The lowest-ranked genre in painting was also among the best-selling
Still life sat on the bottom rung of the traditional hierarchy of painting genres, yet buyers loved it. Its roots run from Egyptian tombs, where painted food was meant to become real in the afterlife, to Netherlandish artists of the 16th and 17th centuries, whose Dutch word stilleven gave English its name.
The Greeks prized lifelike objects. A legend has Zeuxis and Parrhasius competing to paint the most convincing illusion, the earliest recorded account of trompe-l'oeil. Pliny the Elder singled out Peiraikos, mocked as a painter of vulgar subjects such as barbershops, donkeys and vegetables, whose small works nonetheless fetched more than grand paintings by many others. Roman walls and floor mosaics at Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villa Boscoreale show the familiar glass bowl of fruit, and rich Romans laid mosaics displaying their food as a sign of hospitality.
Around 1300, Giotto and his pupils revived the form as painted niches of everyday objects within religious murals, and for centuries still-life elements served Christian messages. Late medieval manuscript borders filled with ever more realistic flowers, animals and objects; the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, likely produced in about 1440 in Utrecht, includes coins and fishing nets chosen to echo the text. Slow-drying oil paint, developed by Jan van Eyck and fellow Northern artists, made hyper-real detail possible.
Leonardo da Vinci's watercolour studies of fruit, made around 1495, and Albrecht Dürer's precise drawings of plants and animals were among the first to shed religious meaning. By the late 16th century still life had become its own genre and a professional specialty in Western painting, prized partly because it gives an artist unusual freedom in arranging a composition.
Symbolism never vanished entirely. The skull as a reminder of death dates back to Roman times, often paired with the phrase Omnia mors aequat, death makes all equal, and Dutch painters around 1600 launched the vanitas tradition that artists have reworked ever since. Food and flowers also returned in the 16th century as emblems of the seasons and the five senses. Modern still lifes have spread to found objects, photography, computer graphics, video and sound.
Source: Still life
