Christopher Allen’s art history series: Before the still life
Inanimate objects have often played a critical role in animating human figures throughout the course of Western artistic history.
The two most important subjects in art are the human figure and landscape. The figure dominates the history of sculpture as well as that of Western art, although as we have seen over the past couple of weeks landscape became more and more highly esteemed over the modern period.
But the obvious importance of landscape and the figure can make us overlook the interest of inanimate things as subjects of art. Like the painting of landscape, the painting of things gradually emerges from the primary genre of narrative to assert itself as the genre of still life, and becomes a fundamental means of artistic expression from the Dutch 17th century to Picasso.
But even before that, there is a fascinating secret life of things to be discovered in art. We can start in the modern period with Simone Martini’s magnificent Annunciation in the Uffizi (1333). The central panel of the composition is occupied by the scene of Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary, as related in the opening pages of Luke’s Gospel, accompanied on either side by the figures of Saint Ansanus and Saint Maxima.
Each of these figures carries emblematic objects. Thus Saint Ansanus, for whose chapel the altarpiece was originally made, holds a palm — a sign of victory — symbolising his martyrdom. He was the patron saint of Siena and the other saint, in spite of the later inscription beneath her, is probably his mother, Maxima, who holds a cross, recalling that she converted the young Roman patrician to Christianity, and a palm again alluding to her martyrdom.
Mary, meanwhile, has a book we presume to be the Bible — the Old Testament to be exact — alluding both to her piety and to the fact that the story of the Messiah was foretold in the Hebrew scriptures. Gabriel holds a branch of olive, which refers to peace and God’s reconciliation with man, recalling the olive branch brought back to Noah by the dove after the Flood. In the middle of the composition is a vase full of lilies, which also have a symbolic or iconographic function, alluding to the purity of the Virgin. But here particularly we can see that the flowers transcend their functional significance and express joy in the splendour of nature and the pleasure of capturing beautiful phenomena in paint.
That impression is even stronger in Hugo van der Goes’s Portinari Altarpiece (1478), which, although painted in Bruges by one of the greatest Flemish painters, is also in the Uffizi because it was commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, head of the Bruges branch of the Medici Bank. In this remarkable triptych, the two outer panels are occupied by the donor, Tommaso, and his wife Maria, kneeling, respectively, with sons Antonio and Pigello and daughter Margarita; the figures of the family are painted on a smaller scale out of humility.
Tommaso is accompanied by Saints Thomas and Anthony Abbot, and his wife by Saint Margaret with book and cross and Saint Mary Magdalene with her jar of ointment. Saint Anthony is identifiable by his regular attributes of black monastic robes and a bell, while Saint Thomas’s spear alludes to his martyrdom in India but may also recall the fact that he was the one who had to put his hand into the wound in Christ’s side — pierced by Saint Longinus’s spear — before he would believe.
The central panel is occupied by a Nativity in which the refined figure of the Virgin makes a striking contrast with the naturalistic features of the adoring shepherds. The figure of Christ lying on the ground is probably an allusion to the spiritual visions of Saint Bridget of Sweden just a century earlier, one of which implied that the birth of Jesus took place mystically — the infant suddenly appearing before the meditating young woman in a pool of light — without the pains of childbirth or the rupturing of his mother’s virginity.
But among the many extraordinary things in this work is the pair of vases that occupy the foreground and may be considered as the first true floral still life in the modern period. Of course, all of these flowers have symbolic meanings — notably the red lilies here for the blood of Christ and the irises, with their seven petals, recalling the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin — but these meanings are not exhaustive, and do not preclude the painter from delighting in the representation of natural beauty.
On the contrary, the symbolism is all the more effective for being subsumed into this love of the natural world, in the same way that the symbolism in Dante’s Divine Comedy is particularly moving because of the way it is realised as living metaphors in the world of human experience, rather than merely as allegories to be decoded intellectually.
Things are also objects of fascination in an earlier masterpiece of the Flemish tradition, Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Canon van der Paele (1434-36). Here the Madonna is accompanied by Saint Donatian (patron saint of the cathedral for which the altarpiece was commissioned) in an extraordinary damask robe and carrying a wheel with candles, which is his attribute. In the centre is a beautiful oriental carpet, a luxury import that was more usually placed on a table at the time.
On the right, Canon George van der Paele is presented to the Virgin by his patron Saint George, and just as in the Portinari altarpiece, the names of the saints are clues to the names of the donors. The portrait of the Canon, prematurely aged although only in his 60s and earnestly imploring the blessing of the Virgin and Christ Child, is unforgettable, but so are the wonderful details of his prayer book, with its soft cloth or pigskin cover, and his glasses, a modern invention that had originated in the north of Italy around the end of the 13th century.
Books and optical instruments are important motifs in Raphael’s Portrait of Leo X (1517), in which the first Medici pope chose to have himself represented as a connoisseur of antiquarian books: sumptuously dressed, he sits at a table at which he has been studying an illuminated manuscript that has been identified as the Hamilton Bible (now in Berlin), which he had inherited from his father, Lorenzo the Magnificent, with a finely crafted magnifying glass and an even more exquisite silver bell.
The depiction of still life objects to characterise sitters in portraits was common in the Renaissance, starting with the simple inclusion of tools or instruments to identify the sitter’s profession, but soon becoming more complex and nuanced. Lorenzo Lotto in Venice was a master of the use of inanimate objects to suggest the personality of his subjects, in such paintings as Portrait of a gentleman in his study (c. 1530) and Portrait of Andrea Odoni (1527).
As in the case of Raphael’s portrait of Leo, however, the inanimate things in a painting can have a resonance of their own, as though they were already asserting their claim to form an independent genre, and this impression is even stronger in the work of Lotto, where objects proliferate, expand and sometimes dominate the composition. The young man in his study, for example, is almost dwarfed by the massive volume that he is leafing through, or more exactly from which he looks up as though pondering what he has just read.
Andrea Odoni, a wealthy art collector in Venice, is surrounded and at first sight seems almost overwhelmed by classical sculptures, most of which we can identify even in their fragmentary state; with his left hand he holds out towards us a small statue of the Diana of Ephesus, while a book and a collection of coins lie on the table before him.
The choice of sculptures is almost certainly significant: the head of Hadrian is matched with a torso of Venus in the foreground, perhaps suggesting the back-to-back layout of the double temple of Venus and Rome, which he built; several figures of Hercules in the background evoke his labours and symbolise the virtue of fortitude. The little Diana may allude to the mystical or esoteric symbolism popular in contemporary neo-platonic interpretations of mythology.
Lotto is such a subtle, sympathetic and insightful portraitist that his figures are not in the end smothered by the objects that surround them: the meanings they suggest are kept under his artistic control, so that we feel they express and reflect the internal states of the sitters, even when these remain ambiguous and elusive.
But objects can assert themselves in cases where their presence is not optional but a necessary part of a narrative subject. One could do a whole study on table settings in the Last Supper, for example, especially as that episode may be represented either, with Poussin, as the moment when Christ institutes the Eucharist or, with Leonardo, as the moment he reveals that one of his disciples will betray him.
Caravaggio is particularly interesting in this regard, and his work is influential, at least in Italy, in the emergence of still life as an independent genre — the topic we will consider next week. Still life elements play an important role in early works, such as Boy with a Basket of Fruit (c. 1593), Boy Bitten by a Lizard (c. 1594) or Bacchus (1596) or of course Still Life with a Basket of Fruit (c. 1597).
Caravaggio’s most extravagant display of still life objects in a narrative scene is in the first version of The Supper at Emmaus (1601-02) in the National Gallery in London. This is the mysterious story of Christ’s appearance, after his resurrection, to two unnamed disciples, and a favourite baroque subject because it evokes the sudden and surprising manifestation of the divine in the middle of the material world.
The disciples, walking to Emmaus, meet a stranger and continue their journey with him; but at night when they sit down at an inn, the stranger breaks a loaf of bread and they recognise him as Jesus; and then he mysteriously disappears. In the London version of this story, Caravaggio emphasises the drama of the scene and loads the table with flasks of wine, a roast fowl, bread rolls and, inevitably, a basket of fruit, all beautifully painted but strictly speaking distracting.
Five or so years later, he painted the second version, which is now in the Brera in Milan, a more sober and focused interpretation with a subdued palette, no superficial theatrics, an almost bare table and a far more inward and spiritual Christ blessing a loaf he has just broken. The two pictures tell a remarkable story of maturing and deepening vision, for here the simple broken crust of the loaf is like a metaphor for the crack in the surface of habitual life, which allows us to glimpse a deeper spiritual reality.
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