See, taste, feel in the contemplation of simple things
Still life paintings can ground us in the human experience by reflecting our sensory reactions to the world, including to food.
As we saw last week, the interest in painting things for their own sake, the precursor to still life as an independent genre, seems to have arisen particularly in The Netherlands and Flanders — one region before the Reformation and under the dominion first of the dukes of Burgundy and then of Spain — and then in Venice and the north of Italy, which had trading relations with the Flemish.
This is consistent with the greater interest of northern art in materials and surfaces in general. The new style of the Renaissance that began in Florence and culminated in Rome was more abstract or conceptual in the way it viewed the world. Bodies were first of all volumes in space, and space was rationalised through the new model of perspective.
The Flemish artists of the 15th century, though contemporaries of the Renaissance in Florence, did not have the same concern with volume and space, which is why their figures can seem to lack substance and their space can be disconcertingly irrational to an eye habituated to Italian art. Foreground spaces, for example, often seem to tip towards the viewer instead of receding to a vanishing point.
But they were fascinated with the surfaces of things, as we could see in the damask robe of St Donatian in Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Canon van der Paele or indeed in the details of the donor’s worn and prematurely aged features. It is the same obsessive interest in the texture and colour of skin, hair and eyes that is characteristic of Peter Paul Rubens’s style almost two centuries later, and which always makes the Italian mainstream uneasy.
This concentration on surfaces could seem both trivial and a little distasteful; even admirers of Rubens in France would later concede that his work was marred by “un gout flamand” — a Flemish taste, in other words a touch of vulgarity. Italian artists in the north were more interested in surfaces, and that was something Annibale Carracci had to shed to become a great artist, when he moved from Bologna to Rome; Caravaggio, also from the north, clung to a greater literalism, partly because of his method of painting directly from life.
The painting of things has further precursors in the 16th century, for example in the market scenes by the Antwerp painters Pieter Aertsen and his nephew Joachim Beuckelaer, even though these are strictly speaking still scenes of everyday life, or what is confusingly known as genre painting.
Paintings of flowers and fruit proliferated too, culminating, in Italy, in Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit (1595-96). A decade or so after the artist’s death, Vincenzo Giustiniani reported that Caravaggio had said a good painting of flowers took as much work as a figure painting — a provocative suggestion considering the low place of still life in the hierarchy of genres.
Still life as a mature genre flourished especially in 17th-century Holland, in a Protestant culture that was suspicious of art and, like the English Puritans, took the second commandment’s prohibition of graven images seriously. But the Dutch had an irrepressible love of pictures, and paintings of the time show them hanging even in modest interiors. Conditions were difficult for history painting but ideal for still life, which generally avoided the figure altogether.
Still-life pictures also could aim for higher things by embodying moral or intellectual ideas. The best-known of these is the theme of vanitas, or “emptiness”, in which elements in the painting recall the passing of time and the perishing of all things in this world. This kind of picture is also referred to by another Latin expression, memento mori — literally, “remember to die”. The dried leaves and the blemish on the apple, for example, are subtle notes of the vanitas theme in Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit.
Pieter Claesz is perhaps the greatest of the Dutch still-life artists, and his Vanitas still life (1630) illustrates another approach to the theme: a skull, the most universal and ancient symbol of mortality, is set on a ledger, no doubt containing the records of wealth, of transactions and of assets. The quill pen with which entries were made is black with ink. A lamp, just blown out, is still smoking, and an expensive pocket watch lies open, with its key on a ribbon, as though its owner was about to wind it up when the end came.
Not all the themes associated with still life are quite as grim; there are also pictures, or a series of pictures, devoted to the five senses, with or without an overlay of vanitas motifs. But the truth is that all still-life painting addresses the senses in a way that is unlike any other genre, and even a work that explicitly reminds us of mortality, such as Claesz’s painting, delights in rendering the surfaces and evoking the physical reality of each of its motifs.
At the deepest level, still life is a meditation on human experience as reflected in our perception of and feelings about things. History painting deals with moral and other questions; landscape deals with our feeling for nature and connection to a world beyond ourselves. But still life is about our reaction to things, including our responses to food. It brings us back to the body, the senses and the appetites.
Claesz’s Still Life with Herring, Wine and Bread (1647) is deliberately designed to address the viewer’s sensory responses. The composition presents us with several things that we know well, and provokes in us the memory of smells, tastes and textures. We taste the salty, oily smoked fish; but we also taste the lemon, for the essence of these pictures is the combination of virtual sensory stimuli. We taste the cold white wine, too, and the light, crunchy bread roll with its soft crumb where it has been pulled apart from a ring of rolls.
Pictures such as this are thus not about gluttony in the sense of gorging oneself with excessive quantities of food, nor are they moralising condemnations of excess; but they are about appetite and our sensual response to food. They recall and elicit the pleasures of taste but at the same time allow us to meditate on these phenomena.
In much the same way, as Aristotle already knew, literature and drama evoke passions, but unlike real desires and fears that lead to action, these are virtual ones that we can tolerate and contemplate imaginatively. Thus the real achievement of 17th-century still life may be seen as part of a new critical awareness of the self and its appetites that goes beyond religiously inspired moralism, and in literature is expressed in the first great critiques of the ego in the works of Pascal and La Rochefoucauld.
Dutch still life in the second half of the century becomes more elaborate and less interesting with the so-called pronkstillevens. On the other hand there are several important practitioners in France, including Philippe de Champaigne, with a very fine Still Life with a Skull (c. 1671), whose skull, hourglass and tulip suggest the brief beauty of this world but also recall the Dutch tulip mania that came to a head and collapsed in 1637 — the first modern financial bubble and the epitome of the vanitas of wealth.
A lesser-known but interesting French practitioner of the genre is Louise Moillon, whose Still Life with a Bowl of Curacao Oranges (1634) shows her typically close focus on the shapes, colours and texture of fruit, and also includes one of the Chinese blue and white export wares that are so common too in Dutch still life. Sebastien Stoskopff, from Alsace, was especially drawn to brittle, inorganic forms, as in his Still Life of Glasses in a Basket (1644).
Throughout this whole period there are also countless pictures in another Flemish subgenre, the floral still life, yet these pictures always have something of the quality of craft and are akin to natural history illustration; it is not often that we sense any deeper imagination or vision in these works.
The only really great still-life painter of the 18th century is also the first to raise the genre to the first rank and to be one of the greatest artists of his time — though admittedly the 18th century is a lesser period in art history compared with the gigantic ages of the 17th and 19th centuries.
Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin had an unconventional beginning and was largely self-taught. In 1728, still completely unknown, he showed a couple of pictures in a free exhibition in the Place Dauphine; they were noticed by two of the most eminent painters of the time, who invited him to join the Academy.
One of these was The Ray (1728), a picture and a motif that have continued to fascinate artists from Matisse to Arthur Boyd. A few years later, he began to paint figures and so evolved a kind of subgenre of figures with still-life motifs. In the most remarkable of these, like Boy with a Spinning Top (1753), he evokes the stillness of attention in a way previously achieved only by Vermeer, whose work he almost certainly had not seen.
Chardin worked slowly like Vermeer, although not quite as slowly since he produced 200 works to Vermeer’s three dozen, and every one of them will repay our close consideration. The pure still-life pictures in particular demand from us the kind of attention that is represented in the figure compositions: an uncompromising presence in the contemplation of simple things.
Chardin has, as far as is possible given the nature of the subjects, dispensed with any ulterior meanings, whether memento mori or conceits about the senses or the elements. There are no tables of food to elicit our appetite; a few pieces of fruit remain, but often the compositions are largely made up of vessels, which played only a supporting role in Claesz’s pictures.
Whether in the relatively early Still Life with a Pipe (1737) or the late and almost minimalistic Still Life with a Glass of Water (1760), we are confronted with the vivid yet elusive life of objects — including objects that we have made, that carry with them the traces or memories of their uses yet have been removed from the utilitarian environment to be looked at for their own sake.
The greatest art critic of the time, Denis Diderot, struggled to express what it was that felt so compelling about works that had no obvious claim to significance: in one famous passage (Salon of 1763), he apostrophises the artist directly: “Ah Chardin, it is not white, red and black that you grind on your palette; it is the very substance of objects; it is air and colour that you take on the tip of your brush and attach to the canvas.”
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