Aertsen invented the inverted still life. In A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms (1551), enormous joints of meat and sausages fill the foreground while the biblical scene is barely visible through a window in the background. It was a radical reversal of pictorial hierarchy: the sacred was pushed to the margin, and the everyday became monumental.

He was born in Amsterdam around 1508 and was known as "Lange Piet" (Tall Pete) because of his height. He apprenticed under Allaert Claesz in Amsterdam before moving to Antwerp, where he became a citizen in 1542 and worked for roughly fifteen years. His market and kitchen scenes placed food, cookware and domestic labour at enormous scale, transforming genre subjects into something approaching history painting's physical presence.

He married Kathelijne Beuckelaar, and three of their eight children became painters. His nephew and pupil Joachim Beuckelaer continued and developed his distinctive format. Many of Aertsen's later religious paintings were destroyed during the Beeldenstorm, the wave of Protestant iconoclasm in 1566. He returned to Amsterdam around 1556 and died there in 1575. His monumental kitchen and market scenes anticipate the still-life painting of the seventeenth century by half a century, and his compositional strategy of hiding the sacred behind the secular continues to generate scholarly argument about his intentions.