Flemish Food Art: An Appreciation

Okay, admit it.  When ambling through collections of European art, you tend to bound past those   Dutch still life paintings.  I know I do.  Admirable though they might be in technique, there seems so little there to grab us (the above example is by Althasar van der Ast).  No figures to relate to, no narrative, no drama.  Worse still, the artists seem interchangeable, which conflicts with our who's-who or auteur approach to museum-going.  Moreover, still life has been written off as a low form of art.  With the exception of Cézanne, no artist who remains widely known today gained fame through painting piles of fruit, and for him, subject matter was far less important than method.  Here I want to offer something of an appreciation of the Dutch still life genre, or at least a contextualization that has made me slow down when crossing those vacant museum rooms.

It all begins after 1600, we are told, during the Golden Age of Dutch culture.  The flower picture on the left is from 1608 (by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder) and the skull with coins is from 1603 (Jacques de Gheyn the Elder). By this time, the Dutch Republic had been liberated from Spanish rule, and there was a growing middle class eager to invest in art.  Still life paintings were a smash hit and their popularity would last for over a century.  But the emergence of this genre is something of a mystery.   How did still life paintings first appear?  Why then?  Why there?  And what made them so damn popular?

To get at these questions, we need to first expose a myth: Dutch still life paintings did not appear ex nihilo.  They have a history before the 20th century, and that history is important for understanding cross-currents and changing tides in European art.  Here I want to focus on food paintings, leaving aside flowers, books, and other popular subjects.  Food, of course, is often present in representational art, and had been featured in many Renaissance paintings, from Leonardo's Last Supper (1494-8) to Bruegel's The Peasant Wedding (1568).  But food is incidental in most of these works.  The question is, when did food get recognized as a subject in its own right?

One important breakthrough seems to have been Pieter Aertsen's Butcher's Shop with a Flight Into Egypt, painting in 1551, half a century before still life painting officially took off in the low countries.  This painting (above) is nothing short of astonishing.  Aertsen was a Northern Mannerist, and he achieves here what is called a Mannerist inversion, taking a classical biblical scene and exiling it to the background, exalting lowly or incidental objects, by making them the primary subject of the work.  This has been done by others with landscapes, and now Aertsen was doing it with decadent piles of food.  The Flight into Egypt (shown in a detail below) is almost invisible, nestled below a pig's ear.  It's significance is rendered even more trifling by the presence of an equally proportioned genre scene on the right side of the canvas, which features two men and two women, inviting narrative projections from the viewer of domestic life and romance (also below).

Shortly after producing this with Aertson would be producing food paintings without religious pretext.  He specialized in market scenes, which quickly caught on.  These are usually market scenes: butchers, fishmongers, or fruit and vegetable sellers.  Others began to make kitchen scenes as well.  Technically, these are not still life paintings, because they retain important figurative elements, but the foodstuffs dominate, making them important precursors.  The greatest of these painters is perhaps Joachim Beuckelaer, who painted sturdy market women with rolled sleeves, stationed proudly aside mountains of cabbages.

Stylistically, however, there is a gap between the mannerist marvels of the 16th century, and the austere chiaroscuro, which typifies the 17th century genre.  To fill this gap, we need a detour through Italy, or so it seems to me.  Mannerism is colorful, dramatic, and flamboyant.  In both Northern Mannerism and its Italian counterpart, there is an active effort to break from the sedate realism of earlier Renaissance work.  So we must ask how did sedate realism re-enter the still life?  This question, I suggest, is tantamount to answering, how did Mannerism end?  One answer, popular in art history, is that mannerism was killed off, by a murderous painter named Caravaggio.

Caravaggio can be described as an anti-mannerist.  Compare his Supper at Emmaus (above), with the same theme painting by Pontormo (right), a pioneer of mannerism.  Where mannerists exaggerated and elongated bodies, making them almost otherworldly, Caravaggio achieved extreme naturalism, painting recognizable low-status individuals.  Where mannerists eschewed black, and used color to shade (cangiantismo), Caravaggio was a master of what Whistler would later called "nocturne painting": subjects are rendered in extreme darkness, with high-contrast highlights provides by candles or other restricted sources of light.  Where mannerists filled every inch of their canvases, Caravaggio used empty space generously and judiciously.  Mannerist paintings team with activity, and Caravaggio gives us frozen moments.  His paintings are not life-less (far from it), but they present life on the edge, in moments where the stillness of death is also palpably present.

Caravaggio, it must be said, did not invent this new approach to painting on his own.  He was influenced by earlier Lombardy painters, like Moretto da Brescia.  To understand the link between Caravaggio's stylistic innovations and Dutch still life painting, it is helpful to recall a forgotten figure in the Lombardy school, Vincenzo Campi.  Campi was a bridge figure between the excess of mannerism and the sobriety of Lombardy, a remarkable balance, which he achieved in part by adapting a genre of paintings that was more or less unknown in Italy: the market painting.  Influenced by Dutch artists like Beuckelaer (remember him?), Campi's paintings retain the opulent piles of food found in northern Mannerist market scenes, but arrange these more tidily, and he tones down the palette and adds more negative space.  He was creating paintings like this by the 1570s.  The one below is from 1580.

Now enter Caravaggio.  A specialist in biblical and classical scenes, Caravaggio is hardly known as a still-life painter.  But he surely would have seen works like Campi's.  When Caravaggio left the Lombardy region and arrived poor and hungry in Rome, he apprenticed himself to a popular painter, Giuseppe Cesari -- a mannerist with a dark palette.  He began doing hack work for Cesari, which included painting fruit.  Caravaggio's first known solo effort (c. 1591) depicts a boy peeling fruit.  Shortly thereafter, he would paint his magnificent Boy with a Basket of Fruit (1593-4), which features Caravaggio's dough-eyed lover set against a plain dark background cradling a delirious mound of apples, grapes, and other delectables. In 1595-6, he produced something remarkable: a painting showing nothing but a basket of fruit.  Though not the first painting of its kind, this was something truly unusual.  No people were present, no market women or biblical characters.  Nothing but the fruit.  Notice that this basket looks just like the one in the Emmaus painting above, suggesting it might have been a study.

Study or not, Caravaggio did go on to paint other bona fide still life paintings.  The example below, from 1605, shows off his skill.  Here he rivals Aertsen, above, but he has imposed his anti-mannerist approach to great effect.

Carravaggio's style spread quickly through Europe.  He had imitators in Italy, France, and Spain.  In Italy, he influenced the work of a superb artist named Fede Galizia, who began producing compelling still life paintings.  The earliest dated example is from 1602 (below), but it is possible that Galizia was painting such panels before Caravaggio.  In any case, she deserves credit for being an important pioneer of the genre.

Caravaggio's Spanish enthusiasts also began producing still lifes.  The two best followers were Juan Sanchez Cotán and Francisco de Zurbarán.  They both adopted a highly formalized, minimalist approach and can be credited with producing some of the most striking still life paintings ever crafted.  Examples from each appear below.

My interest here, however, is with Caravaggio's followers in the Dutch Republic.  Unlike the Italians and Spanish, the Dutch were Protestant.  More precisely, they were Calvinists.  This presumably added to Caravaggio's appeal.  The Dutch were committed to austerity and restraint--characteristics evident in his paintings.  But Caravaggio also had a lusty side.  His sensuous humanism and his apotheosis of prostitutes and streetwise pretty boys did not align with their values.  Moreover, there was a Calvinist ban on religious subjects, which had been Caravaggio's forté.  Indeed, there were efforts to cut art off from the church.   Meanwhile, new found affluence meant there was a growing class of consumers with disposable income who wanted to invest in art without violating religious strictures.  In this climate, Caravaggio's style had great appeal, but only his still life paintings were safe in terms of subject matter.

Safe, that is, unless one could interpret a fruit bowl as something indulgent.  Here Calvinism exerts an unexpected influence on portrayals of food.  Wealthy patrons needed a way to express the fact that their  lavash life-styles remained in line with teachings of the church.  The solution: paint still lives that include the trappings of wealth (imported foods, expensive service items), while also indicating that such things are fleeting and vain.  Dutch artists began to paint table settings in a style that owed much to the Lombardy school, but with signs of mortality and decay: rotting fruit, meat or fish (which will quickly spoil), crumbling bread, empty dishes, half-full goblets, broken glasses, snuffed out candles, and even insects and skulls.  These "vanitas" paintings achieved a delicate balance between celebrating Dutch prosperity while also acknowledging that true reward is reserved for the hereafter (the detail is from the van der Ast at the start of this post).

All of this, of course, has stage setting for the work that I want to examine.  Let me turn, at last, to a few Dutch still lifes.  To begin with a canonical example, consider this masterpiece by Willem Claeszoon Heda (1634).  The background is a simple gray field with a ray of light, reminiscent of Caravaggio.  The main subject is a dinner table after a feast, replete with many of the aforementioned symbols of impermanence, along with a tipped chalice and a crumpled tablecloth. At the near midpoint of the canvas is a silver "cellar," which is a decorative canister for holding salt, a luxury item.  There is also a plate of half eaten oysters, and a half peeled lemon, whose rind hangs down like a noose on the far right.  Thus, saltiness, bitterness, and tartness are all on display, standing in for culinary abundance (lemons were imported from the Mediterranean), but also serving as metaphors for life's hardships.  These items are common in the genre, and reappear the same iconic consistency as Mary and Jesus in Renaissance art.

Heda's painting is at once decadent and austere.  These two extremes are always in dialectic display in these works, but some artists pushed the balance in one way or the other.  The painting below, by Pieter Claesz (1635) is striking for its minimalism. It mostly consists in a large piece of meat, which, rather than enticing, has the charm of a human skull.

By contest, consider this work by Abraham van Beyeren, which shows a more ostentatious style which became popular later in the 17th century.  The extravagance on display here vaguely recall Mannerism, but the controlled, horizontal formal, and the vanitas symbols make it unmistakably Baroque.

One interesting phenomenon in the world of Dutch still life painting was the inclusion of women.  Though sill greatly outnumbered by men, a number of women painting attained considerable recognition at that time.  I mentioned Rachel Ruysch in an earlier blog (on the Wunderkammer), who was an accomplished flower painter.  Of equal acclaim was Clara Peeters.  The example below is "breakfast" painting, which contrasts with the "banquet" painting we've been looking at.  Peeters liked to depict cheese, and in this stunning example from 1616, she also includes dates, nuts, and pretzels (those coils on the left are not meat).  Unlike the other examples, there are no overt symbols of mortality here, though the grim color scheme and claustrophobic composition hardly make this an homage to hedonism.

Also of note is the knife.  A standard trope in Dutch still life paintings, Petters liked to sign her work by creating an illusionistic engraving on cutting implements.  I like to think of this as a feminist gesture.  Also amenable to that interpretation are the figure cast into this particular knife: a nude woman pouring wine and another holding a cross.  These two figures perfectly capture the dialectic that I have been discussing, but they also say something about the artist.  Peeters may be presenting herself as devout, but also carnal.  An unsurpassed master of the genre, she had a talent for breathing life into inanimate things.  It is hard to view her canvas without feeling the urge to pick up a piece of the dried fruit on offer.

Notice, too, the chip in the table here.  You might think it looks familiar.  A less subtly chipped table appears above in one of Caravaggio's examples.  I don't know who innovated this particular symbol of decay.  It may have Italian origins, but, then again, we have seen that the Italians were also borrowing ideas from the Dutch.  I'm not suggesting that Peeters was looking at Italian paintings.  It's beleived that her teacher was Osias Beert, the elder, a Dutch master.  Here is a graphic example of his craft (note the roll, which also makes a cameo in the example from Peeters).

By way of conclusion, I want to mention that, despite a strong bias against still life painting, the genre has an important place in art history.  I mentioned Cézanne at the outset, but we must also remember that Braque and Picasso made extensive use of the genre in launching cubism, Morandi made a career of it, and pop artists arguably restored something analogous to still life painting when they began to depict ordinary household items.  With this in mind, I end with a Warhol-inflected homage to Heda.

Tintoretto's Paradise

Among Venice's many treasures, few are more spectacular than Tintoretto's Paradise, which hangs in the Doge's Palace, next to San Marco's Cathedral.  I saw it on a recent art pilgrimage.  The painting was commissioned when Tintoretto was 70 years old, and was executed with the help of his son, Domenico (three of Tintoretto's children became painters, including his daughter, Marietta Robusti).  The painting is a roaring sea of activity--far too detailed for the eyes to take in at once.  At 74 x 30 feet, it is about the size of a tennis court, and it spans a massive wall in a room that was once the seat of Venetian power.  It would be Tinoretto's last masterpiece.

For a thousand years, Venice was ruled by elected Doge's (or "dukes").  In 1340, construction began on a Gothic palace, that would serve as a residence, a seat of government, and, in the lower chambers, a prison.  No chamber in the palace was more important that the Great Council Hall, where up to 2,000 aristocrats would gather to legislate policy.  The room was originally decorated with frescoes by Guariento di Arpo, a trecento painter from Padua, but those were destroyed in a great fire in 1577.  Below you can see a badly damaged detail of a Guariento fresco, on display at the Palace, as well as a detail from a well preserved work, showing the artist's impressive but decidedly Gothic style. 

After the fire, the Venetian government needed to rebuild the Great Council Hall, and they decided to hold a contest to selected a painted for it's walls.  Tintoretto submitted a sketch, as did Veronese and Bassano, among others (those three sketches appear below in this order).  The commission was originally granted to Veronese and Tintoretto, who were evidently expected to collaborate, despite their different styles.  This plan changed when Veronese died in 1588.  At that point, Tintoretto was given the commission.

At that point, Tintoretto changed his original design, perhaps to catch up with prevailing trends in style, and he executed another sketch (below), which is currently under restoration at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid.  The new design conveys the spirit of the final work, though with less grandeur.

Tintoretto is perhaps the grandest of Venetian painters.  When he submitted his first Paradise sketch , he was still completing his work for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco--two decades worth of mammoth paintings that remaining the crowing achievement of his career.  Dark and imposing, these show of Tintoretto's talent as a dramatist.  He breaks from compositional conventions to bring new energy to familiar subjects.  His crucifixion, for example, has the familiar suspended Christ with mourners at its center, but the surrounding expanse is swarming with equestrian soldiers, and executioners who labor to erect the two other crosses that will eventually flank Christ's sides.  The is not a painting of an temporally fixed occurrence, but of an unfolding event.  One almost expects the scene to change after each glance away.

Drama is certainly present in his Paradise painting as well, but it departs from his more canonical work in various ways.  There is more color in his palette, less narrative, and the composition is decentralized. Above I called it a sea of activity, and this is more than a metaphor.  The painting looks like a turbulent body of water, with dark blue waves and white crests.  It resembles the seascapes created by some of the great ukiyo-e printmakers of Japan, like the one below by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

Tintoretto's sea is made of people.  Even the white crests are filled with people.  His earlier sketch for the painting was also punctuated by white forms, but these were clouds.  The final version is astonishing in part because there is no negative space.  Every inch of the surface teams with figures ascending into Paradise.  These figures are layered on top of each other, with the highest layer occupied by winged angels hovering into the composition from all directions.  At the center there is an ball of orange light, the gateway to heaven, but the rest of the painting seems almost devoid of orientation.  There is no up or down, no sky or earth, no stable point on which to perch.  Tintoretto's Paradise is a crowded place.  It would be suffocating were it not for the overall all sense of flow.  Each individual body is part of a larger whole here.  It is a paradise in which identity gives way to dynamic unity.

One consequence of this unity is that it is difficult to discern the people in Tintoretto's painting.  It might be the most figurative populous picture in the Western canon, but, paradoxically, the figures are almost invisible.  They are a texture, forecasting Pollack's action paintings and other exercises in pure abstraction.  To me, this is the what makes the work so compelling.  It is painting whose whole is not only greater than its parts, but seems almost independent of those parts.  When one focuses in on interlocked bodies from which it is constructed, one loses the larger visual design, and, when one steps back, those bodies magically disappear, and the grand canvas (perhaps the largest painting on canvas in history) breathes as one.

Giotto's Hell

No figure deserves greater credit than Giotto di Bondone, for ushering in the revolution in art that we now know as the Renaissance.  Though others, like Cimabue, had shifted from the constraints of Gothic art, Giotto introduced a degree of naturalism that had not been seen since the natural world.  Naturalistic, yet not classical in sensibility.  Greco-Roman art is marked by a kind of heroic theatrics, grotesque at times, and always idealized.  These vulgar tendencies would eventually make their way into Renaissance art, but, for brief moment at its inception, Renaissance painting had a poetic calm, inherited from Gothic spiritualism.  Giotto preserves that poetry, but translates the otherworldly focus into something movingly terrestrial.

I recently had the great thrill of seeing Giotto’s masterpiece, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (known to art historians as the Arena, because a roman arena once stood on the same site).  Enrico Scrovegni came from a money lending family, and allegedly built the chapel in order to compensate for the sin of usury, which might otherwise mean an eternity in hell.  He commissioned Giotto to pain frescos covering all the interior walls of the chapel.  The work, completed rapidly between 1305 and 1306, is one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of art.  The two walls are divided into rectangular tableaus, depicting the life of Mary and of Jesus.  Portraits of the two also appear on the ceiling, like two planets set against as starry blue, protecting parishioners like a heavenly mantel.  On the central rear wall of the chapel, we find Giotto’s piece de la resistance: the Last Judgment.  At the threshold of Giotto’s hell, Giotto depicts his patron, Scrovegni, delivering the chapel as his gift of penance. 

Goitto’s hell is a remarkable place.    It seems to pour out of a lava pool from the foot of an enthroned Christ figure, who looms with stiff majesty above flanks of angels.  The lava pool is a tangle of tortured bodies set against a dark background.  Some are strung up like drying meat, other lie limply, like rags, and still others writhe in pain.  Interspersed among them, we find teams of gray-blue demons, who prod and torment the hapless naked damned.  There is also a hanging Judas.  Elsewhere in the cycle, Judas appears, hook nosed, receiving a payoff for betrayal, with a shadowy demon coaxing him on.

At the center of Giotto’s hell, we find an enormous and imposing Satan, one of the greatest monster’s in western art.  Giotto’s Satan is a portly slate blue figure, with furry jowls and twisting horns.  He is perched on a man-eating dragon, his feet are crushing other a cluster of bodies, and each outstretched hand holds another body.  Most disturbingly, the lower half of a human body dangles from Satan’s mouth, forecasting Goya’s infamous black painting of Saturn Devouring his Son.  Giotto’s This Satan is king of cannibals, an unmovable mountain of cruelty whose round belly practically pulsates with the girth of previous fleshy meals.

Curiously, Giotto’s Satan also bears a striking resemblance to the Mahakalas of Tibetan art.  The one reproduced below was recently auctioned at Christie's.  Mahakala is a protector.  Placed in a home or a monastery, he would protect his owners, by absorbing and deflecting evil forces.  Given the resemblance, one wonders whether Giotto had seen such images, or whether an influential Tibetan painter had made a field trip to Padua.  In any case, the Tibetan works invite a kind of Gestalt shift.  For all his ravenous menace, it is hard not to see Giotto’s Satan as a positive presence.  He serves as a warning for believers, and thus has a didactic function that can be regarded as positive.  But he also functions as an artistic domestication of evil.  By depicting Satan so compellingly, as the visual epicenter of the Arena frescos, Giotto has converted evil into an enchanting mythic beast.  This is a fairly tale Satan, part of a gripping moral tale, but far from charmless.  Indeed, Satan’s posture echoes the enthroned Christ, but he steels the show.

Echoes, incidentally, are a fundamental feature to Giotto’s Arena.  There are multiple points of compositional and narrative parallelism.  Some examples are reproduced above.  There are two panels with seated figures, two panels with figures on horseback, two sloping mountains with a tree, two mobs with spears, two hangings, two sacrifices (Joachim’s and Christ on the Cross), two babies in bed, two expulsions, two resurrections, two gaping holes (heaven and hell), two kisses, and two annunciations, and two figures bearing the chests.  One these two figures is Caiphas, who condemns Christ, and in that very moment rends his clothes to expresses contempt.  The other figure is the female personification of anger, one of the seven deadly sins.

Giotto’s seven sins are unconventional.  Anger is standardly included on lists of sins, and Giotto also has one other conventional sins: Envy.  But his list also includes Injustice, Inconstancy, Infidelity, Folly, and Despair.  Missing are Avarice, Gluttony, Lust, Pride, and Sloth.   Giotto’s omissions relate to his principle of parallelism:  he depicts seven virtues.  But it is hard to resist the idea that there is something editorial going on here, as my colleague Doug Lackey argues in a wonderful paper, “Giotto in Padua: A New Geography of the Human Soul.”  By removing Lust and Gluttony, Giotto distances himself from asceticism.  By including Folly, he denounce blind faith, an attitude that also comes through in a small cartoon of a person with sticks for eyes, painted nearby the Folly figure discreetly above the Chapel’s side door (so discrete, in fact, that I didn't find her until I made a second visit).  The omission of Pride raises questions about Giotto’s own ego (he may have recognized the magnitude of his own artistic achievement), but it may also reflect the emerging humanism at the dawn of the 14th century.  Giotto implicitly invites viewers to take pride in human accomplishments.   Perhaps most touching is his inclusion of Despair among the sins, and its counterpart, Hope, among the virtues.  As someone who is deservedly regarded as the first Renaissance painter, it is fitting that Giotto advocates a positive outlook on life.

This brings us back to Giotto’s hell.  Fire and brimstone theories promote fear, and one might expect a similar mood to pervade a chapel whose central panel depicts the Last Judgment.  It is also believed to have been a funerary chapel, because of its barrel roof.  But Giotto resists that sentiment.  Unlike some of his Flemish counterparts who paint hell with terrifying relish, Giotto’s hell is more positively contextualized in the twilight blue of the Arena.  It is one option for humankind, but also a place of myth and legend.  The chapel itself embodies another option: beauty, creativity, and a celebration of human life.