains table and collection, a domain where hunting supplies meat, ponds yield fish, and orchards promise fruit. The open air relieves the density of the interior and justifies the plenty at hand: this is not stolen wealth but managed nature. The invitation to stroll—through trees, past grazing deer—extends taste into the realm of fresh air and exercise, tying health to pleasure.
Symbolic Flora and Fauna
Peacocks and swans are not only edible ornaments; they are emblems. The peacock’s iridescence, associated with pride and immortality, becomes a caution about vanity even as its plumage dazzles. The swan—purity and music—sits near sweetmeats, a reminder that pleasure can be graceful. Grapes gathered in the foreground nod to Dionysian tradition; ivy twining the arcade binds the feast to the god of wine. Citrus on the platters recalls global trade, the reach of Antwerp’s merchants, and the role of taste as a marker of cosmopolitan life. Every species adds a word to the painting’s language of appetite.
Texture, Touch, and the Conversion of Sight
The sense of taste rarely travels alone; it calls for touch and smell. The painting answers by rendering surfaces that the eye almost feels. Velvet curtains absorb light; tapestries press shallow patterns against the wall; metal vessels carry the chill of their polish; cut fruit suggests a vapor of scent. Rubens’s flesh retains a slight humidity that keeps the scene sensate rather than merely visual. This synesthetic orchestration turns seeing into a tasting rehearsal—preparing the mind to imagine tartness, sweetness, salt, and fat.
Collaboration and the Harmony of Skills
The canvas is a triumph of coordinated talents. Rubens’s contribution appears in the lively, persuasive bodies—soft shoulders, animated gestures, faces that breathe. The encyclopedic still life, minute floral borders, gleaming silver, and cool architectural spaces speak to the hand of a specialist in objects and setting. Rather than dividing the picture, the duet unifies it by letting each sense of touch be painted by the artist best suited to its texture. The viewer experiences one pleasure as two arts harmonize.
Moral Balance and Human Measure
Baroque allegory delights in both enjoyment and restraint. “Taste” makes room for a gentle admonition without dulling the feast. The satyr’s presence warns against surrender to appetite, while the decorum of the woman and the orderliness of the table propose a rule: pleasure is most pleasurable when governed. The adjacent room at left, with its visible servants and kitchen bustle, reminds us that such tables depend on labor. The painting does not scold; it educates, suggesting that good taste includes gratitude and proportion.
Time, Season, and the Rhythm of Plenty
The image gathers foods from multiple seasons—game of autumn, fruit of late summer, shellfish of tide and market—compressing time into the emblematic present of a perfect meal. The park beyond shows antlered deer and leafy canopies that place the mood between high summer and early fall. The hour is late afternoon, when light warms but shadows lengthen, ideal for a prolonged dinner moving from savory to sweet. By composing a timeless season, the painting argues that taste is a renewable ritual: each year—and each day—can be shaped by thoughtful cycles of work, harvest, and hospitality.
How to Look
Begin at the carpeted island of the table: follow the lemons’ wet edges, then the scalloped lips of oyster shells, then the vermilion curve of lobster claws. Let the satyr’s copper ewer pull your gaze across to the woman’s raised cup and up into the framed banquet scenes overhead. Drop to the fore-table with its peacock and swan; step through the columns into the hazy blue of water and château; return along the hanging game and piled birds to the glare on a silver plate. Each circuit tastes a different register—salt, sweet, fat, tart—translated into shape and light.
Legacy and Resonance
“Taste” helped shape a Northern tradition in which still life became a moral and sensuous genre. Later painters would pare the scene down to a single laden table or a solitary dessert, but the principle remains: food is culture, and culture is a choreography of the senses under reason’s guidance. For contemporary viewers, the painting resonates as a defense of hospitality in an anxious world. It suggests that sharing a table—where art and nature, labor and leisure, restraint and pleasure meet—can still be a measure of the good life.
Conclusion
The painting is a banquet of meanings. It celebrates culinary art without apology, sets appetite beside civility, and gathers the globe’s goods into an ordered display that flatters eye and mind. Rubens’s figures give warmth and narrative tension; the still-life virtuosity supplies savor and range; the landscape breathes ethics into abundance. Taste emerges not as mere indulgence but as a civilizing practice: to choose, to mix, to serve, to share. In this allegory, pleasure is a skill and a responsibility. “Taste” invites the viewer to cultivate that skill—to raise the cup with gratitude, to measure desire with courtesy, and to turn plenty into fellowship.