Changing Stillness
Notes on Rhetoric and Ontology in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Still Life
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.46.3.07Keywords:
still life, rhetoric, ontology, episteme, metaphor-metonymy, allegory, naturalismAbstract
This essay examines the distinctive knot of ontology and rhetoric woven by sixteenthand seventeenth-century still life. Framed against a Foucauldian analysis of the Âge classique and its epistemic order, it seeks to illuminate the subtle shifts this minor genre introduced into the culture from which it emerged. The central argument is that, through its pictorial features—meticulous naturalism, the absence of a thematic centre, and indifference to the historia—still life made visible the onto-linguistic fabric that structured the classification of beings in its time. Moreover, these very features endowed the genre with a peculiar capacity to shift both the place and the “essence” of the things depicted. In doing so, still life stages a singular form of change that unfolds within the immobility of its representation.
Downloads
References
Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Arasse, Daniel. Le detail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture. Paris: Flammarion, 1996.
Barthes, Roland. “Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur.” In The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, translated by Richard Howard, 129–48. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Bergström, Ingvar. Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by Christina Hedstrom and Gerald Taylor. London: Faber and Faber, 1956.
Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974.
Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion Books, 2018.
Casarino, Cesare, and Andrea Righi, eds. Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism. Translated by Mark William Epstein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Chastel, André. La grottesque. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.
Comanini, Gregorio. The Figino, or On the Purpose of Painting: Art Theory in the Late Renaissance. Edited by Ann Doyle-Anderson and Giancarlo Maiorino. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas. “The Allegories and Their Meaning.” In The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by P. Hultén, 89–108. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987.
DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas. Arcimboldo: Visual Jokes, Natural History, and Still-Life Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Dorléac, Laurence Bertrand. Pour en finir avec la nature morte. Paris: Gallimard, 2020.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2005.
Grootenboer, Hanneke. The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. London: Zero Books, 2011.
Hassig, Debra. Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Hultén, Pontus, ed. The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the 16th to 20th Century. New York: Abbeville Press, 1987.
Impelluso, Lucia. Nature and Its Symbols. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. Los Angeles: J. P. Getty Museum, 2003.
Lacan, Jacques. The Psychoses, 1955–1956. Translated by Russell Grigg. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, book 3. London: Routledge, 1993.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Lowenthal, Anne W., ed. The Object as Subject: Studies in the Interpretation of Still Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Marin, Louis. “The Frame of Representation and Some of Its Figures.” In On Representation, translated by Catherine Porter, 352–72. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
McHam, Sarah Blake. Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Muraro, Luisa. Maglia o uncinetto: Racconto linguistico-politico sulla inimicizia tra metafora e metonimia. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1998.
Muraro, Luisa. “To Knit or to Crochet: A Political-Linguistic Tale on the Enmity Between Metaphor and Metonymy.” In Another Mother. Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism, edited by Cesare Casarino and Andrea Righi, translated by Mark William Epstein, 67–120. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2011.
Schapiro, Meyer. “The Apples of Cezanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still-life.” In Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries; Selected Papers, 1–38. New York: George Braziller, 1982.
Sterling, Charles. La nature morte de l’antiquité à nos jours. Paris: P. Tisné, 1952.
Stoichita, Victor I. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting. Translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015.
Vasari, Giorgio. Le Vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue, insino a’ tempi nostri. Vol. 1. Turin: Einaudi, 2015.
Wajcman, Gérard. Ni nature ni morte: Les vies de la nature morte. Caen: Nous, 2022.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Authors
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
More in: Submission chapter
