Dutch Still-Life

DUTCH STILL-LIFE AND THE “ALLEGORY” OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Robert Baldwin Associate Professor of Art History Connecticut College New London, CT 06320 [email protected]

(This essay was written in the mid 1990s and has been revised twice, most recently in April 2011 with an improved discussion of Kalf.)

The Rise of Still-life Painting Known in Classical painting, still-life disappeared in Medieval art and began to emerge in the Renaissance along with a new interest in the terrestrial world of experience and everyday life. The main obstacle to the emergence of still-life painting was the Western understanding of the universe as an orderly hierarchy of mind over body, soul over mere matter, with art largely confined to high subjects of timeless importance. If the same mentality prevented landscape and genre painting from emerging as categories until the sixteenth century, still-life was even more hindered with its lowly status at the bottom of the Western philosophical chain of being in a world of mere things. For all of these lower subjects to emerge, they had to be invested with some kind of higher significance so they could speak of weighty matters in the lofty arena of art. The advent of Renaissance humanism made things both harder and easier for still-life: harder by redefining art as a lofty world of noble intellect, easier by redefining the natural world as a worthy sphere of intellect and inquiry.

In the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, most still-life appeared within larger works of religious art and portraiture, especially in Northern Italy (Mantegna, Carpaccio) and Northern Europe (Van Eyck, Christus, Memling, Dürer, Holbein). In religious art, still-life often worked to express Christian values and artistic illusionism, as in the allegorical still-life of books, candle, and case of lilies in Campin’s Annunciation. In religious art, flowers, vanitas imagery (skull, extinguished candle, flowers), and simple meals (Holy Family) were the most common form of still-life imagery. This is particularly clear in the way floral ornament in manuscript illumination moves from the flat, decorative patterning of the fourteenth century to the trompe l’oeil flowers of manuscript painting after 1450, flowers which view with the religious scenes for the discriminating viewer’s attention. In this early phase before its emergence as an independent subject, still-life can be seen as taking baby steps and learning to speak.

After 1500, the rise of Renaissance humanism in the North and the new study of nature pioneered in Northern Europe by Dürer opened the way for the slow emergence of independent still-life depiction. At first, this took place in the world of small studies or preliminary works – drawings and watercolors – and a handful of small paintings and prints. By the mid-sixteenth century, still-life began to develop as a category but only in Netherlandish art and only within the subcategory of the market scenes painted by Aertsen and Beuckelaer which depicted vegetables, fish, and game. At this point, still-life was still little more than a cautious experiment and, in Flemish market scenes, still largely imbedded in genre painting. 2

None of this tentative imagery hinted at the explosion of still-life as a category in the seventeenth century, especially in the Netherlands. While still-life emerged as an important if secondary category everywhere in Europe after 1600, it took on great importance in only one region, the Low Countries, including both the Southern Catholic Spanish Netherlands and especially in the burgher, republican Northern Netherlands.

The most important factor in the development of still-life painting was the rise of the Dutch burgher republic after 1608 and the focus of Dutch seventeenth-century burgher art on everyday Dutch life including the world of mundane things. The explosion of still-life painting emerged from the same burgher aesthetic preferences seen after 1600 in the outpouring of Dutch landscape and cityscape, Dutch portraiture, and Dutch genre painting (scenes of everyday life). While Dutch seventeenth- century art included history painting, the vast majority of works produced dealt with contemporary Dutch life. The explosion of still-life painting offered Dutch art collectors a unique view of modern Dutch experience and values which was at once more concrete and more abstract than landscape, portraiture, and domestic scenes. Generally humble and down-to-earth in contrast to the heroic dramas of courtly history painting, Dutch still life expressed the triumph of burgher values in a burgher republic. Like Dutch landscape, portraiture, and domestic scenes, Dutch still-life also expressed a wide range of Dutch religious, political, social, and moral values which evolved in dramatic ways as the century unfolded.

There were about 300 still-life painters in seventeenth-century Holland, each churning out hundreds of paintings. The latest catalogue estimates that Dutch artists produced two hundred and fifty thousand still-life paintings in the seventeenth century. This explosion of still-life painting was unprecedented in the history of art and ended in the early eighteenth-century Netherlands as taste, interior decoration, and social morality changed. With so many still-life painters struggling for a share of the market, most Dutch still-life painters specialized in one of the following categories (though objects were often mixed): Vanitas, breakfast, banquet, flower, fruit, shell, game, pronk (luxury objects), and trompe l’oeil (illusionistic games).

As a new category, Dutch still-life played on the emergence for the first time in European culture of a broad, prosperous burgher class with enough disposable income to furnish homes with a wealth of refined material artifacts such as carved and inlaid furniture, Oriental carpets used as table coverings, elaborately decorated musical instruments (such as harpsichords, virginals, and lutes), painted ceramics, precious glassware, dishes made from gold, silver, and pewter, rare sea shells, and works of decorative art such as small statues.

In a culture increasingly absorbed in and surrounded by material things, the Dutch worried endlessly about the proper place and meaning of things in pious burgher lives. These worries appeared in every manner of texts including sermons, plays, poems, moral treatises, and histories and in visual culture such as emblem books, prints, ceramics, oil paintings, and the decoration of real homes. All such texts and images allowed the Dutch to invest the world of everyday things with a rich and varied significance. The text beneath a Dutch emblem of an empty bottle shown upside down commented, "There is nothing empty or meaningless in things".

Whether rare or mundane, the objects in Dutch still-life were invariably a carefully selected group lifted out of a familiar setting onto a table against an abstract background. A dramatic, vaguely 3 religious, diagonal light often enters from above to lift objects further from mundane settings and meanings into a higher order (composition) of social, moral, and spiritual significance.

The relative disappearance of Dutch still life painting in the eighteenth century suggests that material things grew much less problematic as Dutch burgher culture became aristocratized with a Calvinism more at ease with wealth and luxury. In a more courtly culture, material displays of meals and expensive silverware may have seemed increasingly vulgar and old-fashioned.

Contexts for Dutch Still-Life: Religion, Class, Politics, Humanism

At least four developments contributed to the rise of still-life painting in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. First, there was the new consumer culture with its collections of precious things. As a prosperous, mercantile society whose international trade brought unusual things from all over the world into burgher households, the Netherlands showed how well-to-do burghers in the seventeenth century took up the new culture of luxury collectibles first seen among Renaissance courtly and banking elites.

Two other factors worked in tandem to shape Dutch still life, especially in the first half of the century. On the one hand, Dutch Calvinism fueled a widespread hostility to all forms of external extravagance, above all in Dutch church culture where austerity, inwardness, and the simple Word rebuked Catholic “extravagance”. A severe Calvinist ethos also circulated outside church spaces, especially in the plain, black and white clothes worn by Dutch elites until the 1650s.

This Calvinist sobriety was buttressed by a more secular ethos of simplicity rooted in traditional Dutch burgher values and strengthened by a new republican political culture after 1600. Drawing on ancient Roman republican virtues of austerity, simplicity, and hard work, Dutch burghers fashioned a burgher republican identity in which Dutch simplicity rebuked traditional courtly identity with its material extravagance and “feminine” luxury. Because it drew on a complex nexus of religious, social, and political values, moderation became a ruling value in Dutch culture between 1600 and 1650.

Needless to say, the new prosperity of seventeenth-century Dutch burghers and their increasing willingness to display wealth privately through luxury objects clashed directly with the ruling moderation. This conflict produced a fruitful tension within Dutch culture and an outpouring of images addressing problems of wealth, extravagance, work and leisure. In Dutch still life, vanitas and breakfast scenes emerged as major categories 1600 and 1650.

Burgher values also explain the preference in Dutch still-life for the everyday objects of Dutch life, and for the humble genre of still-life itself, in contrast to the lofty world of history painting favored in court culture. Burgher values also explain the adoption and transformation of Renaissance humanist culture and the appeal of humanist moral allegory in particular. In the sixteenth and especially seventeenth centuries, Dutch burghers adopted and transformed Renaissance humanist culture at a time when Dutch artists – still organized professionally within guilds - were eager to prove that they were modern, liberal artists working from the mind rather than medieval craftsmen working in the "mechanical arts". Humanist moral allegory offered Dutch artists a way to display 4 their intellectual ingenuity while ennobling everyday life into a loftier arena of moral discussion without betraying burgher domesticity. It was this allegorizing of everyday objects – the very stuff of Dutch still-life – which gave Dutch still life a higher calling while deflecting Dutch anxieties about materialism and ostentation. By restricting most allegorical imagery to everyday Dutch life, Dutch visual culture rejected courtly humanism and humanist allegory which used mythology to flatter political elites. Think of Carracci’s Farnese Ceiling, the mythological painting of Rubens, and the art commissioned by Louis XIV at Versailles.

The Dutch vogue for burgher allegory rooted in everyday life is, perhaps, clearest in the explosion of emblem book culture after 1600. In contrast to the esoteric humanist emblem books of the Renaissance with their Latin and Greek texts and their recondite imagery, Dutch seventeenth- century emblem books focused on the settings, imagery, and objects of everyday burgher life with allegorical texts in Dutch.

The Rule of History Painting and the Rise of Dutch Still-Life

The arrival in artistic representation of new thematic categories such as still life, landscape, and genre both presumes ongoing cultural shifts and contributes to those shifts in significant ways. Rather than take for granted such basic artistic changes, one should consider the important cultural changes which all new vocabularies imply, the cultural difficulties and obstacles facing such changes, and the way particular artistic choices within new categories work to overcome such difficulties. All art is marked and structured by the cultural and social difficulties it must overcome and by the presence of hostile or competing cultures to which it responds. Thus the particular conventions and choices of seventeenth-century Dutch still life tell us a lot, both directly and indirectly, about problematic areas in Dutch society and culture. The choices of this new, emerging artistic category also tell us a lot how still-life painting went about legitimizing itself in a particular region at a particular historical moment. Only when try to uncover the larger issues at stake in Dutch still life can we understand how it spoke to contemporary social and cultural values, problems, and concerns and how it smoothed the way for its own emergence as a growing category of art.

History Painting as Aesthetic System and the Obstacles to Still-Life The absence of still-life as a category of Western art for some fourteen centuries (300 - 1600 A.D.) suggests, at most, that the world of material things was considered too meaningless, trivial, or lowly for the exalted subjects which painters and sculptors explored for their wealthy patrons (nobles, church officials, rich burghers).

The Arrival of Still Life and the Ranking of Artistic Categories Needless to say, the arrival in the mid to late sixteenth century of new artistic categories concerned more with everyday life such as landscape, still-life, and genre) was not particularly welcome in the relatively new, theoretically elaborated art system which focused on "history painting". Dutch still life offered the everyday, mundane existence and mere objects which "history painting" either subordinated or exclude in its lofty, intellectual subjects and styles. To protect the high status of 5 history painting and the larger artistic system which it exemplified, seventeenth-century art theorists across Europe responded to the new flood of landscape, genre, and still-life with new, hierarchical systems of art. In the hierarchical values adopted by all of these discussions, whether courtly or burgher, we see the larger sway of courtly values in seventeenth-century Europe.

In general, aesthetic writers ranked the categories (genres) of art in a scale with history painting at the top, followed by portraits and landscape with genre (everyday life) and still life at the bottom. Still life remained on the lowest tier for two reasons. It concerned inanimate things which were devalued as base matter and it supposedly appealed more through prosaic description and mere technical skill. In contrast, history painting boasted lofty literary subjects tied to “universal” religious, philosophical, and political values, on the one hand, and a higher aesthetic artifice and poetry tied to artistic mind, an elevated or heroic style worthy of its lofty subjects. Still-life, it was said, was an art of mere imitation, devoid of the great intellectual, religious, and moral problems explored conspicuously in history painting.

As always, the realities of art collecting was more relaxed and complex than the fixed hierarchies and narrow rules of academic art theory. Writings on art also displayed considerable flexibility with Dutch treatises accommodating Dutch aesthetic preferences without abandoning the snobbish preferences of court aesthetics. The fact that still-life attracted considerable patronage among art collectors of all social ranks – even royalty - suggests a more tolerant attitude which did not register in the snobbish conceptual world of the art theorist.

This doesn't mean we should ignore art treatises as irrelevant, pedantic, overly abstract formulations produced by a few theorists removed from the realities of art-making and collecting. On the contrary, seventeenth-century aesthetics provide a larger setting for the rise and the distinctive qualities of Dutch still life. Such pedantic dismissals of still life are useful reminders of a real bias against "lesser" categories and burgher values which persisted at the upper levels of the social ladder even among patrons whose collecting habits included still-life. Such reservations about the potential mindlessness of still life painting also pervaded the culture of Dutch still-life's primary audience and class of patrons, the burgher class itself. Indeed, it pervaded the consciousness of still- life painters themselves and was the primary reason why so much early still life painting in the seventeenth century was explicitly intellectual and allegorical. By the eighteenth century when still life was a more well-established category, it abandoned most of this explicit allegorizing.

Strategies and Conventions of Baroque Still-Life Painting All seventeenth-century still-life painting tended to allegorize, intellectualize, or moralize to one degree or another. Typical strategies included the following.

Unusual Settings. By removing everyday objects from their everyday settings, artists transformed everyday things and gave them a new set of meanings and references.

Selection. By selecting only a few categories of objects from the many which saturated everyday life - flowers, shells, tableware, meals, books, musical instruments, game - artists played on those objects which 1) 6 most resonated with pressing issues (food, wealth) or 2) resolved dichotomies of mind and matter in their own high-mindedness (books, musical instruments), ties to aristocratic pursuits (game), or implied scientific knowledge (flower pieces, shell pieces). Seen thus, selection is really not far from invention.

Composition. To arrange objects is to invite certain questions, associations, and possibilities for high-minded reflection. At times, this can become fairly explicit as in still lives which combine objects not normally seen together as in vanitas pieces and flower pieces combining flowers which bloom at different times of the year. Another device was to collect rare, precious, foreign natural wonders such as highly prized species of flowers and beautiful tropical shells from far off lands.

Other aesthetic choices (color, light, brushwork, etc.) Obviously, these choices add whole new levels for the interpretation of objects by artists. At its most self-conscious, the sheer display of artistic talent and invention in the display of clever compositions, evocative lighting, difficult foreshortenings, clever perspectives, distorted reflections on curved surfaces, acute sense of material textures, etc.) was a display of artistic refinement and high-handedness and thus part of the larger, more elevated appeal of the potentially lowly genre.

All of these strategies can be combined under the more general heading of still-life painting's overall high-mindedness seen in its aesthetic complexity, subtlety, refinement, originality, allegorical cleverness, scientific knowledge, and technical skill. To the extent that all Dutch still-life painting tended to use objects to formulate discussions of one kind of another, they tried to overcome the lowly status of the object, its reputation for base materiality and mindlessness, and its ties to human existence on the most mundane, insignificant level. In this, still-life painters consciously worked to make lowly things the stuff of high artistic mind, to give still-life painting some of the qualities, respect, cultural value, and higher prices of history painting. This imitation by Dutch still life painting of the qualities which history painting tried to monopolize became increasingly explicit over the course of the seventeenth century as Dutch still life assumed more grand and elaborate compositions, sumptuous color, aristocratic settings such as palaces or villas with gardens, and more monumentally sized canvases suitable for the most impressive homes.

Major Thematic Categories of Dutch Still-life: History, Meaning, and Evolution

What follows is an examination of the four most important categories of Dutch still-life: vanitas, breakfast, pronk, and flowers, with shorter comments on lesser categories of still-life such as game (hunting), shells, curiosity cabinet, and trompe’l’oeil.

Vanitas Still-life

Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still-Life, 1630

"Vanity, vanity sayeth the preacher; vanity, all is vanity". This passage which opens the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes (and moves on to describe music as a vain earthly pleasure) is often 7 cited to explain vanitas still-life painting. Since vanitas is Latin for "emptiness", the vanitas still-life is said to comment on the emptiness of earthly possessions, achievements, knowledge and ambitions in the face of death, judgment, hell and heaven.

Vanitas pictures feature objects such as expensive tableware and food, books, maps, globes, musical instruments, and even works of art. Equally common are emblems of time, decay, earthly fragility, and death such as skulls, hourglasses, pocket watches, low-burning or recently extinguished candles, smoke, pipes, rotting fruit, flowers (often withering), bubbles, overturned, empty beakers or broken glasses, and crumbling architecture. One vanitas still-life from the school of Pieter Claesz was inscribed, "The glass is empty. Time is up. The candle is out. Man is silent". Even beautiful flower still-lives could have similar inscriptions as in the following example.

"How closely you regard this flower which seems so fair It fades away quite easily in the sun's mighty glare. By mindful of the word of God which only aye doth bloom The rest of all the world then? It nothing will become."

Even with the rise of pronk or luxury still-life after 1650 (when vanitas paintings was very much on the decline), some pronk still-lives displayed remnants of vanitas thinking. One lavish banquet scene featured a precious glass goblet inscribed, "Not how much", the first three words of a familiar Dutch proverb, "Not how much but how noble".

The Contradictions of Vanitas Paintings Vanitas paintings were most popular from 1610-40 though they can be found after that date. At a time when even wealthy Dutch homes and bodies were decorated fairly simply, vanitas pictures were negative examples of an excess and conspicuous consumption to avoid. During this period, they gradually grew more ambitious in size, composition, and allegorical ingenuity while the material goods they featured increased in expense. In an art market of perhaps thirty or forty vanitas still-life painters, we can understand the competition to surpass one's rivals in beauty of brushwork and coloring, originality of composition, veracity of textural description, and cleverness of allegorical invention. While the vanitas picture may have been a critique of worldly goods and ways, it was also, then, a complex display of artistic virtuosity for an increasingly sophisticated and worldly audience. Here is the paradox of vanitas, a genre supposedly exposing the emptiness of things yet itself a class of expensive, exquisite, and cleverly inventive luxury objects decorating prosperous homes and used to display the picture-reading skills of clever viewers. Gijsbrechts's late Vanitas of ca. 1670, where the painting itself seems to be rotting away with age, is only one more, extremely self-conscious, witty twist on the vanitas theme and thus a display of the artist's power of allegorical invention.

Vanitas pictures were produced by contradictory impulses within Dutch culture and the need for visible decorations managing and reducing all such contradictions. We cannot possibly understand these pictures if we confine ourselves to their surface level of sermonizing imagery. For this misses the clever rhetorical-artistic display of the imagery itself and the larger function of such paintings as expensive, decorative collectibles, as luxury objects proudly displayed among other luxury objects in fashionable burgher homes. The emptiness of earthly goods is clearly not what these pricey and sophisticated earthly goods are about. 8

The proper location for condemnations of the empty world and sinful mankind is not the vanitas still-life but the angry, anti-modern rhetoric of hard line Protestant ministers and moralists, a small but vocal and influential minority within the larger mercantile culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Already by the mid-sixteenth century in the Netherlands, the sharp medieval oppositions between spiritual and bodily, celestial and earthly which still informed the art of Bosch had been transformed into less deadly, humanist moral tensions and debates on how to live. Bad behavior was increasingly seen more as folly than sin, as a lapse of reason which could be corrected by human volition.

Vanitas still-life makes much more sense as an expression of these moral tensions, especially since they took on a new life in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. After all, the Dutch suffered from the clash of Calvinist austerity and humanist moderation on the one hand with an unprecedented, general prosperity and the emergence of a large burgher class with enough disposable income to buy well-decorated houses. This tension was only heightened by a widespread awareness of the impermanence of wealth in a time of fragile markets, easily disrupted shipping routes, marine disasters, crop failures, floods, and rapid economic downturn (as in the tulip mania).

To understand vanitas pictures, one must carefully distinguish between a wide spectrum of responses to the new prosperity. On one extreme, there was the fire and brimstone sermons of hard- core Calvinist preachers threatened by the new ways. In the middle was a more humanistic Protestantism seen in popular Dutch writers and emblem books. Here excessive attachment to worldly goods was more a moral lapse than a deadly sin, an insufficiency of reason over passion and appetite. Typical are these two Dutch emblems depicting expensive silverware or rare shells with warning inscriptions such as "It's sickening how a fool spends his money".

If one stresses the humanist practical values of moderation rather than the misanthropic rhetoric of hard-line Calvinism, vanitas pictures become considerably more comprehensible as contradictory artifacts. The watches and hourglasses become less symbols of life's brevity and emptiness than traditional humanist emblems of moderation and the legitimate pleasure of controlled appetites.

On the other end of the spectrum is the vanitas painting itself and its owner, an object and a class of people eager to make a simultaneous display of prosperity and a detachment from material things. Until recently, art historians all too often used the moralizing emblem books or worse, Protestant sermons, as the basis for interpreting vanitas paintings. This is bad history because it conflates very different kinds of texts, writers, images, and audiences. Emblem books are by their nature moralizing while eagerly collected luxury goods such as vanitas still-life are more complex and ambiguous. The explosion of vanitas paintings makes more sense as a category of still-life which helped prosperous Dutch burghers balance out the contradictions of their lives. What better luxuries than moralizing oil paintings which conspicuously questioned or even attacked immoderate attachment to all luxuries? In that sense, vanitas still-life helped burghers have their cake and eat it too. They were the perfect objects to provide a needed moral and religious distance on all such objects and all material passion.

With the rise after 1650 of a new generation of Dutch burghers all too comfortable with wealth and eager to display it without much embarrassment in clothing, interior decoration, and painting, the 9 need for the vanitas still-life disappeared, as did most of the paintings. New categories of still-life assumed primacy such as meal or “breakfast” still life and later, pronk or luxury still life. Vanitas motifs continued here and their as pious, reassuring reminders of traditional virtues within the new acceptance of appetite and pleasure. But these scattered vanitas motifs were overwhelmed by the larger visual message of later Dutch still-life which proudly flaunted delicious, increasingly elaborate meals and piles of beautiful and expensive things.

Breakfast Still-Life

Claesz, Meal Still-Life, 1625-38

In between the poles of vanitas and pronk still-life, especially common from 1630-60, was the breakfast or meal piece. To some extent, the breakfast piece evolved conceptually, and at times, compositionally, out of the vanitas still-life. Breakfast still-life generally shows a half finished or finished meal, usually with a goblet or glass overturned. Most early breakfast pieces were relatively simple. By the 1640s and 50s, the meals and dishes became more fancy and eventually led to banquet still-lifes after 1650. That is, breakfast still life evolved into pronk or luxury still-life. If the earlier vanitas still-life looked at things with suspicion and the later pronk still-life celebrated fine things, the breakfast still life which flourished in between these two poles was the most ambiguous in its social meaning. It flourished at a time when Dutch society was changing its attitudes towards wealth and aesthetic display.

On the one hand, the breakfast piece retained strong ties to the vanitas tradition in the overall metaphor of life as a short meal interrupted by death. This instability is particularly clear in breakfast scenes where dishes and glasses are overturned, empty, and, above all, broken. (Moralistic writers sometimes compared the brevity of earthly pleasure to the fragility of glass.)

On the other hand, the breakfast piece tends to flaunt lovingly painted, increasingly expensive dishes and precious glassware than those found in the earlier vanitas paintings (1610-30). Broken glasses are rare. The meals are increasingly tasty and elaborate as if the artists were using all their pictorial talent to make the food look delicious. In so doing, artists put sight to the service of taste, a traditionally more carnal sense in most discussions of the five senses. (This hierarchy of the senses was the subject of much writing from antiquity to the seventeenth century, one contemporary text being Chapman’s long poem, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense).

As breakfast still life became more elaborate and appealing to both sight and taste, it became possible to read vanitas references themselves as ambiguous. After all, the shortness of time was often held up by classical writers like Horace and later humanists in the Renaissance and Baroque as the very reason for indulging the pleasures of the body, especially amorous delight. "Life is short, so eat, drink, and be merry".

There are at least three ways to read the luxury objects which begin appearing regularly in breakfast pieces after 1640.

1) a warning against any attachment to earthly goods 10

2) an invitation to enjoy objects and food in moderation 3) an untroubled celebration of material splendor and delight

Rather than provide clear answers as the vanitas piece pretended to do and as pronk still life did, the breakfast still life was more ambiguous in posing questions. Its particular arrangements of particular objects invited a reflection on the place, value, and meaning of such increasingly familiar objects in Dutch life. Seen this way, the occasional presence of vanitas motifs makes perfect sense.

Food and Dinnerware as a Social and Economic Problem

Since classical antiquity, food was one of the most common motifs in Western moral literature where virtue was associated with moderate quantities of simple, basic foods prepared simply and consumed with inexpensive dishes. This moral rhetoric invariably contrasted such virtue to an "unhealthy" extravagance outwardly displayed in dainties, expensive foodstuffs, "excessive" quantity, elaborate preparation, costly utensils, and beautiful dining rooms furnished with beautiful courtesans, dancers, flute girls, and, in many classical texts, serving boys. This discourse on food continued as a major theme in European art and literature right through the nineteenth century.

At one end of the social spectrum, court society used the banquet to represent an exclusive world of wealth, manners, culinary artistry and refinement far from the bestial world of mere bodily appetite. At the other end was burgher humanist culture with its Stoic temperance, moderation, and simplicity, fueled by Protestant Stoicism and austerity.

Since burghers also aped their social superiors, the burgher discourse on food was more complex and ambiguous, with courtly values mingling with more traditional burgher thinking. So too, Protestant austerity infiltrated Protestant court culture, as seen in Milton’s Comus, a court masque of 1634 performed amid much feasting, music, and dancing in Ludlow Castle for the Earl of Bridgewater. Written in Protestant England by the sober humanist Protestant poet, John Milton, Comus dramatized the fight between virtue and vice with banqueting used as a central metaphor. The drama contrasted the chastity and virtue of an unnamed courtly heroine – an aristocratic Everywoman - to Comus, a pagan god of mirth, pleasure, and seduction. The denouement came in lavish banqueting hall of Comus’ castle where the heroine successfully fended off Comus’ wooing exemplified by a magical potion she refused to drink. Comus then gave a long speech on nature’s abundance, wealthy, and beauty which ended thus.

List Lady be not coy, and be not cosen'd With that same vaunted name Virginity, Beauty is natures coin, must not be hoarded, But must be currant, and the good thereof Consists in mutual and partak'n bliss, Unsavoury in the enjoyment of it self If you let slip time, like a neglected rose It withers on the stalk with languished head. Beauty is natures brag, and must be shown In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities Where most may wonder at the workmanship; 11

It is for homely features to keep home, . . . Think what, and be advised, you are but young yet.

Unmoved by this self-serving rhetoric, the eloquent and chaste heroine rebuffed Comus with a speech praising a Christian, Stoic abstinence.

Impostor do not charge most innocent nature, As if she would her children should be riotous With her abundance, she good cateress Means her provision only to the good That live according to her sober laws, And holy dictate of spare Temperance: . . . for swinish gluttony Never looks to Heav'n amidst his gorgeous feast, But with besotted base ingratitude Cramms, and blasphemes his feeder.

In addition to such moral dilemmas, food also triggered anxieties about the social order, especially from the fourteenth century on with the gradual rise of wealthy burghers capable of surpassing their betters in sumptuous living and banqueting. (The attack on presumptuous social climbers was frequently part of the moral debates around food since antiquity.) From 1300 on, Europe saw waves of largely ineffective sumptuary laws which tried to regulate expenditures in clothing and food according to one's social station. Preachers echoed the message from their pulpits. In this way, ruling elites tried to preserve the social hierarchies which served their notions of social order and good government.

Though Dutch seventeenth-century culture was not dominated by court elites, the rapid emergence and expansion of a prosperous burgher class eager to flaunt material prosperity and social importance in competitive displays of banqueting (especially at weddings) and fancy dishes must have been disturbing to many people and even, at times, to those caught up in such display. In a few regions, Dutch authorities even felt compelled to enact new sumptuary laws though their impact on such private spending was always weak at best. As usual, some of the lawmakers were the worst violators! To reinforce these socially conservative laws, Dutch preachers and moralists railed against the conspicuous display of wealth in large banquets by attacking "stinking orgies of gormandizing and carousing" and "showy and delectable refreshments and sumptuous repasts".

Since the problem of food also included the problem of dinnerware, dishes and glassware were also important. (The widespread adoption by burghers of the courtly fork in the early sixteenth century disturbed many writers as a symptom of moral decay. Luther condemned the fork as an instrument of Satan.) The problem of dishes was particularly visible because of the long-standing court ritual of displaying the most costly gold and silver plates on a special table in banquet halls. In this way, the high aristocracy made dinnerware a conspicuous site of social and economic display (as seen in the Limbourg Brothers's January and dozens of later Renaissance banquet scenes.) Seventeenth-century burgher culture continued this tradition on a lesser scale by making precious ceramics an important 12 element in interior decoration. Numerous Dutch Baroque genre paintings like De Hooch's Nursing Mother show fine ceramics displayed on top of cabinets and mantelpieces. (This tradition has remained important to middle class interior decoration ever since.)

Not surprisingly, the same seventeenth-century Dutch preachers who railed endlessly against excessive food also attacked what they perceived as a growing materialism displayed in "all unnecessary and superfluous household furnishings" and "countless gold and silver vessels". One preacher continued,

"We must not be like foolish children and set our hearts on these shining vanities ... for the Lord shall either take them away from us, or us from them."

One Dutch Baroque painting even allegorized Avarice as an old woman clutching at money, jewels, and a large pile of precious dishes.

Given the widespread anxieties triggered by rapid social and economic change, it is not surprising that so many works in the new category of Dutch still-life painting focused on the intertwined subject of food and dishes.

Pronk or Luxury Still-life

De Heem, Banquet Still-Life, 1640 Kalf, Pronk Still-Life with Chinese Cup, 1662 (Thyssen Collection, Madrid)

From 1640-1690, the "pronk" or luxury object still-life emerged, piling up lavish objects such as crystal, silver and gold goblets, precious shells, oriental carpets and ceramics, sumptuous floral displays, and culinary delicacies such as lobsters, oysters, and such. Occasionally they even showed the grand palaces with their formal gardens in which such "pretentious", often very large still-life paintings hung.

Even when pronk still life hung in homes furnished less sumptuously than the painted decor, they no longer offered the warnings about excess found in early vanitas and breakfast pictures. On the contrary, pronk offered Dutch homes illusions of an ever more lavish decoration. As luxury objects themselves, they contributed to an emerging real decor at a time when new quasi-aristocratic forms were appearing in other kinds of still-life, landscape, and genre painting. These included game or hunting still-life, villa, garden, and hunting landscape, and fijnschilder genre. If pronk was the projection of upwardly mobile prosperity, it was also the perfect decoration for patrician houses and villas which were as sumptuously furnished as the latest still-life painting. Since the late Middle Ages, aristocrats had displayed their wealth by setting out their most costly gold and silver plates and serving dishes on a sideboard. If Dutch burghers took up this tradition on a more modest scale, Dutch pronk still life transformed this courtly tradition of material display into a new category of still-life. Coextensive with the real furnishings of Dutch houses, these still-life paintings featured the latest Dutch taste for Chinese ceramics, elaborate Venetian glassware, and carved nautilus shells transformed into goblets allegorizing the wealth of the sea (a favorite Dutch theme.) Indeed, Dutch 13 craftsman began duplicating Chinese ceramics and Venetian glassware in large quantities in the mid to late seventeenth century.

At the same time, Kalf’s pronk still-life, in particular, set themselves apart from the potential materialism of the objects they depicted and from the craftsmanship of glassblowing, ceramics, and goldsmiths by exploiting the pictorial qualities of oil painting. Instead of heaping up piles of expensive things as did Jan de Heem and Abraham van Beyeren, Kalf opted for a striking economy in the number of dishes depicted and by working on smaller canvases. In this way he achieved a relative simplicity and modesty within the luxuries he depicted. Kalf moved even further from the materialism of contemporaries pronk still life by adopting a mysterious shadow from religious painting, especially the Dutch followers of Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Against this extreme tenebrism, Kalf exploited the translucency of glassware, especially half filled with red wine and dramatically lit from behind. Emerging from an infinite darkness (yet impossibly back-lit), Kalf’s dishes and glassware assumed an immaterial luminosity associated in Baroque religious art with the miraculous and the visionary.

In works such as the Pronk Still Life now in the Thyssen Collection, expensive collectibles were transformed into aestheticized cult-objects glowing silently amidst a spiritualizing darkness whose solemnity and mystery purged radiant color of any overt sensuality. The handling of color, light, and brushwork furthered this artful dematerializing of expensive things even as it gave a new loveliness to the things depicted in a kind of secular epiphany. Even the most humble of motifs – the half-peeled, spiraling lemons ubiquitous in Dutch Baroque still-life painting – took on a complex inner radiance through Kalf’s artful layering of translucent oil glazes. The reflected, colored light emerged from deep within the sectioned lemon and transformed humble fruit into something as beautiful as any courtly jewel.

Kalf’s still-life painting achieved a miraculous concordia discors, at once heightening the value of precious luxuries while dematerializing them with a spiritual mystery and aesthetic beauty no object could ever possess. At once luxurious yet simple, outwardly glittering yet inwardly radiant, sumptuously colored yet absorbed into a larger tenebrism beyond all worldly color, Kalf reinterpreted the materialism of contemporary Dutch townhouses and raised mercantile prosperity into the celestial sphere of poetry and art. Departing from the materiality which surrounded it, Kalf’s still-life painting used exquisite glassblowing and metalwork to set off its own higher artistry beyond all things. As with the "fine painting" of Vermeer and Ter Borch, pronk still-life celebrated the triumph of art over nature which Italian Renaissance humanist aesthetics had made central to European culture as a whole and to the visual arts in particular. i At a time when Dutch flower still- life paintings were praised for a higher and more complex beauty which no flower could offer, it is not anachronistic to quote an eighteenth-century aesthete such as Goethe on the appeal of Kalf’s pronk still life. It was the more advanced and self-conscious aestheticism of late eighteenth-century writers which allowed them to describe aesthetic qualities that Kalf’s burgher contemporaries were more able to prize intuitively than put into words.

One must see this picture [by Kalf] in order to understand in what sense art is superior to nature, and what the spirit of man imparts to objects when it views them with creative eyes. There is no question, at least there is none for me, if I had to choose between the golden vessels and the picture, that I would choose the picture. ii 14

Natural Science Still-Life: Flowers, Shells, and the Curiosity Cabinet

[I plan to expand the discussion of flower still-life at some future point.]

Still-life paintings which displayed precious collectibles (especially combinations of natural and artificial things) offered small scale expressions of the collecting mentality which figured prominently in the highest royal and court culture after 1500. As European explorers, armies, merchants, and settlers lay political and economic claim to a rapidly expanding new world (Americas, Africa, East Indies), it became fashionable for monarchs and princes to display their wealth, universal knowledge, and power to command things from across the globe by organizing international collections of rare, exotic, precious, and beautiful things from nature and from the human hand. Known as "curiosity cabinets", these were the first museums in Western culture. Such cabinets were themselves so famous that they formed the subject of numerous paintings, mostly executed by Flemish artist such as Jan Bruegel.

In so far as the seventeenth-century Netherlands was both the center for international trade and the region where a prosperous, large middle class invested large sums of disposable income in material culture - in refined things - the courtly fashion for collecting spread rapidly among Dutch burghers. Of course, they collected on a much smaller scale, just as their formal gardens were tiny versions of princely estates like Versailles.

Spurred on by new albums of botany and zoology which were lavishly illustrated with color prints and which were themselves seen as micro-collections and little "museums," seventeenth-century Dutch burghers began collecting rare flowers, shells, ceramics, ornate glassware, plates, and serving dishes. Instead of a large princely horticultural garden and collector's cabinet, the burgher had smaller scale representations: small ebony cabinets displaying shells and coral, albums of botanical and zoological prints, and most importantly still-life paintings.

The social meaning of these collections is crucial if we want to understand the intellectual aspiration of Dutch still-life painting and the proliferation of still-lives combining natural and artificial objects. For the princely "curiosity cabinet" or museum was the one cultural arena where the potentially base thing, the problematic material object of still-life was reconstituted as the stuff of the highest magnificence, noble scientific knowledge, and aesthetic discrimination. By imitating the princely collecting mentality, Dutch still-life painting sought to overcome its lowly, material status and rise to the level of the noblest intellectual discussions and displays.

On a purely economic level, the inclusion of beautiful shells and flowers in still-lives displaying expensive glasses and precious dishes helped naturalize and legitimize what was in strict religious and moral quarters vigorously condemned as a monstrous and unnatural avarice and waste. If nature's artistry could lend support to that of the human hand, perhaps the very objects of still-life paintings - exquisite, artificial collectibles - could take on greater legitimacy. And given the frequent discussions of art's rivalry with nature in post-Renaissance European aesthetics, literary criticism, and landscape architecture, many Dutch still-lives combining beautiful shells and dishes 15 probably staked out an implicit claim for the superior beauty of art over nature which would have given still-life painting itself yet another claim to respect and status. Here we are far from vanitas with its hostility towards human artifice and material accomplishment. On the contrary, the still-life which collects and displays beautiful natural and artificial things delights in the latter as either equal to those which come from nature's artistry (or "God's hand" as some said in giving this comparison a religious twist) or even superior. The last is stated directly in a poem on a flower still-life.

This work indeed yields nothing to life. No trained rose arbor gives more beautiful roses. No tulips, no narcissus ever met so suitable, so fine a likeness. Neither caterpillar nor butterfly will ever put this to shame. ... But alas! How short a time and the blossom must wither. Yet there is a means whereby the rose will not wither and perish. It will endure in secure colors, planted to measure by Zeuxis' hand, much better than in damp sand.

[Zeuxis was a famous Greek painter of still-life.]

Tromp l’Oeil Or Illusionistic Still-Life

Gijsbrechts, Vanitas Still-life, ca. 1670

Hoogstraten, Trompe l’Oeil Still-Life, 1662

This still-life offered a virtuoso naturalism, minimizing space to fool the beholder. Even the frame was a painted fiction. On one level then, it raised the art/nature comparison common in Renaissance-Baroque art theory and boasted of the painter's ability to fool the eye by equaling or even surpassing nature.

On another level, the still-life showed off Hoogstraten's higher conceptual powers not just as a composer of allegorical motifs in a witty still-life depicting important events in his life, but also as a painter honored by the highest courtly patrons of the day. As recounted in Hoogstraten's own book on painting published in 1678, the emperor Ferdinand III was so delighted at a presentation of Hoogstraten's paintings that he rewarded the artist with a chain of honor and a medal, the very objects featured in our still-life. The lines of poetry at the upper right recount the story of the ancient Greek painter, Zeuxis, honored in his day for the deceptive truth of his paintings. In this way, Hoogstraten elevated the "low" genre of still-life with its trivial, everyday objects, comparing it favorably with the greatest classical art and offering himself as a modern Zeuxis. 16

To ennoble himself further as an intellectual artist, Hoogstraten included two of his published plays, Dierijk en Dorothé, (The Hague, 1666), and De Roomsche Paulina, (The Hague, 1660). Here we see the still-life painter's defensiveness in the face of an intellectual culture which praised history painting and all but ignored the still-life paintings it nonetheless eagerly collected. The irony is Hoogstraten himself felt the need to uphold this very hierarchy when composing his own theoretical treatise on painting. After placing history at the top and trompe l'oeil still-life at the bottom, he wrote, "Apprentices set out playfully (on panels or walls) everyday objects in natural and cut-out colors, such as letters and combs. They find that it is easy to represent flat things on a flat ground. Yet honor can be won by deceiving princes and princesses ... Fruit or flower still-lifes serve moreover as practice in good taste and color composition".

If his treatise shows an ambiguous scorn and praise for still life, so does the painting itself. The display of Hoogstraten's books suggested the lofty realm of theory, reason, and history yet the work as a whole proudly displayed the artist's skill in deceptive still life. If the art treatise's status as literature all but required it to place history at the top, our still life claims an elevated rank for itself by appropriating the learned, allegorical mode of history and by wittily absorbing literature and history into still life, triumphing over them by making books into just two more deceptively painted, material things, the traditional subject of still life. If history was wittily reduced to the materiality of combs and brushes on the one hand, still life used history to argue its own high intellectual nobility on the other.

Though Hoogstraten's painting offered a somewhat witty rebuke to history - especially seen in the combination of high literature and lowly comb, soap, and shaving brush - its novel combination of still life and history also bought into the very hierarchical values which placed history over still life, ideas over things, mind over body, universals over particulars (and which Hoogstraten affirmed in his treatise on art.) Even the mundane objects of physical appearance address these issues in so far as they all contribute to the well-groomed body, a central topic in Renaissance and Baroque etiquette books. The widely-read burgher literature on etiquette emerged from the humanist ideal of a restrained, well-governed body. As outward bodily expression, grooming was inseparable from proper conduct; both were internalizations of civic codes maintaining the larger social order. In this discourse, peasants and workers served metaphorically as crude, ill-mannered, unkempt negative examples, as bodies and passions unregulated by mind. "Don't urinate in public like a peasant", etc. Proper conduct like good breeding and grooming were the marks of gentlewomen and gentlemen, those prepared physically, morally, and intellectually to participate in polite society. Hoogstraten's pictorial assertion of his own good grooming reminds us of the important issue of etiquette in fijnschilder painting, not just in grooming pictures such as Terborch's Lady at the Mirror but more generally in the whole fijnschilder aesthetic with its focus on civility and polite behavior.

In so far as Hoogstraten's personal toilette addresses the same theme of cleverly managed, artificially transformed physical appearance as does his illusionistic still-life painting, it is possible he intended the viewer to compare the refined art of personal appearance with that of his visually deceptive, intellectual still-life painting. From this perspective, what seemed lowly in contrast to literature - mere objects of personal hygiene - were signs of refinement, civility, virtue, and the mind's triumph over body. Soap and combs and books all worked toward a larger civilizing of a lower bodily nature. 17

Soap and combs also helped alert the thoughtful beholder to the idea that still-life painting worked not so much to record material things mindlessly as to select, arrange, compose, interpret, cleanse, and allegorize physical reality, to transform things into visual ideas. All of this went together in so far as social-climbing, still-life painters like Hoogstraten needed to display both their personal refinement and civility on the one hand and the higher, intellectual concerns of their art on the other before they could find acceptance and recognition in higher social circles (even the highest circles like the emperor). If one things back to Holbein's elevation of portrait painting in the French Ambassadors, one also should compare Hoogstraten's still life to other seventeenth-century displays of artistic nobility, Velasquez's Las Meninas and Vermeer's Allegory on the Art of Painting.

GAME OR HUNTING STILL-LIFE / this section has not yet been developed

Fyt, Game Still-Life with Diana, 1650-65, (Flemish) Fyt, Game Still-Life Outside Villa, 1655-61

Game still-life offered a more courtly mode tied to the aristocratic sport of hunting. In Flemish court painting by Snyders and Fyt, game still-life was often quite large, even taking on the grand scale of history painting in decorating palaces and large villas. So too, the animals were often heaped up in large quantities to underscore courtly ideas of landed wealth, cornucopian nature, and aristocratic power over the natural order and over all lower spheres of existence. Finally, the animals in game still-life painting were often shown lying on the grounds of magnificent villas or in beautiful gardens, sometimes with large hunting dogs or mythological figures like Diana, goddess of the hunt.

Like most pronk still-life painting, the game still-life indicates the courtly turn of Dutch burgher vales and appears primarily after 1650. Compared to their Flemish counterparts, Dutch game pieces were generally much more modest in size to fit into smaller Dutch burgher homes. They also displayed a more modest animal rhetoric and avoid mythological imagery. After 1660, some courtly qualities began to appear in Dutch game still life including villa settings, fine hunting equipment, dogs, or splendid animals. One typical example is Hondecoater’s large Still-Life with Peacocks in a Garden (1683, Metropolitan Museum). i In medieval literature such as the Romance of the Rose, the Ars-Natura comparison worked to heighten the supreme power of God’s creation and the comparative weakness of all human efforts, especially the art of poetry. (At that time, painting was a lower craft and as such was generally excluded from discussions of the rivalry between Ars and Natura.) Prior to the Renaissance, human art invariably lost the competition with God’s nature for the same reason medieval theology warned human minds from attempting to comprehend the divine. With the coming of Renaissance humanism, the arts boldly proclaimed themselves a higher nature grounded in divine mind and as such superior to the lower, material realm of the earthly sphere. Redefined now as liberal arts springing from noble mind, Renaissance and Baroque painting and sculpture could also claim a superior artistry triumphant over a bodily nature. ii Goethe, writing in 1797, quoted in L. Grisebach, Willem Kalf, Berlin, 1974, p. 84; also quoted in Philip Conisbee, Chardin, Phaidon, 1985, p. 74.