Still Life: From Ancient Images to Modernism

[Illustration page in the source PDF: images of the Tomb of Menna, a Pompeian still life and a medieval harvest, with English explanations. The Russian account follows in the source.]

Still life has accounted for a large proportion of depictions of food in art over many centuries, from Roman frescoes to contemporary art. A still life, also known by the French term nature morte, is a work depicting an arrangement of inanimate objects, such as fruit, flowers or household items.

The earliest known still lifes were created by the Egyptians in the fifteenth century BC. Funerary paintings depicting food, including grains, fish and meat, have been found in ancient tombs. The most famous ancient Egyptian still life was discovered in the Tomb of Menna, whose walls are decorated with exceptionally detailed scenes of everyday life.

Still life from the Tomb of Menna.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans also created similar images of inanimate objects. Although they most often reserved still life for mosaics, they also used it in frescoes, such as Still Life with a Glass Bowl of Fruit and Vases, a first-century wall painting from Pompeii.

Still Life with a Glass Bowl of Fruit and Vases (AD 63–79). In the Middle Ages, artists adapted still life to religious purposes in order to convey moral messages. They also depicted food in scenes of everyday agricultural work, harvests and feasts.

Harvest scene, attributed to the illuminator Andrea da Bologna, before 1340. Tempera, gold and ink on parchment, 14.4 × 7.6 cm (5 11/16 × 3 inches).

1. Still life is not ‘about beautiful food’. It is about what food means to society. For the Egyptians, this was literally life after life: food as ‘provision’ for eternity.

For the Greeks and Romans, it was order, domestic life, prosperity and material culture. In the Middle Ages, it was morality, religious meaning, labour and the ‘proper’ way of life.

2. Food in art is a document of civilisation.

Such images allow us to read an era: what people feared, believed in and valued, and how they lived.

3. A direct bridge to contemporary gastronomy and food art.

Today, a plate is also an ‘arrangement of objects’. There is one question: is it simply form, or is it a statement?

Still life reminds us that once an ingredient enters the frame — or the plate — it already carries meaning. Even if you ‘just put it there’.

Still life as the ancestor of food art

It is sometimes useful to remember that food art was not invented yesterday. It is not a hundred years old. Nor even five hundred. Its direct ancestor is still life.

Still life was never simply ‘beautifully arranged food’. Fruit, game, bread and vessels did not appear in the image merely to beautify an interior. They were traces of life. Signs of human presence.

In Egypt, images of food guaranteed the continuation of life after death. In Rome, they signified order and domestic culture. In the Middle Ages, they carried a moral message that viewers could read without a caption.

In Renaissance painting, food became a language of symbols.

Contemporary gastronomy does exactly the same. A plate replaces the canvas. Taste, texture and temperature replace paint. A person eating here and now replaces the museum viewer.

A plate is the same kind of still life. Only for a minute.

Yet we often confuse food art with striking presentation. Presentation without attention to meaning is an empty form. Like a still life from which the soul has been removed. Beautiful, but mute.

Still life teaches gastronomy a rigorous discipline: there are no accidental objects in the frame.

Nor should there be any in a meaningful dish. If you add an ingredient ‘because it looks beautiful’, that is decoration. If you add it ‘because it is a phrase’, that is language.

Once an ingredient is on the plate, it is already speaking. The only question is whether the person eating hears it.

Food art lives in the pause. In the second between expectation and reality. In the moment when a person stops merely consuming calories and begins to be present.

When attention appears, food stops being merely food. It becomes a statement.

A quiet one. But a precise one.

[Illustration page in the source PDF: European still lifes and English explanations; the Russian account follows in the source.]

Still life became established as a genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its name derives from the Dutch word stilleven, literally ‘quiet life’.

Early examples contained religious symbols. The idea was to show a ‘slice of life’. Yet this ‘slice’ was often embellished with exotic objects — parrots on the table, for example, alongside different foods, luxurious fabrics or glassware.

The still-life genre flourished in the Netherlands, Italy and Spain.

In particular, Dutch and Flemish masters of the seventeenth century, during the Dutch Golden Age, painted lavish scenes displaying many different foods together. In these paintings, the meaning of each individual food is less important. The effect is achieved through the composition as a whole. The idea is to express abundance and a privileged way of life through elaborate ‘displays’ of food: game, poultry, lobsters, shellfish, exotic citrus fruit or precious grapes. Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Still Life with Ham, Lobster and Fruit, around 1653.

Vermeer and the hidden message of still life — vanitas

In his famous painting The Milkmaid, the artist used expensive pigments, rich colours and exceptional lighting to depict the most ordinary foods: milk and bread.

The hidden message of still lifes from this period is the transience of life, the futility of pleasures and the inevitability of death.

A particular type of still life exists at this time: vanitas.

The word vanitas is explained here as ‘emptiness’, suggesting futility and vacancy. This represents a Christian view of earthly goods and aspirations. In some paintings, it is expressed directly through objects such as skulls, rotting fruit and clocks. The Milkmaid, Johannes Vermeer, around 1660, oil on canvas, 45.5 × 41 cm.

Southern Europe: Spain and Italy — bodegones and Caravaggio

In Southern Europe, in Spain and Italy, fewer artists concentrated on this genre.

Spanish still lifes are called bodegones. They are austere: dead animals still awaiting butchery, raw fruit and vegetables, and sombre backgrounds. In Italy, one of the leading figures in the genre was Caravaggio, with his naturalistic style. His Basket of Fruit, showing imperfect fruit placed at eye level, is an excellent example.

Basket of Fruit, Caravaggio, around 1599, oil on canvas, 46 × 64.5 cm.

Still life is not ‘about food’, but about a model of the world

Food becomes a way of showing:

• abundance and status — Dutch luxury;

• austerity and truthful texture — Spanish restraint;

• transience and limits — vanitas: pleasure does not cancel time.

In Northern Europe, a ‘theatre of abundance’; in the South, an ‘austere document’

• The Netherlands: an effect created by the whole composition, a ‘display of the world’, wealth and expansiveness.

• Spain/Italy: fewer words, more truth. Darkness, raw ingredients, the wait for butchery. Reality rather than celebration.

Vanitas is a moral ‘whisper’ within beauty

Its meaning is this: yes, it is beautiful. Yes, it tastes good. But time still passes. Skulls, clocks and rotting fruit are therefore not horror, but reminders of the price of pleasure.

How this applies directly to contemporary gastronomy and food art

Translated into the language of the kitchen, it gives us three schools:

1. Dutch: ‘composition matters more than the ingredient’. This concerns large set-piece presentations, generous arrangements and ‘abundance as a gesture’.

2. Spanish/Caravaggesque: ‘the truth of the ingredient matters more than decoration’. This concerns honest simplicity, raw materials, quietness and texture. And the courage to show imperfection.

3. Vanitas: ‘pleasure + the meaning of time’. This is the level at which a dish says not ‘delicious’, but ‘remember’. For example: seasonality as finitude, fermentation as time, leftovers as traces.

‘Vanitas and gastronomy: why a beautiful dish should remember time’

In the seventeenth century, still lifes had a quiet underlying tension.

They could look luxurious: fruit, wine, lobsters, glass, fabric. Yet a whisper often lived within this beauty: everything passes.

This type of still life was called vanitas.

Its meaning is straightforward: futility, emptiness, transience. That is why artists placed a clock, a skull or a partly rotten fruit beside the abundance. Not to frighten the viewer. To bring them back to reality.

I think contemporary gastronomy sometimes needs the same reminder. We have learnt to make things beautiful.

Sometimes even too beautiful.

But beauty without a memory of time quickly becomes decoration.

And cooking is literally an art of time.

Fermentation. Ageing. Infusion. Proving. Slow cooking.

Even ordinary bread is about patience. About waiting. About a process that cannot be accelerated without losing its meaning.

Vanitas in gastronomy is not about gloom.

It is about honesty.

About the fact that pleasure does not cancel finitude.

About the fact that seasonality is a law of nature, not marketing.

About the fact that ingredients age. Taste changes. The moment passes.

And if a dish can say this — quietly, without slogans — it becomes deeper. Sometimes a single detail is enough.

A slight ‘imperfection’. A trace of time.

A suggestion that the beauty here is living rather than eternal.

Food art begins where the plate stops being a display and becomes a thought. And a thought almost always begins with a question: what does time do to this taste — and to me?

Still life: the eighteenth century

By the eighteenth century, the religious and allegorical connotations of still-life painting had, in many cases, been discarded.

‘Kitchen’ pictures of tables evolved into carefully considered depictions of varied colours and forms, showing everyday food. The French aristocracy commissioned artists to create paintings of abundance and extravagance. Rococo intensified the interest in trompe-l’œil. Trompe-l’œil, French for ‘deceive the eye’, is a specialised form of still life in which viewers are led to believe that the image is real. The French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau revitalised the waning Baroque style, shifting it towards something less severe, more naturalistic and less formally classical: Rococo. Watteau is credited with inventing the genre of fêtes galantes, idyllic scenes with a theatrical quality. He influenced Rococo painters such as the Austrian artist Franz Christoph Janneck.

Here Janneck depicts the still life on the table in great detail. These details emphasise the brevity of life and the importance of pleasure, unlike the Dutch masters, who suggested the fleeting nature of earthly pleasures. At the end of the eighteenth century and after the fall of the French monarchy, European academies, particularly the Académie Française, played a central role in academic art. According to the academy, there was a hierarchy of genres, and still life stood at the very bottom. Historical, biblical or mythological subjects were considered more artistically significant. Still life began to fall out of fashion. Painting caption: Elegant Company Feasting on a Terrace, Franz Christoph Janneck, oil on copper, unframed, 16.26 × 20.51 inches (41.3 × 52.1 cm).

By the 1830s

By the 1830s, genre and portrait painting had become the focus of the Realist and Romantic artistic revolutions. The idea was to convey a strong emotional mood without being concerned with precision. Richness was expressed through fluid brushwork and shimmering light. During this period, we see the work of Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne and Van Gogh. They reinterpreted nature through their own colour harmonies.

Painting caption:

Luncheon of the Boating Party, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1880–1881, oil on canvas, 69.13 × 51.25 inches.

By the eighteenth century, still life gradually takes off its ‘ecclesiastical robes’ and moves into the kitchen. Not in the sense of becoming simpler. Rather, it matures and becomes domestic, yet calculated: colour, form, texture, light. Just as on a good plate, where simple food suddenly begins to resonate because it has been intelligently composed.

Rococo takes the next step. The French aristocracy commissions images of abundance, because abundance too needs to be displayed skilfully. A love of trompe-l’œil, ‘deceiving the eye’, emerges. You look and almost believe you can reach out and take something. To be honest, this is deeply gastronomic: how often has contemporary cooking played the game of ‘this is not what it seems’? Today, it is called an ‘illusion’, a ‘presentation trick’, or ‘and now for a surprise’. Watteau and his circle translate Baroque into a lighter language: less stern solemnity, more air, more pleasure. What matters here is that pleasure stops being a sin and becomes culture. Almost as in a good restaurant, where enjoyment is cultivated rather than noisy.

Then the academy arrives and says: ‘We have a ranking of genres.’ Still life is placed at the bottom. Historical and mythological subjects are at the top, while food and tables are supposedly too mundane. It is amusing that gastronomy has followed the same path in different eras: first ‘cooking for servants’, then ‘haute cuisine’, then a return to simplicity, this time as a conscious choice.

By the 1830s, the focus changes once again. Mood becomes more important to artists than precision. Brushwork comes alive, light begins to shimmer, and the world is no longer ‘copied’ but ‘experienced’. This is a direct relative of contemporary experiential gastronomy, where value lies not in the perfect geometry of the dish but in the feeling of the moment. Taste as emotion. Light as atmosphere. The table as a stage. Reduced to a single gastronomic formula, it looks like this: the eighteenth century teaches composition; Rococo teaches illusion and pleasure; the academy teaches hierarchy — and snobbery; and the nineteenth century teaches mood. All of this, in a useful sense, still underlies the way we ‘build’ taste on a plate.

Still life: the twentieth century

The first four decades of the twentieth century formed an exceptional period of artistic revolution. Avant-garde movements developed rapidly and overlapped as they moved towards complete abstraction. Still life, like the other visual arts, continued to develop and adapt until the middle of the century, when complete abstraction, as exemplified by Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, eliminated all recognisable subject matter.

Still Life with Aubergines, Henri Matisse. Matisse further reduced the depiction of still-life objects until they became little more than bold, flat outlines filled with bright colours. He also simplified perspective and introduced multicoloured backgrounds. In some of his still lifes, such as Still Life with Aubergines, the table and its objects almost disappear among the other coloured patterns filling the room.

Paul Cézanne explored geometrical spatial organisation and the elements of colour, shape and line. This was a major step towards abstract art.

Cézanne’s experiments can also be seen as leading directly to the development of Cubist still life in the early twentieth century.

Still Life with Fruit Dish, Paul Cézanne, 1879, oil on canvas, 46.4 × 54.6 cm (18 1/4 × 21 1/2 inches).

The Cubists / Picasso

Adapting Cézanne’s shifts of planes and axes, the Cubists instead concentrated on breaking objects down into pure geometrical shapes and planes. Between 1910 and 1920, Cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso painted many still lifes, often including musical instruments, bringing still life to the forefront of artistic innovation almost for the first time. This painting refers to Cézanne’s large still life Apples and Oranges by borrowing favourite motifs — a patterned curtain, a laden fruit bowl, crumpled white linen, fruit and a rustic table — imitating formal devices — the horizontal arrangement of objects across the tabletop, inconsistencies of viewpoint, tilted perspective and variations in paint handling from dense impasto to barely covered canvas — and echoing Paul Cézanne’s innate sense of ceremony.

Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, Pablo Picasso, 1909.

‘When food became form’

At a certain point, artists stopped ‘painting food’ and began thinking through it. The twentieth century did to still life what contemporary gastronomy did to the plate: removed unnecessary words and left the structure.

Matisse is about taste as colour.

He simplifies objects into flat silhouettes and makes the background louder than the food itself. As in a dish where the ingredient is not ‘described’, but illuminated through colour, contrast and rhythm. Sometimes food even ‘disappears’ into the pattern, like an ingredient that does not shout on its own but sustains the whole chord.

Cézanne is about taste as geometry.

His apples are not apples ‘for beauty’. They are weight, volume, balance, an axis. He is like a chef who constructs a plate through discipline: where the centre is, where the pause is, where the tension lies. Construction rather than decoration.

The Cubists — Picasso and company — go further: they take the ingredient apart into planes and reassemble it.

This already resembles the contemporary approach of ‘deconstruction’: bread becomes a line, fruit a patch of colour, fabric a rhythm. But the point is not the trick.

The point is that we begin to see the ingredient as a language of form.

Here is my gastronomic conclusion: food art does not begin with striking presentation. It begins with understanding the shape of taste. Sweetness is roundness and softness.

Acidity is a sharp angle.

Bitterness is a dark depth.

Salt is sharpness and a boundary.

Texture is punctuation itself: crunch places a full stop, cream makes a comma, fermentation adds ‘subtext’. If you can hear this, you stop ‘decorating food’. You begin speaking through the ingredient.