Seller of Snails
by NAPOLETANO, Filippo, Oil on copper, 18 x 13 cm
This small, well-executed, disagreeable painting on copper may be more than just a particularly repellant genre scene. Beginning e generation before Filippo’s activity, certain paintings reasserted the divine or natural social order by identifying certain foods as suitable to the appetites of the lower classes. More refined, literally lofty meats were assigned to the more delicately nurtured.