Looking at the Overlooked

Four Essays on Still Life Painting

Norman Bryson

• Editorial: Reaktion Books
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780232522
• Categoría: Arte
• Categoría: Arte generale

In this, the only up-to-date critical work on still life painting in any language, Norman Bryson analyzes the origins, history and logic of still life, one of the most enduring forms of Western painting. The first essay is devoted to Roman wall-painting while in the second the author surveys a major segment in the history of still life, from seventeenth-century Spanish painting to Cubism. The third essay tackles the controversial field of seventeenth-century Dutch still life. Bryson concludes in the final essay that the persisting tendency to downgrade the genre of still life is profoundly rooted in the historical oppression of women.In Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson is at his most brilliant. These superbly written essays will stimulate us to look at the entire tradition of still life with new and critical eyes.

1 Xenia

We know from the villas buried beneath the lava of Vesuvius that the Romans possessed a category of painting much resembling what would later be called ‘still life’: xenia. The works that survive fulfil most subsequent definitions of this branch of painting: they represent still-siehende Sache, things standing still, nature reposée, things at rest; such things as fruit, baskets of flowers, loaves of bread, ewers, pitchers, platters, fish, seafood, game – the familiar repertoire of the later genre. Yet it would be wrong to decide that, because the ensemble of objects so resembles that of later painting, one must be dealing here with the same kind of work, with Still Life, or even with its origins.¹ The xenia need to be approached on their own terms. They are a fascinating group of images, and any reading of still life painting that ignored them would be radically incomplete. Yet they present peculiar difficulties of approach. Exactly because they seem so close in content to later still life painting, they are easily elided with images produced under quite different cultural conditions; what can be quickly lost is the sense of their specificity. And the xenia essentially come to us as a ruin; we possess only a minute fraction of the still life of antiquity, mere fragments of what once was there. The present essay is a reading of some of these fragments; given their brokenness and dispersal, it is necessarily tentative and incomplete. Our first step must be to establish at least some of the conditions that formed the semantic field of which the xenia were a part, and this necessarily will take us to those few texts concerning xenia which survive from antiquity – Philostratus, the Natural History of Pliny, suggestive asides by Plato and Vitruvius. The corpus of relevant texts is indeed scant, but enough for us to begin to look again at the images in detail, and not only at the images themselves, but at the decorative schemes which frame and structure them.

The xenia that come down to us would be pure enigma if we were unable to ascertain something of what they meant to their Roman viewers and why they were valued, their symbolic implications and semantic charge. It is fortunate that there survives one particular source of information which deals explicitly with the codes of viewing that surrounded Roman painting, and not as brief digressions within a philosophical treatise or as entries in a compendium of general knowledge, but as a pedagogical text designed with the express purpose of guiding Roman students through the paintings of their culture: the Imagines. Their author, Philostratus, was a Greek Sophist who taught in Athens and later in Rome in the third century AD, and the work takes the form of descriptions of paintings supposedly forming the extensive collection of a wealthy art-lover in the city of Neapolis, ancient Naples. The question whether the paintings in the Imagines actually existed, or were wholly or largely imaginary, was the subject of heated and inconclusive debate during the last century, and the issue remains unsolved.² In a sense the question is irrelevant to the usefulness of Philostratus’ text. If the paintings were non-existent, what the Imagines in fact describe are codes of viewing in a remarkably pure form: protocols, expectations and generic rules governing the viewing of pictures, almost in abstraction from its empirical objects. If, on the other hand, the paintings described actually existed in the collection of a Neapolitan amateur, those rules of viewing become anchored in the context of actual Roman art production. Either way, the Imagines are crucial to the understanding of xenia. In Philostratus’ gallery mythological and historical painting are well represented; so is landscape; and among these other genres are two paintings of still life, the only ones in the collection.

XENIA I
It is a good thing to gather figs and also not to pass over in silence the figs in this picture. Purple figs dripping with juice are heaped on vine-leaves; and they are depicted with breaks in the skin, some just cracking open to disgorge their honey, some split apart, they are so ripe. Near them lies a branch, not bare, by Zeus, or empty of fruit, but under the shade of its leaves are figs, some still green and ‘untimely’, some with wrinkled skin and over-ripe, and some about to turn, disclosing the shining juice, while on the tip of the branch a sparrow buries its bill in what seems the very sweetest of the figs. All the ground is strewn with chestnuts, some of which are rubbed free of the burr, others lie quite shut up, and others show the burr breaking at the lines of division. See, too, the pears on pears, apples on apples, both heaps of them and piles of ten, all fragrant and golden. You will say that their redness has not been put on from the outside, but has bloomed from within. Here are gifts of the cherry tree, here is fruit in clusters heaped in a basket, and the basket is woven, not from alien twigs, but from branches of the plant itself. And if you look at the vine-sprays woven together and at the clusters hanging from them and how the grapes stand out one by one, you will certainly hymn Dionysos and speak of the vine as ‘Queenly giver of grapes’. You would say that even the grapes in the painting are good to eat and full of winey juice. And the most charming point of all this is: on a leafy branch is yellow honey already within the comb and ripe to stream forth if the comb is pressed; and on another leaf is cheese new curdled and quivering; and there are bowls of milk not merely white but gleaming, for the cream floating upon it makes it seem to gleam.³

XENIA II
This hare in his cage is the prey of the net, and he sits on his haunches moving his forelegs a little and slowly lifting his ears, but he also keeps looking behind him as well, so suspicious is he and always cowering with fear; the second hare that hangs on the withered oak tree, his belly laid wide open and his skin stripped off over the hind feet, bears witness to the swiftness of the dog which sits beneath the tree, resting and showing that he alone has caught the prey. As for the ducks near the hare (count them, ten), and the geese of the same number as the ducks, it is not necessary to test them by pinching them, for their breasts, where the fat gathers in abundance on water-birds, have been plucked all over. If you crave for raised bread or ‘eight-piece loaves’, they are here near by in the deep basket. And if you want any relish, you have the loaves themselves – for they have been seasoned with fennel and parsley and also with poppy-seed, the spice that brings sleep – but if you desire a second course, put that off till you have cooks, and partake of the food that needs no fire. Why not, then, take the ripe fruit, of which there is a pile here in the other basket? Do you not know that in a little while you will no longer find it so fresh, but already the dew will be gone from it? And do not overlook the dessert, if you care at all for medlar fruit and Zeus’ acorns, which the smoothest of trees bears in a prickly husk that is horrid to peel off. Away with even the honey, since we have here the palathè, or whatever you like to call it, so sweet and dainty it is! And it is wrapped in its own leaves, which lend beauty to the palathè.

I think the painting offers these gifts of hospitality to the master of the farm, and he is taking a bath, having perhaps the look in his eyes of Pramnian or Thasian wines, although he might, if he would, drink the sweet new wine at the table here, and then on his return to the city might smell of pressed grapes and of leisure and might belch in the faces of the city-dwellers.⁴

Why should we turn at this point to Philostratus? After all, if the paintings never existed, one would be relying on the evidence of an ingenious mythomane. The Sophist philosopher might have invented the entire gallery, together with improvised and misleading suggestions for viewing its contents, solely as an exercise in rhetoric or the bizarre use of imagination. Yet the paintings which Philostratus describes do correspond to the evidence of the archaeological excavations in Campania; the practice of thematically grouping paintings into clusters or cycles, so striking in this text, closely resembles the painting programmes present, for example, at Pompeii;⁵ and the discussion does not proceed randomly, but follows the pattern of other surviving works in the classical genre known as ekphrasis, words on the subject of images. The descriptions are consistent with the visual, archaeological and literary evidence. And they are more than verbal descriptions, they are commentaries. Although in his preface to the Imagines Philostratus stresses the importance of imitation, his argument is that the recognition of lifelike effects is only the first stage of a mature understanding of painting, and he warns his students against settling for superficial appreciation: to admire mere lifelikeness is to ‘praise an insignificant feature of the painting and one that has to do solely with imitation: but we should not be praising its intelligence or the sense of decorum it shows, though these, I believe, are the most important elements of art’.⁶ The admiration that a painting provokes is not related principally or only to the material objects it represents, but to the ideas it is able to suggest to the reflective observer: Philostratus expects painting, as Michel Conan puts it, ‘to nourish the flow of thought’.⁷ And the flow is not to be idiosyncratic or subjectively associative: Philostratus is educating his readers in the properties of viewing, in public codes of recognition. What, then, are the ideas appropriate to xenial

In his monumental work, Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin observes that ‘In the oldest system of images food was related to work .... Work triumphed in food. Human labour’s encounter with the world and the struggle against it ended in food, in the swallowing of that which had been wrested from the world’.⁸ Bakhtin’s remark applies directly to the first xenia that Philostratus describes, but in reverse: what Philostratus first stresses is the complete absence of the dimension of human labour from a system of natural abundance:

Purple figs dripping with juice are heaped on vine-leaves; and they are depicted with breaks in the skin, some just cracking open to disgorge their honey, some split apart, they are so ripe.

The figs break open of themselves; no effort or implement is needed to reach the goodness within. That goodness is ‘honey’, food that not only requires no cooking, but is unaffected by cooking: it can be heated, yet fire will not transform it into another state. The figs themselves render all preparation redundant: no need even for a dish or plate, a vine-leaf is enough to serve them. This is nourishment that nature produces for its own, and already a sparrow has chosen the best of the fruit. In a sense what is described is not human food at all, food that marks out humanity as different, as needing a diet that is ‘species specific’. The figs equalise nature’s species, or more exactly they place in suspension the cultural imperative to alter the natural world in order to appropriate nature to what is human. It is the opposite of a georgic relation to nature – the kind that Bakhtin describes.⁹ There, the earth is grudging and will not yield its fruits without struggle; everything must be wrested from the soil with effort, so that what is eventually consumed and celebrated is the fruit of labour and (agri)cultural work. Here the human order is bracketed, and with it the distinction between what is nature and what is culture. The image seeks a moment prior to cultural intervention, when the distinction between these categories has not yet formed:

All the ground is strewn with chestnuts, some of which are rubbed free of the burr, others lie quite shut up, and others show the burr breaking at the line of division.

Three states of the chestnut: unbroken and covered with burr; with the burr breaking along the natural seam; and open. What is mimed is the human action of breaking into the nut: nature performs this task by itself, casting what is human in a rôle of contented passivity. And the painting itself is caught up in this general obviation of effort: the red of the apples does not have to be ‘put on from the outside’, it glows ‘from within’. It is unclear whether this red that is applied from the outside comes from the sun, or from pigment – which is exactly the point. Painting here takes on the colours of nature: it loses its connection with cosmetic application, the marks of a brush on a surface, so that the cultural labour of making a depiction is bypassed, and the painted fruit glow without the intervention of technique:

Here are gifts of the cherry tree, here is fruit in clusters heaped in a basket, and the basket is woven, not from alien twigs, but from branches of the plant itself.

What would be repellent here is a basket woven from anything other than the same plant that produces the fruit: the text works to prevent the thought of human activity, of a division of labour that would take the making of baskets away from this plant and this one place into a farm economy, or any kind of planned agriculture. For a basket woven out of any other substance would necessitate the recognition of systematic work, of cultural operations that cut across natural abundance with a network of other places, times and acts. Everything must take place locally, so that the cherry tree itself supplies the frame for its own fruit: there must be no suggestion of a frame that cuts into this scene from somewhere else (and least of all a picture-frame).

Philostratus concludes his description of the first xenia with a list that might have come from Lévi-Strauss’ The Raw and the Cooked.¹⁰ What do all these foods have in common, the wine and honey, cheese and milk, if not that all are culinary invocations of a world without work? When the women in The Bacchae of Euripides leave the city of Thebes for the hills and for the cult of Dionysos, all toil is forgotten: scratch the soil with bare fingers and milk comes welling up, strike a thyrsos in the earth and a spring of wine pours forth; pure honey spouts from the wands.¹¹ The honey and the mil...