Diego Velázquez, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary

In the foreground Velázquez paints an everyday kitchen scene. A maid pounds garlic in a mortar, and other ingredients lie scattered on the table: eggs, a shrivelled red pepper, fish – a traditional symbol associated with Christ – and an earthenware jug probably containing olive oil. An older woman points towards the girl, as if giving her instructions or telling her off for working too hard, or she may be drawing our attention to the figures in the background. These two women are very naturalistic and may be based on real models.

The scene visible in the upper right is taken from the New Testament (Luke 10: 38–42). Mary sits at Christ’s feet, listening to him, and her sister Martha complains that she should not be left to serve the food alone. Christ replies: ‘Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things. But one thing is needful, and Mary has taken that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.’ The story encourages a life of contemplation over action, conveyed through the different behaviours of Martha and Mary.

We view this biblical scene through an opening, although it has also been read as a reflection in a mirror or a picture on the wall. Its relationship to the figures in the foreground is also debated; dressed in contemporary costume, they may be intended as a latter-day Martha and Mary. The elderly woman’s pointing finger suggests that we should perhaps think about how these two scenes – the everyday and the biblical – are connected. Velázquez may have got the idea of combining a contemporary everyday scene with a Gospel story from sixteenth-century Flemish art, known to him through engravings.

Velázquez probably painted this work in 1618, shortly after leaving Francisco Pacheco’s studio and becoming an independent artist in Seville. We do not know who commissioned it. It may have been intended for a domestic setting, such as the home of the wealthy 3rd Duke of Alcalá, whose inventory of 1637 mentions a painting by Velázquez of ‘a kitchen where a woman is pounding garlic’ – though there is no reference to the religious subject in the background. It has even been suggested that the Hospital de Santa Marta in Seville, the principal function of which was to feed the poor, may have provided Velázquez with the inspiration for this painting, and may even have commissioned it.