Jan Steen's In Luxury Look Out (c. 1663, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) is the most elaborate expression of the visual moral theology that made Steen one of the most popular and commercially successful painters of the Dutch Golden Age. The painting depicts a Dutch household in a state of cheerful, comprehensive disorder: a drunken man has fallen asleep, children run amok, food and wine are being consumed with abandon, a pig roots through the kitchen, and every corner contains evidence of moral, domestic, and fiscal chaos. On a slate in the background, the Dutch proverb 'In weelde siet toe' - 'In luxury, look out' - provides the caption.
But this painting is also a sermon, and like the best sermons it is entertaining in direct proportion to its moral seriousness. Steen was a Calvinist Catholic - a member of the Catholic minority in the Reformed Republic, attending Mass privately while living publicly in a Protestant society saturated with Reformed biblical culture - and his moral paintings operate in the space where Calvinist ethical urgency and Catholic sacramental sensibility overlap. The disorder of his households is not merely funny but theologically pointed: this is what happens when the Proverbs 31:27 household ('She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness') is abandoned, when Deuteronomy 6:6-7's injunction to instruct children in the law of God is neglected, when the warnings of Luke 12:15-21 about the Rich Fool who builds bigger barns and neglects his soul are ignored.
Luke 12:20 is the specific text that haunts the painting: 'But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?'' The cheerful abundance of the disordered household - the food, the wine, the laughter, the games - is depicted not as condemnation but as warning: this is the moment before the reckoning. The painting shows the Parable of the Rich Fool in its comic register, which was always part of the parable's mode: the fool is both tragic and ludicrous, and the laughter his self-satisfaction provokes is the laughter of recognition before it becomes the laughter of judgment.
Steen's paintings functioned as visual sermons in a society where Sunday attendance at Reformed services was universal and biblical literacy high. His audience knew the texts behind the images, and they also knew that they were being shown their own households and their own tendencies toward comfortable dissolution. The 'Jan Steen household' became a Dutch proverb for a disorderly home, and the paintings' popularity depended on the viewer's capacity to laugh at themselves.
The painting's enduring relevance - in a consumer society for which 'In luxury, look out' is at least as pertinent as it was in the 17th-century Dutch Republic - demonstrates that the best biblical moral art does not moralize at a safe distance but holds a mirror close enough to be uncomfortable, at the angle that produces recognition rather than shame.