Still Life and Vanitas: the Hidden Language of Objects

Still life is a genre in which still objects, such as fruit, flowers, tableware and household items, are the only subject. Vanitas is a particular kind of still life from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which skulls, hourglasses and wilting flowers remind the viewer that life is short and that earthly luxury is transient.

Facts

A low-ranked subject that became great

Artists of antiquity already painted fruit and birds, and Roman still lifes survive at Pompeii. But as a genre of its own the still life emerged only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The French Academy ranked the genres in a hierarchy in which history painting stood at the top and still life at the bottom, because it demanded neither imagination nor the depiction of people. Even so it was loved by buyers, especially in the Netherlands, where citizens wanted to see their possessions portrayed.

In the Dutch Golden Age still lifes were painted in many variants: breakfast tables with ham and beer, bouquets, hunting trophies and lavish pronk still lifes with silver jugs, gold goblets and expensive fruit. In some still lifes real objects can be recognised, such as the glass Römer or the nautilus cup; look at the objects in the design section.

Reading vanitas

Vanitas is the word for a picture that urges the viewer to remember death. The expression comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” The skull is the clearest sign, but hourglasses, watches, extinguished candles, wilting flowers, peeled lemons and soap bubbles also mean that time passes and that everything is transient.

Books, musical instruments, money and jewellery stand for knowledge, pleasure and wealth, the things people value but which do not help in death. A lone dead butterfly or a mask can symbolise how quickly life is over. Read more about the language of symbols in the guide to iconography and attributes and under themes such as death and still life.

Spain and France

In Spain the genre is called bodegón. Francisco de Zurbarán painted a still life with lemons, oranges and a cup in 1633, with objects lined up in sharp light against darkness so that they seem almost sacred; see the Spanish Golden Age. In the Netherlands Rachel Ruysch made bouquets with almost scientific accuracy, in which worms and insects crawl among the flowers as a reminder of decay. See flowers and meals as themes.

In the eighteenth century Jean Siméon Chardin gave the genre a calm, humble seriousness with kitchen utensils and fruit painted in soft tones. The still life now became less a message and more a study in form, light and material.

Modern art and the legacy of the still life

For Paul Cézanne apples and pots were a laboratory. He arranged the objects in a composition and let the perspective shift to show how we actually see, and in doing so he laid a foundation for Cubism. Vincent van Gogh painted Sunflowers in thick paint, and Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque broke bottles, instruments and newspapers apart in Cubist still lifes with collage.

The Pop artist Andy Warhol turned cans and bottles into icons, as in Campbell’s Soup Cans, a still life of twentieth-century consumption. The vanitas picture lives on in contemporary art, in a dead fly, a rotting apple or a photograph of a decaying bouquet. The genre’s strength lies in the ordinary object carrying a large thought.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What does a skull together with an hourglass usually stand for in a picture?