Monkey martini

March 29, 2011

Here is another photograph I took at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. This painting has been titled "Sense of Taste." Provenance: the workshop of Jan Brueghel the Younger, mid-17th century.

[Click through for hi-res.]

You can say a lot about this painting — the representation of the gastronomic luxuries of the 1600s, the slightly off-kilter perspective, the seductive gaze of the woman eating the oyster, the painting within a painting (on the back wall), how Adam and Eve look onto the scene with expressions of disapproval — but really, the only thing that matters is that in the foreground, there's a monkey drinking a martini.