30th December 1983

On butchery and Goya

I always used to think that the Germans were the bloodiest nation on earth and therefore possessed of the bloodiest butchers’ shops.  This is completely untrue.  German butchers’ shops are clean and cosy places with a warm, savoury smell and a massive display of sausages, cheeses and salads.  The raw meat is always very discretely presented, usually off the bone, de-fatted and ready for cooking.  English shops, which shake to the thud of the butcher’s chopper on the well-worn wooden block, are far more gruesome.  But they are nothing compared to the butchers’ shops I have seen here in San Miniato.  It is quite normal to cleave the carcass of a pig or cow in two, leaving it joined at the head and shoulders, and then to hang it up in the middle of the shop so that it forms a massive blood-and-marrow ‘V’ round which the customers have to step in order to get to the counter.  A pile of sawdust on the floor collects the blood which drips from the split head.  I cannot remember seeing anything like this in Spain, but it makes Goya’s famous picture of a carcass in the Prado intelligible as a study which is also a vision, and not just as a vision.

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