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Still Life
Still lives are the representations of
lifeless objects, which are arranged
according to formal artistic and aes-
thetic criteria.
This genre emancipated itself from
landscape and portrait paintings at
the beginning of the 17th century - in
the Baroque period. There exist, how-
ever, early examples of still lives dat-
ing all the way back to Ancient Rome.
The term still life, referring to a Dutch
term, did not appear in the German
language until the middle of the 18th
century.
A French term - la nature morte - was
employed in the theoretical discus-
sions of the French Academy in the
17th century. The term still life was
documented in the middle (or end) of
the 18th century. By the early 19th cen-
tury, the term still life had been estab-
lished as the term for the genre in the
various translations (stilleven, nature
morte, natura morta, still life, etc.).
Georg Flegel:
© public domain.
erasmus_final_pages.indd 54 18.09.19 17:24
