Page 56 - Erasmus+ : Food on Europe's Tables

51 Evaluation of the Results

1 Charles Brady:
© National Gallery, Dublin

he genre of still lives can be organized in three categories: the flower
T still life, the kitchen piece and the hunting piece. Already at the end of
the 14th / beginning of the 15th century there were first allegorical references
to food in our culture. Well-known artists who began to depict food were for
example Jan van Eyck and Robert Champin. In the 15th century the still
life was dominated by negatively connoted objects. There were, for example,
items such as extinct candles, wilting flowers and skulls all symbolizing hu-
man mortality and vanitas. The greatest production of the still-life paintings
happened during the golden age of still-life paintings in the 17th and 18th
centuries, especially in Germany and the Netherlands. Specific motifs, such as
flowers, developed in different regions, such as the Netherlands. Here, paint-
ings of flowers were employed to showcase the various flowers that could be
grown by flower bulb producers. A wide range of still life painting, differing by
motifs, was created in various cities. The aim of the painters were, on the one
hand, to capture and reproduce the beauty of objects of nature and everyday
life and, on the other hand, to convey a coded message and intellectual content

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