Hello my name is Clara. I'm one of the Young Producers currently working at the
National Gallery and today I'm going to briefly talk about this painting over
here which is called 'The Four Elements: Fire' which was completed around 1570 by
the Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer.
It is one of four paintings
which are loosely supposed to represent the four elements. So the four elements
was a seadoo science which had its origins in ancient Greece and it was
believed to represent and control various aspects of the human body as
well as the natural world. With the element of fire it was considered that
people had very fiery personalities but also, more importantly in the case of
this painting, that it was linked to the gallbladder which was used for
digesting fat. Now hold that thought because I'll come back to that. So let's
start first with the foreground of the painting so what we first see and it's
this overwhelmingly sensual, lush depiction of meat: we have ham, we have
mutton chops but we also have a variety of different poultry which is
mouth-watering but depending on your taste you may even
find the two female servants preparing the food appetizing as well but you never
know. So you've got these guys preparing food and then in the mid-ground we've
got the cooks preparing the meal and they're right next to the fire so that's
a literal link to the title 'Fire' but also it links to the four elements
because we've got lots of fat, it needs to be digested, hence the gallbladder
association with the element of fire so it's beginning to make a little bit more
sense, hopefully. But one question that arises is who is all this food being
prepared for? Well, if we go straight to the background we see a group of people
sitting at the dining table and look there's a guy with a halo. It's Jesus and
he's come for dinner - how exciting! Well, why would Jesus be in a 1570
painting in Flanders? Well, he didn't actually go to Flanders but he did visit
the house of Mary and Martha, two sisters living in Jerusalem, and they got really
excited that they have this really important guest coming to their house so
Martha went to the kitchen and she was busy cooking but she was really annoyed
to find Mary sitting there listening to Jesus and not helping her so she gets
really annoyed and it's like "Jesus, aren't you going to tell her off for being
so, you know, unhelpful?" and Jesus is like "Martha, Martha you worry about too
many things but Mary's made the right decision and she's listening to me".
What this is interpreted to mean is that spiritual matters are a lot more
important than material pursuits like cooking and eating food which leads me
into the first interpretation of this painting that researchers have come up
with and that is that this entire display of the kitchen is a moral
warning against the sin of gluttony. So you've got all this food here, it's
distracting, it's sensual but then the artist has used this sharp perspective that
draws you away from all the distracting food and your eyes are drawn straight to
the biblical narrative. It's as if the artist wants you to take aside all the
sensual distractions of daily life and the pursuit of material pleasure and
instead look and find the quiet spiritual truth hidden deep within the
painting. Then comes the second interpretation
where some people believe that actually, no this isn't a universal
message. The painting isn't talking to the viewer, it's not telling the viewer
beware of gluttony but in fact it's saying actually it's the working class:
it's the cooks and the maids and the servants who are the ones that are dodgy.
Now why would they say something like that? During the 16th century people
had just begun to rediscover classical writers such as Cicero in Western Europe
and Cicero wrote a very famous piece where he stated that people who are
butchers, fishmongers or cooks cannot be trusted because they work directly with
bodily pleasures, food, and they cater to material pursuits so, by being
morally dubious, you're also socially inferior and so the elite who would have
been owners of this painting would have seen this as justification of their
moral superiority and you can see this in even more detail when you look at the
details and the painting. So starting from the mid-ground here, you've got
the two female cooks who are very close to the fire and fire is a symbol of hell
so they're right at the gateways of hell, quite literally. The guy dressed in green
looks very unsteady and it looks like he's gobbling down alcohol so he's a
drunk but more importantly when you come to the front of the painting again, you
see these two possibly seductive looking females. This woman is looking rather
suggestively at the viewer but they're both dressed in red and red was a colour
associated commonly with lust but more importantly they are holding birds. Now
in the Dutch language at the time 'vogellen' had a double meaning. It meant
poultry and birds but it also meant to copulate so if you saw pictures of
people holding our birds it could potentially mean, you know, "I want to have
sex" or "I'm very loose morally, I have a very uncontrolled sexuality". So there
we have these morally dubious individuals at the front and then who's
in the dining room? Jesus. The elite would never go in the kitchen, they would be
where he's standing. No one bothered to ask them "well who are they making all
this food for? You're eating them right?" but never mind that's a different matter.
The third interpretation is saying "no, no, no, all of this is utter nonsense. Why
would this be a warning against gluttony and why would this be a criticism of
food when the artist has taken so much time to paint everything in meticulous
detail? Why would he put it so forward into the foreground? Why can you just
touch the food? Why would he do that?" and some people say this is because,
essentially, the artist and the person he was painting the work for were
interested in still life. They were interested in domestic scenery and that
the biblical scene and the innuendos are just an excuse to paint everyday life; So
when you consider this interpretation, this is the beginning of art for art's
sake, painting still life for the sake of painting still life. Now, hopefully from
this very short talk, you can see that just by looking at this painting very
quickly and analysing the different layers, there are a variety, a huge range
of interpretations that you could come up with and there isn't necessarily a
right answer. The painter's dead, the people who bought the painting are dead.
We don't know what they had in mind but we have the freedom to decide
based on what we've seen what this could potentially mean. So I hope you enjoyed
that and thank you very much for watching this. If you'd like to learn
more about our paintings, please click here or here and if you'd like to learn
more about the Young Producers programme at the National Gallery, please don't
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Thank you very much for watching. Bye.