Still life
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Featured:  Illustration: Portrait fantaisiste du marquis de Sade (1866) by H. Biberstein |
A still life is a work of art depicting inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, plants and natural substances like rocks) or man-made (drinking glasses, cigarettes, pipes, hotdogs and so on). Popular in Western art since the 17th century, still life paintings give the artist more leeway in the arrangement of design elements within a composition than do paintings of other types of subjects such as landscape or portraiture. In French, a still life is called a "nature morte."
Still life paintings often adorn the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs. It was believed that the foodstuffs and other items depicted there would, in the afterlife, become real and available for use by the deceased. Similar paintings, more simply decorative in intent, have also been found in the Roman frescoes unearthed at Pompeii and Herculaneum. The popular appreciation of still life painting as a demonstration of the artist's skill is related in the ancient Greek legend of Zeuxis's contest with Parrhasius.
Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, still life in Western art was mainly used as an adjunct to Christian religious subjects. This was particularly true in the work of Northern European artists, whose fascination with highly detailed optical realism and disguised symbolism led them to lavish great attention on the meanings of various props and settings within their paintings' overall message. Painters such as Jan van Eyck often used objects, such as those considered still life elements, as part of an iconographic program.
See also
- Dutch Golden Age painting
- History of painting
- List of Dutch painters
- Painters of silence
- Still
- Still life photography
- Living Still Life
