In his 1655 painting, The Slaughtered Ox, Rembrandt gives us a disturbing image. We come face to face with a giant ox carcass hanging from a cross beam, its hind legs splayed and skin flayed to reveal the bone, fat, and muscle beneath. The animal dominates the image space; the viewer can find virtually nowhere to look for relief. Even peripheral details, such as the wooden planks of the interior and the clothing of a woman in the background, take on the colors of the slaughtered animal; subdued browns, reds, and whites dominate. The painting belongs to the later, “impressionistic” part of Rembrandt’s career, as the rather loose brushstrokes indicate. But surely to segue into a discussion of impasto represents a thinly veiled attempt to divert attention from the reality of this image. There is no way to get around it: in his painting, Rembrandt offers not merely thick brushstrokes, but the convincing illusion of dead and soon-to-decay flesh.
I always have liked Rembrandt, but I never thought much about the The Slaughtered Ox. Certainly I never sought out this painting on my occasional visits to the Louvre, where it now hangs. With art history classics like Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks and Paolo Ucello’s Battle of San Romano in nearby galleries, why focus on an animal carcass? A few years ago, however, I found myself face to face with the kind of flesh that Rembrandt depicts. This time, my encounter took place not at a museum, but at the meat department of a large midwestern grocery warehouse. I had taken a job at the warehouse, called Roundy’s, where I sold all kinds of fresh and processed meat to grocery stores in a tri-state area. Suddenly, I was surrounded by the kinds of carcasses I previously had found so distasteful. In this most unlikely of situations, I discovered that Rembrandt and I—and his painted ox, too—had something in common.
Dead flesh would not have been an unusual sight in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, when butchers routinely displayed their freshly slaughtered wares in the marketplace. Neither was it, by Rembrandt’s time, an uncommon motif in works of art. Nearly a century before Rembrandt’s ox appeared on the scene, the Flemish artist Pieter Aertsen inaugurated the painterly fascination with meat by depicting twenty-one square feet of glistening animal flesh in his monumental Meat Stall. Amidst the impressive display of sausages, haunches, and lungs, an ox carcass hangs in the right background. Over the next century, flayed oxen became a common motif in Netherlandish prints and paintings, especially those depicting the parable of the Prodigal Son and other moralizing themes. Many of these scenes teem not only with meat but also with human figures that showcase the less seemly side of life.
Rembrandt’s painting, in contrast to these crowded and occasionally rowdy scenes, exudes quiet and stillness. The artist has shown a profusion of neither meat nor people. Instead, he focuses all his attention—and ours—on a single creature, with no narrative content to explain or frame its presence. We are not even certain where Rembrandt’s ox hangs. At a butcher’s shop? In a room or shed of a domestic residence? A young woman peers out of a doorway in the background of the painting, her upper body parallel to and almost merging with that of the ox. She, too, appears uncertain, as if aware that she does not quite belong in the same room (or painting) as the animal. Looking at the ox from behind, this woman mirrors our own gaze at the giant carcass. Like us, she regards in wonder the flayed animal that Rembrandt has detailed with as much devotion as we might expect an artist to lavish on a flower in bloom.
But the term “bloom,” surprisingly enough, applies as much to Rembrandt’s side of beef as to the most delicate rendering of a Dutch tulip. Indeed, the word refers not only to the bursting forth of floral life, but also to the process of animal death. It was, in fact, one of the first terms I learned at my job as a meat seller. “Bloom” indicates the bright red color that today’s consumers associate with fresh meat. As slaughtered animal meat becomes exposed to light and air, a protein pigment called myoglobin is transformed to oxymyoglobin, causing the meat to turn from a dark purple to a bright red hue. Rembrandt’s ox has been skinned and drained of blood but not yet cut up; I would hazard a guess that it remains in a pre-bloom stage.
And so, working at the grocery warehouse, did I. Or perhaps the better term would be “post-bloom.” I had previously been a college teacher turned writer until circumstances dictated that I find some sort of paying work; hence my job at Roundy’s. The dizzying change in my work life was marked by my altered vocabulary. In my role as professor, I’d used such terms as “still life,” “genre scene,” and “inverted morality picture” on a regular basis. As a writer, I learned “kill fee” and “query.” Now I had moved on to words like “bloom” and “wog.” (A wog is a whole chi