The Egg Dance, Pieter Aertsen, 1552
oil on panel, h 84cm × w 172cm × w 20.5kg More details
At right, in this brothel, a young man does an egg dance to the music of a bagpiper. While dancing, he had to roll an egg within a chalk circle – without it breaking – and to cover it with a wooden bowl. This ‘pointless’ amusement, along with the dissolute behaviour of the other figures, served as a moral warning against debauchery.
