Distributing Alms

In this painting a crowd of beggars and cripples jostles outside a church charity. Bread is handed out through the barred window. There is probably a Christian subtext in it but the poor are not depicted with much sympathy, quarreling and stealing from one another. Deprived drifters were often seen as parasites that threatened the fragile social order and depicting them as foolish and grotesque was traditional in Flemish painting of the sixteenth century.