JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. IRSA s.c. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus et Historiae."Oyster dear to the gourmet, beneficent Oyster, exciting rather than sating, all stomachs digest you, all stomachs bless you." Seneca Seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters could hardly have done without the oyster.' It was so important to the repertoire that by the later seventeenth century the oyster meal had become the focus of many genre paintings. It was frequently the principalif not the onlyfood depicted as eaten, serving as a vehicle for moral comment and just as often as a token of erotic intent. This paper discusses one aspect of the oyster meal in genre paintings: the symbolism of the oyster.2If the sources of the oyster meal lie in the early seventeenthcentury Dutch merry company paintings, then the subject of the merry company scenes evolved from the sixteenth-century mythological theme of the "Feast of the Gods."3 This theme was employed by Hendrick van Balen, Frans Floris, [Figs. 1 and 2] and other Flemish Mannerists who passed it on to the sixteenth-century Dutch Mannerists, including Cornelis van Haarlem [Fig. 3], Hendrick Goltzius and Karel van Mander. The thread of influence continues to the early seventeenth-century genre painters: David Vinckboons (Karel van Mander's pupil) [Fig. 4], Willem Buytewech and Dirk Hals. Consider a typical sixteenth-century Flemish example of a feast of the gods that served as a model for the merry company scenes which follow. Frans Floris' Feast of the Gods, also called The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, (c. 1546, Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp) [Fig. 2]4, provides not only the feast theme, but also includes the oyster motif. In a very original manner, Floris depicts the gods banqueting on the grass. The gods are making merry, and oysters are clearly visible in the painting: in the middleground Jupiter reaches with his left hand for an oyster steaming on the table, while with his other hand he takes a goblet of wine given by Hebe. Behind Juno two oyster shells have been discarded on the lawn. Cupid has dropped his arrows and flaming torches for the pleasure of eating an oysterhe is seen holding the shell in his hand. Another deity, Aphrodite (Venus), sits on a large oyster shell, holding in her hand an oyster shell of smaller size. Mercury, who stands behind Peleus and Thetis, plays music upon his syrinx. Human beings' knowledge and use of the oyster extends back to antiquity.5 For the Greeks and Romans the oyster (gourmet's delight, aphrodisiac and medical remedy of sorts) was the subject of numerous anecdotes. Aphrodite, who appears frequently in stories and paintings of the feasts of the gods, "was conceived in an oyster shell an...
