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One thing modern life is not short of is imagery. | 0:00:08 | 0:00:11 | |
We are bombarded by the fast-cut, | 0:00:12 | 0:00:14 | |
quick-moving symbols of advertising and media. | 0:00:14 | 0:00:18 | |
It's everywhere we look. | 0:00:18 | 0:00:19 | |
But the story of still life is not about looking, | 0:00:21 | 0:00:24 | |
it's about seeing. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:25 | |
Still life asks us to stop and consider the world anew. | 0:00:36 | 0:00:41 | |
Our impulse to take pleasure in the simple things of everyday life | 0:00:45 | 0:00:49 | |
stretches back into the depth of time. | 0:00:49 | 0:00:52 | |
Throughout history, artists have used still life to help us | 0:00:56 | 0:01:00 | |
understand the beauty of nature... | 0:01:00 | 0:01:01 | |
..and value the material world we have created around us. | 0:01:04 | 0:01:07 | |
The story of still life is an astonishing tale | 0:01:12 | 0:01:15 | |
of how the depiction of humble things | 0:01:15 | 0:01:17 | |
was relegated to the bottom of art's hierarchy... | 0:01:17 | 0:01:21 | |
..yet rose to play the key role | 0:01:23 | 0:01:25 | |
in some of art's most revolutionary moments. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:27 | |
And today, it lives on in unexpected ways. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:36 | |
Almost anything has got aesthetic qualities. | 0:01:55 | 0:01:59 | |
There are many more beautiful things than | 0:01:59 | 0:02:02 | |
we give credence to in our day-to-day lives. | 0:02:02 | 0:02:06 | |
When we think about what happiness really entails, | 0:02:08 | 0:02:11 | |
it often is about an appreciation of the moment, | 0:02:11 | 0:02:15 | |
and of things that are right in front of our eyes, | 0:02:15 | 0:02:18 | |
and things that are, in a way, quite ordinary. | 0:02:18 | 0:02:21 | |
And still life helps us with that. | 0:02:21 | 0:02:24 | |
In a way, still life is the most demanding genre of art to take | 0:02:24 | 0:02:29 | |
seriously because it doesn't have any of the obvious signs of importance. | 0:02:29 | 0:02:33 | |
How artists depict the world helps us to decide what | 0:02:33 | 0:02:37 | |
we think of as valuable, and what we neglect and demean. | 0:02:37 | 0:02:41 | |
The story of this intriguing genre is intertwined with religion, | 0:02:51 | 0:02:56 | |
politics and wealth. | 0:02:56 | 0:02:58 | |
Depicting a mere object might seem the simplest | 0:02:59 | 0:03:02 | |
and most obvious form of art. | 0:03:02 | 0:03:04 | |
But it's a practice the greatest names | 0:03:06 | 0:03:08 | |
have always been drawn towards. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:10 | |
But how do you define it? | 0:03:13 | 0:03:14 | |
What actually constitutes a work of still life? | 0:03:15 | 0:03:18 | |
The four basic elements that an artist is going to be | 0:03:27 | 0:03:29 | |
looking for when they are composing a still life is that, first, | 0:03:29 | 0:03:32 | |
they are going to choose their objects, | 0:03:32 | 0:03:34 | |
then they are going to place them in space - | 0:03:34 | 0:03:36 | |
because the space is just as important as the object, | 0:03:36 | 0:03:39 | |
and then they are going to consider their lighting, | 0:03:39 | 0:03:42 | |
and last of all, they will think about the framing, how the | 0:03:42 | 0:03:45 | |
total composition actually works within the height | 0:03:45 | 0:03:48 | |
and width of the finished image. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:50 | |
It's a painting of everything within arm's reach. | 0:03:54 | 0:03:58 | |
It's everything that's touchable, | 0:03:58 | 0:04:00 | |
it's everything that you could lift with your hand. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:04 | |
It's about a manual, and gestural space. | 0:04:04 | 0:04:07 | |
One peculiarity of still life painting is that, by and large, | 0:04:09 | 0:04:12 | |
the world stops at the far edge of the table, it just ends. | 0:04:12 | 0:04:16 | |
You do not even ask why. It is so cleverly done, you don't | 0:04:16 | 0:04:19 | |
even think... "They're censoring this, | 0:04:19 | 0:04:21 | |
"what have they got beyond the table?" | 0:04:21 | 0:04:23 | |
It's far more interested in the tactile world, | 0:04:27 | 0:04:30 | |
and the interplay between things that you... Dare I touch this glass? | 0:04:30 | 0:04:33 | |
Things that you lift and are used to, and you get | 0:04:33 | 0:04:36 | |
so used to that you don't see them any more. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:38 | |
So, one of the things that European still life gets into is, | 0:04:38 | 0:04:42 | |
supposing this is about the objects that are so familiar | 0:04:42 | 0:04:45 | |
and everyone's got them, so much so that you never look at them. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:48 | |
It's a sort of re-enchantment of the things that are overlooked, | 0:04:48 | 0:04:52 | |
that are so taken for granted that you don't see them any more. | 0:04:52 | 0:04:56 | |
Well, literally, a still life painting is | 0:04:57 | 0:04:59 | |
a painting of inanimate objects, but it clearly is not adequate | 0:04:59 | 0:05:02 | |
because any still life painting from the middle of the 17th century | 0:05:02 | 0:05:06 | |
is likely to have beetles and bugs and snails and live animals | 0:05:06 | 0:05:10 | |
so the term itself is only approximate. | 0:05:10 | 0:05:12 | |
During the Italian Renaissance, | 0:05:43 | 0:05:45 | |
the ancient city of Milan was one of the world's key centres of art | 0:05:45 | 0:05:49 | |
and learning. Among the many treasures still to be found here | 0:05:49 | 0:05:53 | |
is one deceptively simple painting that is of vital | 0:05:53 | 0:05:56 | |
importance in the story of still life. | 0:05:56 | 0:05:58 | |
We are in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. | 0:06:07 | 0:06:10 | |
Its origins go back to the donation made by Cardinal Federico Borromeo | 0:06:10 | 0:06:15 | |
in 1618 when he decided to donate his private collection | 0:06:15 | 0:06:19 | |
to the Ambrosiana, | 0:06:19 | 0:06:21 | |
thus founding the oldest museum in Milan. | 0:06:21 | 0:06:24 | |
Although the collection is not a huge collection as such, | 0:06:24 | 0:06:29 | |
nevertheless, we have amazing masterpieces. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:33 | |
The Pinacoteca has many very important masterpieces | 0:06:34 | 0:06:39 | |
but definitely, there is one which deserves special attention. | 0:06:39 | 0:06:44 | |
Here is the famous basket of fruit by Caravaggio | 0:06:58 | 0:07:03 | |
which is surely one of the most important pieces of our collection. | 0:07:03 | 0:07:07 | |
The painting is one of the most fascinating, beautiful, | 0:07:39 | 0:07:43 | |
enigmatic, important works of art, not only in the history | 0:07:43 | 0:07:47 | |
of still life painting but in the whole of European art. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:51 | |
It looks, for all the world, like a commonplace basket of fruit, | 0:07:51 | 0:07:54 | |
and yet it is painted with a realism, with an intensity, | 0:07:54 | 0:07:57 | |
a sense of detail, and immediacy that certainly is unparalleled. | 0:07:57 | 0:08:02 | |
And historically, of course, in this painting, Caravaggio has | 0:08:04 | 0:08:07 | |
painted the very first known still life painting of a basket of fruit. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:11 | |
When this work was first created, the people at that time had never | 0:08:14 | 0:08:18 | |
seen anything like it. | 0:08:18 | 0:08:19 | |
The basket of fruit is recognised | 0:08:21 | 0:08:23 | |
as the first major work of Western still life. | 0:08:23 | 0:08:26 | |
It was painted in 1596 by the infamous artist, | 0:08:29 | 0:08:33 | |
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. | 0:08:33 | 0:08:35 | |
And by doing something seemingly obvious as depicting a simple | 0:08:37 | 0:08:40 | |
basket of fruit, Caravaggio had written a new chapter | 0:08:40 | 0:08:44 | |
in art history. | 0:08:44 | 0:08:46 | |
Caravaggio was a rather dark character, very ambitious | 0:08:48 | 0:08:52 | |
and when he was 21 he paints his only still life painting. | 0:08:52 | 0:08:56 | |
It's a basket of fruit that wants to be something else. | 0:08:57 | 0:09:01 | |
It wants to be a painting about life and death, | 0:09:01 | 0:09:04 | |
and resurrection and salvation and whether you can achieve such a thing. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:11 | |
Caravaggio is a man full of doubt | 0:09:11 | 0:09:13 | |
and I think that doubt is in that painting. | 0:09:13 | 0:09:15 | |
The forms that he makes are all extremely imperfect. | 0:09:18 | 0:09:23 | |
There isn't anything that hasn't been ravaged by a worm or a bug | 0:09:23 | 0:09:27 | |
or some kind of foliage disease because Caravaggio loves things | 0:09:27 | 0:09:33 | |
when they are imperfect and damaged. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:35 | |
The symbolism in the painting is quite highly charged. | 0:09:36 | 0:09:39 | |
The apples are conspicuously worm-eaten | 0:09:39 | 0:09:42 | |
and they are meant to bring to mind the apple from which Eve ate, | 0:09:42 | 0:09:47 | |
which condemned man to sin, death and time. | 0:09:47 | 0:09:50 | |
And their counterpoint is the vine leaves | 0:09:53 | 0:09:56 | |
which stand for Christ and they stand for the wine | 0:09:56 | 0:10:00 | |
that is Christ's blood that saves us from death. | 0:10:00 | 0:10:04 | |
The painting is about death, the worm-eaten apple and the hope for | 0:10:04 | 0:10:08 | |
eternal life divine, | 0:10:08 | 0:10:10 | |
and yet Caravaggio always leaves space for doubt. | 0:10:10 | 0:10:14 | |
Some of the vine leaves have begun to | 0:10:14 | 0:10:16 | |
wither and they seem almost to have turned into hands, gesturing, | 0:10:16 | 0:10:20 | |
reaching for salvation as if salvation isn't, in fact, certain. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:24 | |
And the whole basket of fruit teeters on the edge of the ledge as | 0:10:24 | 0:10:28 | |
if about to fall. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:29 | |
It's a picture that's got so much in embryo of what makes him | 0:10:32 | 0:10:35 | |
an extraordinary artist. | 0:10:35 | 0:10:36 | |
It's one of the great paintings in the world. | 0:10:36 | 0:10:39 | |
Caravaggio's still life resurrected one of the most popular and | 0:10:51 | 0:10:54 | |
fascinating of art's disciplines. | 0:10:54 | 0:10:56 | |
The impact of the work can only really be | 0:10:56 | 0:10:59 | |
understood in the context of what had come before. | 0:10:59 | 0:11:02 | |
With his humble subject, dedication to realism and sublime technique, | 0:11:03 | 0:11:09 | |
Caravaggio had revived a genre of painting lost since antiquity. | 0:11:09 | 0:11:12 | |
In ancient Egypt, large-scale tomb paintings have been discovered | 0:11:20 | 0:11:24 | |
that contain elements familiar to still life. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:26 | |
Again, Ancient Greek art also depicted simple objects that | 0:11:33 | 0:11:37 | |
point towards the genre. | 0:11:37 | 0:11:39 | |
But the finest examples of the ancient world's still life | 0:11:42 | 0:11:45 | |
wouldn't be revealed until a discovery in the mid-18th century. | 0:11:45 | 0:11:49 | |
From under the ash of Pompeii, early excavations of the site | 0:11:56 | 0:12:01 | |
uncovered 2,000-year-old Roman still life frescoes. | 0:12:01 | 0:12:04 | |
There are interesting examples in Roman arts of paintings of fruit | 0:12:10 | 0:12:14 | |
and fish and water and jugs of wine, | 0:12:14 | 0:12:17 | |
and these are described as works of Xenia art. | 0:12:17 | 0:12:21 | |
Now, Xenia is a fantastic, ancient Greek word and means a kind of | 0:12:21 | 0:12:25 | |
guest-host friendship or the gifts that are given | 0:12:25 | 0:12:28 | |
between guests and hosts. | 0:12:28 | 0:12:30 | |
The Xenia paintings aren't just pretty things, | 0:12:30 | 0:12:32 | |
they are not just there to show off the skill of the artist, | 0:12:32 | 0:12:35 | |
they had a job of work to do. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:37 | |
The Roman Empire is a massive place, | 0:12:37 | 0:12:40 | |
people are travelling the whole time, there's a huge trade in goods, | 0:12:40 | 0:12:44 | |
in ideas, there's a lot of political visits from diplomats, | 0:12:44 | 0:12:47 | |
and I think, in some ways, the Xenia paintings are saying to the | 0:12:47 | 0:12:51 | |
wider world, "we are a cosmopolitan society, | 0:12:51 | 0:12:54 | |
"we accept people who travel from foreign lands, | 0:12:54 | 0:12:57 | |
"and this is the kind of hospitality that you can expect from us." | 0:12:57 | 0:13:01 | |
These Xenia paintings are the clearest examples of ancient | 0:13:03 | 0:13:06 | |
still life that form a direct link | 0:13:06 | 0:13:08 | |
with the later tradition of European work. | 0:13:08 | 0:13:11 | |
Whoever painted this fresco was thinking in exactly the same way | 0:13:13 | 0:13:17 | |
as artists who would come later. | 0:13:17 | 0:13:19 | |
The subjects chosen are domestic. These are humble things. | 0:13:22 | 0:13:27 | |
There's a range of textures on display. | 0:13:29 | 0:13:32 | |
We can see a dialogue between the natural and the man-made. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:38 | |
Objects overhang the edge of the table, breaking the line, | 0:13:42 | 0:13:45 | |
emphasising perspective. | 0:13:45 | 0:13:47 | |
Even in the earliest work in the genre, | 0:13:51 | 0:13:53 | |
we can see defined rules of composition. | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
And there's another link between ancient Xenia | 0:13:58 | 0:14:00 | |
and still life we know today... | 0:14:00 | 0:14:03 | |
The direction of light. | 0:14:03 | 0:14:04 | |
So the first thing that I'm going to do is just move my hand very, | 0:14:10 | 0:14:14 | |
very loosely and expressively over the surface of the paper, | 0:14:14 | 0:14:17 | |
which is just making a first response to the shape and the texture | 0:14:17 | 0:14:21 | |
and the size and the weight of the subject. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:23 | |
Fairly soon, | 0:14:23 | 0:14:24 | |
I am going to be thinking about the lighting of it because I want this | 0:14:24 | 0:14:27 | |
to look three-dimensional and I am instinctively lighting from the left. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:32 | |
If you go to a national gallery and have a look at a broad spectrum | 0:14:35 | 0:14:39 | |
of still life, have a look at which direction the light is coming from. | 0:14:39 | 0:14:43 | |
And in the majority of paintings it is going to be | 0:14:44 | 0:14:46 | |
coming from the left-hand side. | 0:14:46 | 0:14:48 | |
So here we have a classic example - Caravaggio's Basket Of Fruit. | 0:14:52 | 0:14:56 | |
And the light is very clearly coming from the left, we can see the | 0:14:56 | 0:14:59 | |
shadow just underneath the grapes, and also on this side of the basket. | 0:14:59 | 0:15:04 | |
From the left. From the left. | 0:15:04 | 0:15:07 | |
From the left. | 0:15:07 | 0:15:09 | |
From the left. From the left. | 0:15:09 | 0:15:12 | |
Perhaps it is to do with literacy. | 0:15:12 | 0:15:14 | |
The fact that in the West we are learning to read | 0:15:14 | 0:15:16 | |
and write, from infancy, we are dealing with text and the input | 0:15:16 | 0:15:19 | |
of written information from left to right, left to right, left to right. | 0:15:19 | 0:15:23 | |
It's almost as if the Western brain has been programmed to | 0:15:23 | 0:15:26 | |
take in information | 0:15:26 | 0:15:27 | |
and therefore to prefer the receipt of information from left to right. | 0:15:27 | 0:15:32 | |
It's in the Xenia frescoes discovered at Pompeii | 0:15:34 | 0:15:37 | |
we find all the emerging rules of still life. | 0:15:37 | 0:15:39 | |
The genre was pioneered within Roman visual culture, | 0:15:41 | 0:15:44 | |
but no matter how skilled the work or popular its appeal, still life | 0:15:44 | 0:15:49 | |
was destined to be considered the lowest form of art. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:53 | |
A fact one of Rome's greatest authors | 0:15:54 | 0:15:56 | |
and philosophers would be quick to point out. | 0:15:56 | 0:16:01 | |
Pliny the Elder was a Roman period author. | 0:16:01 | 0:16:04 | |
He worked and lived in the first century AD. Very prolific, | 0:16:04 | 0:16:07 | |
and his great work is the Natural History. | 0:16:07 | 0:16:12 | |
It's an extraordinary undertaking. | 0:16:12 | 0:16:14 | |
In a way, it is the world's first encyclopaedia. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
And why this is so significant for us | 0:16:17 | 0:16:20 | |
is that there is a whole paragraph | 0:16:20 | 0:16:22 | |
devoted to a discussion of still life, | 0:16:22 | 0:16:24 | |
and whether still life is a higher or lower form of painting. | 0:16:24 | 0:16:29 | |
In a way, Pliny is the world's first art critic | 0:16:29 | 0:16:33 | |
because he's introducing a particular painter, called Peiraikos, | 0:16:33 | 0:16:36 | |
who is supposed to be a splendid artist, to have extraordinary talent, | 0:16:36 | 0:16:41 | |
and yet, as Pliny says, "the question is whether he debased himself | 0:16:41 | 0:16:46 | |
"because he chose to paint simple and base things," | 0:16:46 | 0:16:50 | |
and he's actually got a fantastic Latin word to describe him. | 0:16:50 | 0:16:54 | |
He calls him a rhyparographos, | 0:16:54 | 0:16:56 | |
which means a painter of low and meanly things. | 0:16:56 | 0:17:00 | |
He was successful, as Pliny says here, he obtained great glory, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:04 | |
his work sold for a lot of money, and yet this is really | 0:17:04 | 0:17:08 | |
marginalising still life painting, this is saying, this is not | 0:17:08 | 0:17:12 | |
a higher form of the art, this is something which really is base. | 0:17:12 | 0:17:16 | |
Pliny's words would set the tone on how still life would now be rated. | 0:17:18 | 0:17:22 | |
It would be seen as vulgar, | 0:17:22 | 0:17:25 | |
less worthy than other supposedly superior genres. | 0:17:25 | 0:17:28 | |
To be practised by those artists of lower status. | 0:17:29 | 0:17:32 | |
But it wasn't just marginalisation that would be the issue. | 0:17:34 | 0:17:37 | |
When the Roman Empire fell, the art of still life would fall with it. | 0:17:38 | 0:17:42 | |
It would vanish. | 0:17:44 | 0:17:45 | |
THUNDER RUMBLES | 0:17:45 | 0:17:46 | |
Europe would now enter the medieval age | 0:18:06 | 0:18:09 | |
and there would be no place for painting ordinary objects. | 0:18:09 | 0:18:12 | |
The period commonly referred to as medieval, | 0:18:16 | 0:18:19 | |
it's over 1,000 years long. | 0:18:19 | 0:18:22 | |
It starts around the fall of Rome, | 0:18:22 | 0:18:24 | |
so about 400AD, and it continues right up until the Renaissance, | 0:18:24 | 0:18:30 | |
you could say up until 1500 AD. | 0:18:30 | 0:18:33 | |
But the defining characteristic of this period is | 0:18:33 | 0:18:37 | |
the rise of Christianity, | 0:18:37 | 0:18:39 | |
the all-pervasive impact of Christianity, | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
particularly on visual culture. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:44 | |
Christian painting had no place, really, for ordinary, | 0:18:49 | 0:18:54 | |
secular objects because it was always the higher world, | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
the heavenly world, the very radiant world. | 0:18:57 | 0:18:59 | |
If you get an artist who's simply painting bowls of oranges or | 0:19:04 | 0:19:09 | |
bunches of flowers, that is not really helping anyone, it is | 0:19:09 | 0:19:12 | |
not contributing to Christian society. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:15 | |
Still life doesn't actually exist in the medieval | 0:19:19 | 0:19:23 | |
period as a specific artistic genre. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:26 | |
You don't get objects in isolation, | 0:19:26 | 0:19:29 | |
they tend to function as symbols or attributes. | 0:19:29 | 0:19:32 | |
So, for example, the apple - if you saw a painting, | 0:19:32 | 0:19:35 | |
an image of an apple, the medieval mind would immediately start | 0:19:35 | 0:19:40 | |
connecting that with other narratives, other connections. | 0:19:40 | 0:19:43 | |
For example, Adam and Eve. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:45 | |
So, the apple would be a symbol of the fall from grace that Adam and Eve | 0:19:45 | 0:19:50 | |
undertake after having eaten the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. | 0:19:50 | 0:19:54 | |
And if it was depicted in visual culture, | 0:19:54 | 0:19:57 | |
you wouldn't see just an apple by itself, you would have the apple and | 0:19:57 | 0:20:01 | |
then you would have Adam and Eve, the tree and the serpent as well. | 0:20:01 | 0:20:05 | |
The Catholic Church was the absolute force behind medieval art. | 0:20:09 | 0:20:13 | |
In biblical terms, | 0:20:13 | 0:20:15 | |
anything that glorified a mere object was strictly forbidden. | 0:20:15 | 0:20:19 | |
There were to be no graven images. | 0:20:22 | 0:20:25 | |
But one particular painting does take us | 0:20:29 | 0:20:32 | |
a step closer to the rehabilitation of still life. | 0:20:32 | 0:20:35 | |
This is Duccio's The Annunciation, painted over 700 years ago. | 0:20:37 | 0:20:42 | |
It contains Renaissance still life in embryo. | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
When the simplest things began to acquire a symbolic power... | 0:20:49 | 0:20:53 | |
all of their own. | 0:20:53 | 0:20:54 | |
"The Angel Gabriel was sent to a virgin | 0:20:57 | 0:21:00 | |
"and the virgin's name was Mary. | 0:21:00 | 0:21:03 | |
"Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favour with God and behold, | 0:21:05 | 0:21:10 | |
"thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son. | 0:21:10 | 0:21:14 | |
"And you will call his name, Jesus. | 0:21:14 | 0:21:18 | |
"And of his kingdom, there shall be no end." | 0:21:18 | 0:21:21 | |
I suppose one way of thinking about Christian art is that it was | 0:21:25 | 0:21:30 | |
a visual Bible for a largely illiterate population. | 0:21:30 | 0:21:36 | |
When the high art of the Middle Ages developed, it was not only | 0:21:36 | 0:21:39 | |
something that was beautiful for its own sake | 0:21:39 | 0:21:42 | |
but it would have an instrumental, educational value | 0:21:42 | 0:21:46 | |
so you would see the angel, and Mary devoutly, eyes down, | 0:21:46 | 0:21:51 | |
and listening to this solemn address, and consenting to do the will of God. | 0:21:51 | 0:21:56 | |
But there would be little interpretative tools in there, | 0:21:56 | 0:22:01 | |
and probably the classic one is the vase of lilies, | 0:22:01 | 0:22:05 | |
lilies being a sign of sexual innocence. | 0:22:05 | 0:22:09 | |
This is very loaded, very potent symbolism. | 0:22:11 | 0:22:14 | |
The object is still relegated in terms of its scale and | 0:22:22 | 0:22:25 | |
prominence within religious painting, but the item is growing | 0:22:25 | 0:22:29 | |
in symbolic power and it was this, | 0:22:29 | 0:22:32 | |
alongside a technical development in paint, | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
that would provide a launch-pad for the re-emergence of still life. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:39 | |
Up until now, all major art works used tempera. | 0:22:42 | 0:22:46 | |
This was a paint which used opaque egg yolk to bind pigment, | 0:22:46 | 0:22:49 | |
and it restricted what great artists could achieve. | 0:22:49 | 0:22:54 | |
It required small brushstrokes, dried quickly, | 0:22:57 | 0:23:01 | |
and had a dull matte finish. | 0:23:01 | 0:23:03 | |
It would take a new innovation to allow still life to grow | 0:23:08 | 0:23:11 | |
towards illusion. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:12 | |
That's where oil comes in. | 0:23:14 | 0:23:17 | |
As a relatively new binding medium, it does create a revolution, | 0:23:17 | 0:23:22 | |
if you like, in terms of what artists can show. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:26 | |
Housed at St Bavo Cathedral in Belgium is the first major | 0:23:29 | 0:23:33 | |
painting of the Renaissance to take full advantage of the new medium, | 0:23:33 | 0:23:37 | |
the Ghent Altarpiece from 1432. | 0:23:37 | 0:23:41 | |
Oil allowed artists to achieve greater virtuosity. | 0:23:50 | 0:23:53 | |
Compared to a generation before, | 0:23:58 | 0:24:00 | |
they could now paint with a new level of intense detail. | 0:24:00 | 0:24:03 | |
A mix of natural and man-made materials that would soon | 0:24:06 | 0:24:09 | |
become the mainstays of still life are all on display. | 0:24:09 | 0:24:12 | |
But now, it's almost as if you could hold the object in your hand. | 0:24:16 | 0:24:20 | |
With oil you can create much more depth and light and shadows | 0:24:27 | 0:24:32 | |
and contrasts between light and dark, | 0:24:32 | 0:24:35 | |
all things that are crucial to render all these materials properly. | 0:24:35 | 0:24:40 | |
I think the developments of oil painting is hugely | 0:24:43 | 0:24:46 | |
important for still life. | 0:24:46 | 0:24:49 | |
The early painters of oil, they took those small-scale | 0:24:49 | 0:24:52 | |
skills of being able to depict flowers and fruit. | 0:24:52 | 0:24:55 | |
Oil paint enabled them to take that on to the large scale | 0:24:57 | 0:25:01 | |
and they could create these wonderful effects. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:03 | |
Oil paint just gives this whole new life and... | 0:25:06 | 0:25:10 | |
light and sense of moisture and freshness to art. | 0:25:10 | 0:25:15 | |
By the 16th century, | 0:25:18 | 0:25:20 | |
the church continued to be the main commissioner of European art. | 0:25:20 | 0:25:25 | |
But now painters were depicting elements of still life with | 0:25:25 | 0:25:29 | |
a new sense of obsessive detail. | 0:25:29 | 0:25:31 | |
Artists' love affair with the ordinary stuff of life would grow | 0:25:35 | 0:25:38 | |
and grow until still life would begin masquerading | 0:25:38 | 0:25:41 | |
as religious work. | 0:25:41 | 0:25:43 | |
And there are no better examples of this bold artistic duplicity | 0:25:47 | 0:25:51 | |
than at the National Gallery in London. | 0:25:51 | 0:25:53 | |
In the Four Elements by Flemish painter Joachim Beuckelaer, | 0:25:59 | 0:26:03 | |
the artist has to satisfy the demands of the church, | 0:26:03 | 0:26:07 | |
so we find Jesus appearing to his disciples after the Resurrection. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:11 | |
The true prominence in the painting is given to a market scene, | 0:26:14 | 0:26:19 | |
teeming with details of fish. | 0:26:19 | 0:26:21 | |
The Son of God has been firmly pushed into the background. | 0:26:23 | 0:26:26 | |
Now we see Christ seated with Mary | 0:26:29 | 0:26:31 | |
and Martha after raising Lazarus from the dead. | 0:26:31 | 0:26:34 | |
But Beuckelaer has positioned Jesus away in the back room. | 0:26:36 | 0:26:39 | |
He's little bigger than the loaf of bread, | 0:26:39 | 0:26:42 | |
placed in the foreground, littered with elements of still life. | 0:26:42 | 0:26:45 | |
In a painting of the same Bible story by Spanish artist Velazquez, | 0:26:50 | 0:26:55 | |
we see the same ploy of inserting still life within religious works. | 0:26:55 | 0:26:58 | |
Again, the figure of Jesus. | 0:27:00 | 0:27:02 | |
But the fish, which are the symbol of Christianity, | 0:27:02 | 0:27:06 | |
are given more prominence than Christ himself. | 0:27:06 | 0:27:08 | |
After 1,000 years of being hidden from view, | 0:27:11 | 0:27:14 | |
still life has begun to climb out from behind the veil of religion. | 0:27:14 | 0:27:18 | |
Christianity has got a very odd relationship to still life | 0:27:19 | 0:27:22 | |
because from the one point of view, and indeed for centuries, | 0:27:22 | 0:27:25 | |
it wouldn't tolerate it. | 0:27:25 | 0:27:26 | |
There'd be no place in a world that wanted radiant golden heaven | 0:27:26 | 0:27:30 | |
around the saints and figures of the Bible. | 0:27:30 | 0:27:32 | |
There was going to be no place for the everyday. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:34 | |
But when still life does revive, it's revived through Christianity. | 0:27:34 | 0:27:38 | |
It rides on the coat-tails of Christianity. | 0:27:38 | 0:27:41 | |
By 1596, when Caravaggio finally painted The Basket Of Fruit, | 0:27:54 | 0:27:59 | |
he achieved something that no-one had seen in living memory. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:03 | |
He eliminated every obvious feature of grand religious narrative | 0:28:03 | 0:28:08 | |
and placed the sole focus on a humble, simple object. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:11 | |
He'd created a world without God. | 0:28:13 | 0:28:16 | |
Although he brought the genre out from the shadows, | 0:28:18 | 0:28:22 | |
Caravaggio would never paint another still life in his career. | 0:28:22 | 0:28:25 | |
Although his fruit basket is such a famous picture, | 0:28:36 | 0:28:40 | |
that's Caravaggio on the way up. | 0:28:40 | 0:28:42 | |
That's what he wants to leave behind, that kind of work. | 0:28:42 | 0:28:44 | |
He wants to paint human bodies in action. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:47 | |
By the early 1600s, | 0:28:51 | 0:28:53 | |
Caravaggio was being commissioned | 0:28:53 | 0:28:55 | |
to paint important religious pictures, | 0:28:55 | 0:28:58 | |
such as this painting of Christ and the disciples at Emmaus. | 0:28:58 | 0:29:01 | |
In other words, | 0:29:01 | 0:29:03 | |
he had become a major provider of pictures to the Catholic authorities, | 0:29:03 | 0:29:06 | |
applying the realism of his early years | 0:29:06 | 0:29:09 | |
to the business of depicting scenes from the Bible. | 0:29:09 | 0:29:13 | |
Caravaggio may have begun to focus on explicitly religious subjects... | 0:29:15 | 0:29:19 | |
..but he still finds space for an old friend. | 0:29:21 | 0:29:24 | |
The Basket Of Fruit has been here at the Ambrosiana | 0:29:35 | 0:29:37 | |
since the gallery opened in 1607. | 0:29:37 | 0:29:40 | |
It was added to the collection by the founder, | 0:29:40 | 0:29:43 | |
Cardinal Federico Borromeo. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
Borromeo was a major collector of art during the Renaissance | 0:29:46 | 0:29:50 | |
and a key figure in the development of still life painting. | 0:29:50 | 0:29:53 | |
His love of The Basket Of Fruit | 0:29:55 | 0:29:57 | |
made him desire more works in a similar vein. | 0:29:57 | 0:29:59 | |
He began to commission other early still life works | 0:30:01 | 0:30:04 | |
from further afield. | 0:30:04 | 0:30:05 | |
If you go to Milan and you look at the Ambrosiana collection, | 0:30:07 | 0:30:10 | |
on the one hand you've got Caravaggio, | 0:30:10 | 0:30:12 | |
on the other hand you've got Raphael. | 0:30:12 | 0:30:13 | |
But then you've got huge amounts of Dutch still life painting. | 0:30:13 | 0:30:18 | |
This spectacular flower piece at the Ambrosiana | 0:30:26 | 0:30:29 | |
is by the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel. | 0:30:29 | 0:30:31 | |
As part of their studies, | 0:30:34 | 0:30:36 | |
Northern European artists like Brueghel | 0:30:36 | 0:30:38 | |
would make the pilgrimage south, | 0:30:38 | 0:30:40 | |
to soak up the influence of the masters of Italian art. | 0:30:40 | 0:30:43 | |
This was very important for artists to go there. | 0:30:45 | 0:30:47 | |
It was part of their training, their education. | 0:30:47 | 0:30:50 | |
And you do see influences on their work when they come back. | 0:30:50 | 0:30:54 | |
It has a huge impact on their style and development. | 0:30:54 | 0:30:57 | |
I think it's hardly surprising | 0:31:00 | 0:31:02 | |
that Northerners were drawn in particular to Caravaggio | 0:31:02 | 0:31:05 | |
and took these lessons back with them to the north | 0:31:05 | 0:31:08 | |
and became integral, | 0:31:08 | 0:31:10 | |
became rooted, embedded in the art of the north in the 1600s. | 0:31:10 | 0:31:14 | |
It was in Northern Europe | 0:31:16 | 0:31:18 | |
that still life would fulfil its potential | 0:31:18 | 0:31:20 | |
and, in particular, | 0:31:20 | 0:31:21 | |
tiny Holland that would provide the setting for a golden age. | 0:31:21 | 0:31:25 | |
I think it's incomparable what happened in Amsterdam, | 0:31:47 | 0:31:51 | |
especially in Amsterdam around 1600, | 0:31:51 | 0:31:54 | |
to see how this art market almost exploded, | 0:31:54 | 0:31:58 | |
all of a sudden. | 0:31:58 | 0:32:00 | |
It's amazing how fast still life spreads in Europe. | 0:32:29 | 0:32:32 | |
It really is a mass phenomenon. | 0:32:34 | 0:32:36 | |
By the 17th century, | 0:32:44 | 0:32:46 | |
Dutch painters returning from Italy | 0:32:46 | 0:32:48 | |
were coming home to a nation that had been revolutionised | 0:32:48 | 0:32:51 | |
by a political and religious storm - | 0:32:51 | 0:32:54 | |
the Protestant Reformation. | 0:32:54 | 0:32:56 | |
An iconoclastic rage swept the country, | 0:33:00 | 0:33:03 | |
transforming visual culture. | 0:33:03 | 0:33:05 | |
The extravagant Catholic art | 0:33:08 | 0:33:09 | |
that had dominated for over 1,000 years | 0:33:09 | 0:33:12 | |
was torn down, destroyed. | 0:33:12 | 0:33:14 | |
The Dutch had declared themselves a republic, | 0:33:16 | 0:33:19 | |
free from the influence of monarchy, | 0:33:19 | 0:33:22 | |
free from the Catholic Church. | 0:33:22 | 0:33:24 | |
A new Protestant merchant class wanted a different type of art. | 0:33:26 | 0:33:30 | |
Art that reflected a new world they'd created for themselves. | 0:33:32 | 0:33:36 | |
This is really secular painting. | 0:33:38 | 0:33:40 | |
It's almost the first era | 0:33:40 | 0:33:41 | |
of absolutely non-religious painting in the world. | 0:33:41 | 0:33:44 | |
And of course, the thing that's making that power of secularism | 0:33:44 | 0:33:47 | |
is the economy, what's happening with the economy. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:49 | |
The Dutch refer to the 17th century as their Golden Age. | 0:33:55 | 0:33:59 | |
And with good reason. | 0:33:59 | 0:34:01 | |
This small republic on the northern edge of Europe, | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
uncoupled from the church and monarchy, | 0:34:03 | 0:34:06 | |
used its freedom to transform itself | 0:34:06 | 0:34:08 | |
into an economic and cultural superpower. | 0:34:08 | 0:34:11 | |
They were quite simply | 0:34:14 | 0:34:16 | |
the richest nation on earth. | 0:34:16 | 0:34:17 | |
This is the 17th-century canal house of the Van Loon family, | 0:34:22 | 0:34:26 | |
the most influential of Amsterdam's merchants, | 0:34:26 | 0:34:29 | |
who weren't slow in enjoying their new affluence. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:32 | |
Their fabulous wealth, | 0:34:41 | 0:34:42 | |
like that of the nation, | 0:34:42 | 0:34:44 | |
was built on vast maritime trading networks | 0:34:44 | 0:34:47 | |
that spread across the globe. | 0:34:47 | 0:34:49 | |
The Dutch ships were trading all over the world. | 0:34:53 | 0:34:57 | |
And they were bringing in masses of stuff, | 0:34:57 | 0:35:01 | |
all sorts of materials and objects, | 0:35:01 | 0:35:04 | |
into the Netherlands and to the rest of Europe | 0:35:04 | 0:35:09 | |
which you also find in the still life paintings from the period. | 0:35:09 | 0:35:13 | |
So, you find Chinese porcelain... | 0:35:13 | 0:35:16 | |
..exotic flowers, | 0:35:17 | 0:35:19 | |
exotic fruit, | 0:35:19 | 0:35:21 | |
all that sort of thing. | 0:35:21 | 0:35:23 | |
In still life painting, | 0:35:23 | 0:35:24 | |
the Dutch work out their relationship to things. | 0:35:24 | 0:35:28 | |
They're, in a way, the first consumer society. | 0:35:28 | 0:35:30 | |
So they are awash in plenty and in luxury goods. | 0:35:30 | 0:35:33 | |
The Dutch art market boomed | 0:35:33 | 0:35:35 | |
like no other market in Europe had boomed. | 0:35:35 | 0:35:38 | |
But it went with the idea that when you get wealth, | 0:35:38 | 0:35:40 | |
you should decorate your house, your home. It's the only other... | 0:35:40 | 0:35:44 | |
it's the only foyer for the display of wealth in the Netherlands | 0:35:44 | 0:35:47 | |
cos there isn't a court | 0:35:47 | 0:35:48 | |
and there isn't a church that's going to gobble up | 0:35:48 | 0:35:50 | |
the national surplus wealth. So it's in the home. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:52 | |
So the primary object of Dutch wealth is the paintings. | 0:35:52 | 0:35:56 | |
Dutch culture was unique in that | 0:36:04 | 0:36:06 | |
everybody was buying paintings. | 0:36:06 | 0:36:08 | |
You know, the postman was buying paintings. | 0:36:08 | 0:36:12 | |
The baker was buying paintings. | 0:36:12 | 0:36:13 | |
A baker owned several Vermeers. | 0:36:13 | 0:36:17 | |
This was art for everybody. | 0:36:17 | 0:36:19 | |
In these early decades of the 17th century, | 0:36:32 | 0:36:35 | |
millions of paintings must have been made. | 0:36:35 | 0:36:37 | |
So it was a fully new market. | 0:36:37 | 0:36:39 | |
A mass market for paintings on this scale | 0:36:51 | 0:36:53 | |
had never been seen anywhere in the world before. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:57 | |
Art became an industry. | 0:36:57 | 0:36:59 | |
And such was the craze for still life | 0:37:01 | 0:37:03 | |
that customer-savvy painters | 0:37:03 | 0:37:04 | |
began to develop mass production techniques | 0:37:04 | 0:37:07 | |
to satisfy the demand. | 0:37:07 | 0:37:08 | |
OK, this is a still life with dead game, from Franz Snyders. | 0:37:20 | 0:37:24 | |
Franz Snyders went to Italy for a short period | 0:37:24 | 0:37:28 | |
and after he came back, | 0:37:28 | 0:37:30 | |
he developed much more his own style. | 0:37:30 | 0:37:32 | |
So it was clearly | 0:37:32 | 0:37:34 | |
a very important visit for him. | 0:37:34 | 0:37:36 | |
So it's a very interesting piece, | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
in terms of studio practice. | 0:37:39 | 0:37:41 | |
Because when you look at this particular painting, | 0:37:41 | 0:37:45 | |
you can see there's big motifs of the roe deer, the boar, | 0:37:45 | 0:37:50 | |
the lobster on the plate, | 0:37:50 | 0:37:52 | |
the dead birds here and there, | 0:37:52 | 0:37:54 | |
fruit, vegetables - | 0:37:54 | 0:37:56 | |
everything is in there. | 0:37:56 | 0:37:58 | |
And if you look at other works by Snyders, | 0:37:58 | 0:38:01 | |
you find that these motifs have been used again and again. | 0:38:01 | 0:38:05 | |
We know by making a tracing of the deer | 0:38:05 | 0:38:08 | |
on transparent foil, melinex foil, | 0:38:08 | 0:38:11 | |
and then placed it on other paintings by Franz Snyders | 0:38:11 | 0:38:15 | |
showing the same motif. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:17 | |
And with small variations, very small variations, | 0:38:17 | 0:38:21 | |
it fit it quite well. | 0:38:21 | 0:38:23 | |
So the idea that a painter would sit | 0:38:23 | 0:38:26 | |
with this whole banquet here in front of him | 0:38:26 | 0:38:29 | |
is not really realistic. | 0:38:29 | 0:38:31 | |
In this case, Snyders would have drawings | 0:38:31 | 0:38:34 | |
of all these different motifs | 0:38:34 | 0:38:37 | |
and he would combine them into an interesting composition | 0:38:37 | 0:38:42 | |
and repeat that with different combinations for other paintings. | 0:38:42 | 0:38:47 | |
There was an incredibly demanding market | 0:38:48 | 0:38:51 | |
so they needed to produce quite large numbers of works | 0:38:51 | 0:38:55 | |
and this is an efficient way of creating new compositions. | 0:38:55 | 0:39:00 | |
Creating fictional compositions became commonplace. | 0:39:09 | 0:39:12 | |
Perhaps the perfect example | 0:39:14 | 0:39:16 | |
of Dutch artists foregoing reality in pursuit of striking composition | 0:39:16 | 0:39:20 | |
can be seen in their approach to nature, | 0:39:20 | 0:39:22 | |
with floral still life. | 0:39:22 | 0:39:24 | |
Looking at the flower paintings of the 17th century, | 0:39:30 | 0:39:33 | |
it's about bringing together | 0:39:33 | 0:39:36 | |
as many beautiful, rare and exotic examples of flowers | 0:39:36 | 0:39:39 | |
as you possibly could. | 0:39:39 | 0:39:41 | |
It's done purely for pictorial effect. | 0:39:45 | 0:39:48 | |
It's very much this anti-natural impulse. | 0:39:55 | 0:39:57 | |
And so what you are looking at is what humans do with nature, | 0:39:57 | 0:40:00 | |
not nature itself. | 0:40:00 | 0:40:01 | |
You find flower painting | 0:40:01 | 0:40:03 | |
where species that could not possibly exist in the same seasonal moment | 0:40:03 | 0:40:06 | |
are brought together in a kind of triumph of wealth and ownership. | 0:40:06 | 0:40:10 | |
I think what they are | 0:40:14 | 0:40:17 | |
is a kind of coded celebration | 0:40:17 | 0:40:19 | |
of the Dutch Republic's power and influence. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:22 | |
Because what you get is | 0:40:22 | 0:40:24 | |
you get these flowers from different parts of the world | 0:40:24 | 0:40:28 | |
in which the Dutch have been trading. | 0:40:28 | 0:40:31 | |
And yet, they're all in the same vase. | 0:40:31 | 0:40:33 | |
So what the vase of flowers expresses | 0:40:33 | 0:40:36 | |
is the extent, the global extent, of Dutch maritime trade. | 0:40:36 | 0:40:40 | |
That painting is a kind of... | 0:40:40 | 0:40:41 | |
"This is us." | 0:40:41 | 0:40:44 | |
It's a bouquet of power. | 0:40:44 | 0:40:45 | |
During the Golden Age, | 0:40:49 | 0:40:51 | |
fortunes could even be made in the flowers themselves. | 0:40:51 | 0:40:54 | |
And in particular, this new import from Asia. | 0:40:54 | 0:40:57 | |
Tulip mania, as it was called, saw the trade in tulip bulbs | 0:40:59 | 0:41:02 | |
become engulfed in crazed financial speculation, | 0:41:02 | 0:41:06 | |
sending prices soaring. | 0:41:06 | 0:41:08 | |
The bulb of a single tulip | 0:41:10 | 0:41:12 | |
could cost three times as much as a house. | 0:41:12 | 0:41:15 | |
So they were such rare and exotic plants | 0:41:15 | 0:41:19 | |
that no-one would cut them. | 0:41:19 | 0:41:23 | |
You wouldn't have tulips as cut flowers | 0:41:23 | 0:41:27 | |
in real life | 0:41:27 | 0:41:29 | |
because they were just too expensive and, you know, | 0:41:29 | 0:41:32 | |
you just would never do it. | 0:41:32 | 0:41:34 | |
In paintings, to see a whole bouquet of just tulips | 0:41:34 | 0:41:39 | |
was outrageous. | 0:41:39 | 0:41:40 | |
Displays of outrageous affluence took several forms | 0:41:45 | 0:41:48 | |
and were commonplace in Golden Age still life. | 0:41:48 | 0:41:51 | |
The Dutch were hungry for the prestige that went with consumption. | 0:41:52 | 0:41:56 | |
Another genre that's developed are banquet pieces | 0:41:56 | 0:41:59 | |
where you get tables not unlike this amazing table here | 0:41:59 | 0:42:02 | |
that are absolutely uninhibited displays | 0:42:02 | 0:42:05 | |
of maximum possession of wealth. | 0:42:05 | 0:42:07 | |
Lobster and crayfish are not normal foodstuffs in the Netherlands | 0:42:14 | 0:42:18 | |
and citrus fruit doesn't grow in the Netherlands. | 0:42:18 | 0:42:22 | |
It all has to be brought in | 0:42:22 | 0:42:23 | |
so it's a celebration of that kind of power | 0:42:23 | 0:42:26 | |
to bring together in one place all the luxury of the world. | 0:42:26 | 0:42:29 | |
As the genre matures, | 0:42:35 | 0:42:37 | |
you find that the scene of consumption, the scene of wealth, | 0:42:37 | 0:42:40 | |
it becomes increasingly barbarous. | 0:42:40 | 0:42:42 | |
Things are pushed over. | 0:42:42 | 0:42:44 | |
The whole table is sort of strewn with a kind of principle of litter. | 0:42:44 | 0:42:48 | |
It's wreckage. It's like destruction, | 0:42:48 | 0:42:50 | |
consumption as destruction. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:52 | |
At the same time, it's a Calvinist culture | 0:42:58 | 0:43:00 | |
with a tremendous amount of guilt about acquisition. | 0:43:00 | 0:43:03 | |
They're generally worried | 0:43:03 | 0:43:04 | |
that although they've worked hard for this, earned it, | 0:43:04 | 0:43:06 | |
nonetheless in wealth itself there's a principle of corruption | 0:43:06 | 0:43:09 | |
that will undo them or undo their souls or make them unhappy. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:12 | |
So, you find a very odd, | 0:43:12 | 0:43:14 | |
kind of, push-pull thing happening in Dutch still life painting | 0:43:14 | 0:43:17 | |
between on the one hand a perfectly understandable desire | 0:43:17 | 0:43:20 | |
to celebrate all this wealth with which the country is awash. | 0:43:20 | 0:43:23 | |
At the same time, | 0:43:23 | 0:43:25 | |
a sort of residual religious sentiment that this is not good. | 0:43:25 | 0:43:29 | |
Strictly speaking, as devout Calvinists, | 0:43:30 | 0:43:33 | |
the Dutch shouldn't be celebrating their affluence with decorative art. | 0:43:33 | 0:43:36 | |
So how do you keep collecting paintings | 0:43:37 | 0:43:39 | |
and avoid the corrupting influence of acquisition? | 0:43:39 | 0:43:42 | |
Still life painters had an answer for these guilty Protestants, | 0:43:44 | 0:43:48 | |
containing a message with a rather daunting reminder of mortality. | 0:43:48 | 0:43:52 | |
The subject of the vanitas, the painting that reminds us of death, | 0:44:00 | 0:44:04 | |
is a whole class of still life painting | 0:44:04 | 0:44:07 | |
where the symbols of death and mortality | 0:44:07 | 0:44:10 | |
and the transience of human life | 0:44:10 | 0:44:12 | |
are so obvious that they can't be avoided. | 0:44:12 | 0:44:14 | |
Most often, we recognise a vanitas painting | 0:44:19 | 0:44:22 | |
by the presence of a skull, | 0:44:22 | 0:44:23 | |
which is sort of a dead giveaway that, you know, | 0:44:23 | 0:44:26 | |
everything else around the skull has to do with the idea | 0:44:26 | 0:44:30 | |
of death and transience | 0:44:30 | 0:44:32 | |
and the futility of accumulating material possessions | 0:44:32 | 0:44:36 | |
because, when you die, you don't take it with you. | 0:44:36 | 0:44:40 | |
Very often, another component that we see | 0:44:44 | 0:44:48 | |
are helmets or militaria | 0:44:48 | 0:44:51 | |
that remind you of the futility of war, ultimately. | 0:44:51 | 0:44:55 | |
A lot of times, you see items that have to do with music | 0:44:58 | 0:45:03 | |
because before recorded music, | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
music was something that existed only as you played it. | 0:45:06 | 0:45:09 | |
And as soon as you stopped, it was dead. | 0:45:09 | 0:45:11 | |
It didn't exist any more. | 0:45:11 | 0:45:13 | |
It's as if these people are celebrating their riches | 0:45:17 | 0:45:20 | |
and yet there's always this vanitas undertone of meaning. | 0:45:20 | 0:45:25 | |
You know, all of this is going to fade, it will pass. | 0:45:25 | 0:45:29 | |
And Holland, you know, Holland was a hugely volatile nation. | 0:45:29 | 0:45:33 | |
Fortunes were made and lost like that. | 0:45:33 | 0:45:35 | |
So any depiction of riches, wealth, grandeur and splendour | 0:45:35 | 0:45:39 | |
was always, you know, was always threatened. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:42 | |
A still life painting makes that perfectly explicit. | 0:45:42 | 0:45:45 | |
You know, you can always imagine pulling that cloth | 0:45:45 | 0:45:48 | |
and everything would go onto the floor. | 0:45:48 | 0:45:50 | |
Well, life was like that for the Dutch. | 0:45:50 | 0:45:53 | |
Despite the millions of paintings | 0:46:03 | 0:46:05 | |
that were created in Holland during the 17th century, | 0:46:05 | 0:46:08 | |
the most comprehensive collection of Golden Age still life | 0:46:08 | 0:46:11 | |
is to be found somewhere a bit closer to home. | 0:46:11 | 0:46:14 | |
The Ashmolean has surprisingly one of the largest, | 0:46:23 | 0:46:25 | |
if not the largest, | 0:46:25 | 0:46:27 | |
collections of still life painting | 0:46:27 | 0:46:29 | |
from 17th-century Holland and Flanders | 0:46:29 | 0:46:31 | |
in existence. | 0:46:31 | 0:46:32 | |
It's a remarkable collection | 0:46:34 | 0:46:36 | |
because it covers every aspect of still life painting | 0:46:36 | 0:46:38 | |
in the period from the early 1600s through to the early 1700s. | 0:46:38 | 0:46:42 | |
Well, here we are in the collection of still life paintings, at last. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:56 | |
This collection was given to us in 1939 | 0:46:59 | 0:47:02 | |
by a collector from Newcastle, called Theodore Ward, | 0:47:02 | 0:47:05 | |
who made his money in international paint. | 0:47:05 | 0:47:09 | |
The collection was given to us in memory of his widow, | 0:47:09 | 0:47:12 | |
Daisy Linda Travers, | 0:47:12 | 0:47:13 | |
or Daisy Linda Ward as she became after her marriage, | 0:47:13 | 0:47:16 | |
who was an opera singer in her early years. | 0:47:16 | 0:47:19 | |
The collection is probably the most comprehensive of its kind | 0:47:21 | 0:47:24 | |
in existence. | 0:47:24 | 0:47:26 | |
Most of the great names of the 17th century | 0:47:26 | 0:47:29 | |
are here in this gallery. | 0:47:29 | 0:47:31 | |
And it goes round the room in a sequence | 0:47:32 | 0:47:35 | |
passing through the large paintings of Isaak Soreau, | 0:47:35 | 0:47:39 | |
an artist who came from Frankfurt, | 0:47:39 | 0:47:41 | |
and who painted in a tradition that's slightly different | 0:47:41 | 0:47:44 | |
from the tradition that we associate | 0:47:44 | 0:47:46 | |
with painting in Holland at this time. | 0:47:46 | 0:47:49 | |
The painting by Clara Peeters | 0:47:51 | 0:47:53 | |
is probably one of the most important paintings | 0:47:53 | 0:47:56 | |
in the collection of the Ashmolean, | 0:47:56 | 0:47:59 | |
not because Clara Peeters is a famous artist. | 0:47:59 | 0:48:02 | |
In fact the opposite is true. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:04 | |
Her life is particularly obscure. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:06 | |
We don't know where she was born, we don't know when she was born. | 0:48:06 | 0:48:09 | |
We're not even sure who taught her to paint. | 0:48:09 | 0:48:12 | |
But the pictures themselves bear witness | 0:48:12 | 0:48:15 | |
to the accomplishment in the art of still life painting | 0:48:15 | 0:48:18 | |
by an artist who was working in the 1620s, 1630s. | 0:48:18 | 0:48:23 | |
Her work is magnificent. | 0:48:23 | 0:48:25 | |
And as we come round to this long wall, | 0:48:27 | 0:48:29 | |
we pass a great display of the more florid painters | 0:48:29 | 0:48:33 | |
of the middle years of the 17th century. | 0:48:33 | 0:48:36 | |
And it moves through a really sensational | 0:48:36 | 0:48:38 | |
group of paintings by Abraham Van Beyeren, | 0:48:38 | 0:48:41 | |
whose banquet pieces speak for themselves, | 0:48:41 | 0:48:44 | |
so gloriously detailed are they. | 0:48:44 | 0:48:46 | |
A grand banquet of a type which no doubt | 0:48:50 | 0:48:52 | |
Abraham Van Beyeren himself rarely enjoyed. | 0:48:52 | 0:48:56 | |
And we move round the corner into a series of paintings | 0:48:57 | 0:49:00 | |
which take us towards the end of the 17th century | 0:49:00 | 0:49:03 | |
and into the beginning of the 18th century, | 0:49:03 | 0:49:06 | |
when this much more decorative tendency, | 0:49:06 | 0:49:09 | |
the more florid and colourful tendency | 0:49:09 | 0:49:11 | |
that we saw in these earlier paintings | 0:49:11 | 0:49:14 | |
reaches a kind of rococo apogee. | 0:49:14 | 0:49:17 | |
And this is a tendency that continues through | 0:49:23 | 0:49:26 | |
into the works of Rachel Ruysch, for example, | 0:49:26 | 0:49:29 | |
whose ornamental and almost rococo pictures | 0:49:29 | 0:49:33 | |
represent a final theme | 0:49:33 | 0:49:35 | |
in the development of Dutch still life painting | 0:49:35 | 0:49:39 | |
as it emerged in the early 1700s. | 0:49:39 | 0:49:42 | |
She was a very important artist | 0:49:42 | 0:49:44 | |
but she was also one of the last in this great century of paintings | 0:49:44 | 0:49:48 | |
that mark the golden age in the history of the art of still life. | 0:49:48 | 0:49:52 | |
I suppose my favourite painting in this gallery | 0:49:59 | 0:50:03 | |
is the least typical of them all | 0:50:03 | 0:50:04 | |
and one that stands aside from the more sumptuous paintings | 0:50:04 | 0:50:08 | |
that were being done in the lifetime of the artist, Adriaen Coorte, | 0:50:08 | 0:50:11 | |
about whom we know very little. | 0:50:11 | 0:50:13 | |
You get what you see in a painting like this. | 0:50:13 | 0:50:15 | |
It is very... | 0:50:15 | 0:50:17 | |
understated. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:18 | |
And the reason why he painted it is particularly opaque, | 0:50:18 | 0:50:22 | |
other than the fact that he wanted to make an image, | 0:50:22 | 0:50:24 | |
and a particularly liquid and beautifully-lit image, | 0:50:24 | 0:50:28 | |
of such a commonplace thing as a bundle of asparagus. | 0:50:28 | 0:50:31 | |
It's making out of the stuff of nature and the commonplace | 0:50:31 | 0:50:34 | |
something that is as lasting as a work of art and a thing of beauty. | 0:50:34 | 0:50:38 | |
I've never felt so warmly about asparagus in real life | 0:50:38 | 0:50:41 | |
as I do in the flat and silent art of still life painting. | 0:50:41 | 0:50:44 | |
I love this one. | 0:50:46 | 0:50:47 | |
Taking commonplace things | 0:50:57 | 0:50:59 | |
and elevating them into objects of great beauty | 0:50:59 | 0:51:02 | |
wasn't just restricted to the Netherlands. | 0:51:02 | 0:51:05 | |
Spanish painters had also begun to explore the art of materialism. | 0:51:05 | 0:51:09 | |
In Spain, which is an immensely powerful country | 0:51:14 | 0:51:17 | |
with a huge empire, a vast economy and a very powerful aristocracy... | 0:51:17 | 0:51:20 | |
Nonetheless, its interpretation of still life painting | 0:51:20 | 0:51:23 | |
is to locate its true being in the monasteries, | 0:51:23 | 0:51:26 | |
in monastic painting, | 0:51:26 | 0:51:28 | |
painted by painters who either were lay brothers | 0:51:28 | 0:51:31 | |
or had experience of monastic communities. | 0:51:31 | 0:51:34 | |
These austere arrangements | 0:51:37 | 0:51:39 | |
were painted by a Spanish Carthusian monk, | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
Juan Sanchez Cotan. | 0:51:42 | 0:51:43 | |
They're known as works of Bodegons, | 0:51:46 | 0:51:49 | |
larder pieces. | 0:51:49 | 0:51:50 | |
The items of food featured were stored within a concrete block | 0:52:00 | 0:52:03 | |
and suspended on string | 0:52:03 | 0:52:05 | |
to help with refrigeration. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:07 | |
Unlike his contemporaries in the Netherlands, | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
Cotan was a dedicated realist, | 0:52:11 | 0:52:13 | |
painting the world exactly as he found it. | 0:52:13 | 0:52:16 | |
If you look at Cotan, | 0:52:21 | 0:52:23 | |
it's very much about a kind of renunciation of the world. | 0:52:23 | 0:52:26 | |
It's about leaving the world. | 0:52:26 | 0:52:28 | |
Not believing in the world's show. | 0:52:28 | 0:52:30 | |
Looking at the simplest things in the world because your values | 0:52:30 | 0:52:34 | |
are adjusted to the values of monastic life, contemplative life. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:39 | |
In some Spanish still life painting, you get the contents of a larder. | 0:52:39 | 0:52:43 | |
It could not be more unimportant. | 0:52:43 | 0:52:45 | |
They are arranged in these suspensions of string | 0:52:45 | 0:52:49 | |
that make them seem like mathematical constructions | 0:52:49 | 0:52:54 | |
or like the solar system. | 0:52:54 | 0:52:56 | |
They look completely out of this world. They look otherworldly. | 0:52:56 | 0:52:59 | |
Otherworldly still life. No other school does that. | 0:52:59 | 0:53:02 | |
If the 17th century had seen the golden age of still life, | 0:53:23 | 0:53:27 | |
in the 18th, it suffered a more complicated fate. | 0:53:27 | 0:53:30 | |
This is the world-famous Louvre, in Paris. | 0:53:33 | 0:53:37 | |
In its earlier existence, it was the French royal palace. | 0:53:37 | 0:53:40 | |
By the 18th century, Louis XIV, the Sun King, | 0:53:44 | 0:53:47 | |
decided this place wasn't grand enough | 0:53:47 | 0:53:50 | |
to suit his rather extravagant tastes and moved his entire court | 0:53:50 | 0:53:55 | |
to a new home, Versailles. | 0:53:55 | 0:53:57 | |
Back at the Louvre, the building was soon occupied by a new institution | 0:53:59 | 0:54:04 | |
that would make Paris the centre of European art. | 0:54:04 | 0:54:07 | |
The French Academy was founded in 1648 | 0:54:09 | 0:54:13 | |
and the elected academicians agreed what were the rules of art. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:17 | |
They decided what constituted the best kind of art, | 0:54:17 | 0:54:21 | |
what was less important art, what was the least important art, | 0:54:21 | 0:54:25 | |
and they also controlled, in effect, royal commissions, | 0:54:25 | 0:54:28 | |
so anyone who wanted to get big money for painting | 0:54:28 | 0:54:31 | |
needed to go through the Academy. | 0:54:31 | 0:54:34 | |
The academies placed a very high value on drawing | 0:54:35 | 0:54:38 | |
and painting the human figure. Life class was the centre of the Academy. | 0:54:38 | 0:54:43 | |
Artists were chiefly judged for their talent as figure painters. | 0:54:43 | 0:54:47 | |
They were trained to paint human figures, | 0:54:47 | 0:54:50 | |
they were trained to paint physiognomy and gesture and action. | 0:54:50 | 0:54:55 | |
Human drama, in other words, | 0:54:55 | 0:54:56 | |
which was regarded as the most important element, | 0:54:56 | 0:54:59 | |
so that an artist who did not paint the human figure | 0:54:59 | 0:55:01 | |
or indeed, in some cases, | 0:55:01 | 0:55:03 | |
artists who could not paint the human figure, | 0:55:03 | 0:55:05 | |
were regarded as the bottom of the heap. | 0:55:05 | 0:55:07 | |
The academic tradition of painting placed still life, | 0:55:09 | 0:55:13 | |
which just shows inanimate things, absolutely bottom, | 0:55:13 | 0:55:17 | |
then came landscape which was depiction of the world, | 0:55:17 | 0:55:21 | |
then came portrait, depiction of man, but then the serious stuff begins. | 0:55:21 | 0:55:27 | |
Mythological painting, narrative painting, biblical painting. | 0:55:27 | 0:55:30 | |
That was high art because it shows man in action, man in thought. | 0:55:30 | 0:55:34 | |
That's why this hierarchy exists. | 0:55:34 | 0:55:39 | |
Still life painters are always fighting an uphill battle, | 0:55:39 | 0:55:42 | |
always fighting to be taken seriously. | 0:55:42 | 0:55:44 | |
Chardin, the great French still life, | 0:55:44 | 0:55:47 | |
probably the first still life painter to begin to be really | 0:55:47 | 0:55:51 | |
taken seriously, he fights the good fight. | 0:55:51 | 0:55:54 | |
"Proust once wrote an essay in which he set out to restore | 0:56:07 | 0:56:10 | |
"a smile to the face of a gloomy, envious and dissatisfied young man. | 0:56:10 | 0:56:15 | |
"He pictured this young man sitting at a table after lunch one day | 0:56:15 | 0:56:19 | |
"in his parents' flat, gazing dejectedly at his surroundings. | 0:56:19 | 0:56:24 | |
"The mundanity of the scene would contrast with the young man's taste | 0:56:24 | 0:56:28 | |
"for beautiful and costly things which he lacked the money to buy. | 0:56:28 | 0:56:32 | |
"Proust imagined the revulsion the young aesthete would feel | 0:56:32 | 0:56:36 | |
"at this bourgeois interior, and how he would compare it | 0:56:36 | 0:56:39 | |
"to the splendours he had seen in museums and cathedrals. | 0:56:39 | 0:56:43 | |
"To escape his domestic gloom, the young man might leave the flat | 0:56:43 | 0:56:48 | |
"and go to the Louvre, where at least he could feast his eyes | 0:56:48 | 0:56:51 | |
"on splendid things. | 0:56:51 | 0:56:53 | |
"Touched by his predicament, Proust proposed to make | 0:56:53 | 0:56:56 | |
"a radical change to the young man's life by way of a modest alteration | 0:56:56 | 0:57:01 | |
"to his museum itinerary. | 0:57:01 | 0:57:03 | |
"Rather than let him hurry to galleries hung with paintings | 0:57:03 | 0:57:06 | |
"by Claude and Veronese, | 0:57:06 | 0:57:08 | |
"Proust suggested leading him to a quite different part of the museum, | 0:57:08 | 0:57:11 | |
"to those galleries hung with the works of JeanBaptiste Chardin. | 0:57:11 | 0:57:17 | |
"A peach by him was as pink and chubby as a cherub, | 0:57:19 | 0:57:22 | |
"a plate of oysters or a slice of lemon | 0:57:22 | 0:57:25 | |
"were tempting symbols of gluttony and sensuality. | 0:57:25 | 0:57:28 | |
"A skate slit open and hanging from a hook | 0:57:28 | 0:57:31 | |
"evoked the sea of which it had been a fearsome denizen in its lifetime. | 0:57:31 | 0:57:36 | |
"Its insides, coloured with a deep red blood, | 0:57:36 | 0:57:39 | |
"blue nerves and white muscles, were like the naves of a polychrome cathedral. | 0:57:39 | 0:57:44 | |
"After an encounter with Chardin, | 0:57:45 | 0:57:47 | |
"Proust had high hopes for the spiritual transformation | 0:57:47 | 0:57:52 | |
"of his sad young man as he wrote, | 0:57:52 | 0:57:54 | |
"'Once he had been dazzled by this opulent description | 0:57:54 | 0:57:58 | |
"'of what he called mediocrity, this appetising depiction of a life | 0:57:58 | 0:58:02 | |
"'he had found insipid, this great art of nature | 0:58:02 | 0:58:06 | |
"'he had found so paltry, I should say to him, now, are you happy?'" | 0:58:06 | 0:58:11 | |
I think what's remarkable about Chardin is he is undeniably a great artist. | 0:58:15 | 0:58:18 | |
He's got total command of his medium | 0:58:18 | 0:58:21 | |
and none of his critics | 0:58:21 | 0:58:23 | |
and observers of his time | 0:58:23 | 0:58:25 | |
could possibly deny that this was | 0:58:25 | 0:58:27 | |
a master of handling the medium of paint. | 0:58:27 | 0:58:30 | |
But what was fascinating and what was such a challenge | 0:58:30 | 0:58:33 | |
to his contemporaries was what he decided it was important to paint. | 0:58:33 | 0:58:37 | |
He didn't just say that still life was important. | 0:58:37 | 0:58:40 | |
He showed in a visceral and sensory way that it could be. | 0:58:40 | 0:58:43 | |
Jean-Baptiste Chardin was an 18th-century French artist | 0:58:45 | 0:58:49 | |
and one of the finest painters of still life the world has ever known. | 0:58:49 | 0:58:53 | |
Born in Paris, he never once left the city. | 0:58:55 | 0:58:58 | |
He lived in a period dominated by the extravagant rococo style of Neoclassicism. | 0:59:00 | 0:59:05 | |
His simple act of revolution was to create a world of truth and calm. | 0:59:07 | 0:59:12 | |
In 1728, without establishment contacts | 0:59:12 | 0:59:16 | |
and with no intellectual background, | 0:59:16 | 0:59:19 | |
Chardin submitted two works to the all-powerful French Academy. | 0:59:19 | 0:59:23 | |
He was instantly accepted. | 0:59:34 | 0:59:36 | |
He's like a revolutionary force that's constantly being pushed down. | 0:59:39 | 0:59:44 | |
In the Academy, he was given the lowest possible job, | 0:59:44 | 0:59:47 | |
the person who hangs the paintings for the annual shows, | 0:59:47 | 0:59:50 | |
so he's officially where he should be, at the bottom of the heap. | 0:59:50 | 0:59:54 | |
One has to remember that for the 18th century, | 0:59:57 | 1:00:01 | |
in France and in all Europe, | 1:00:01 | 1:00:04 | |
the major quality of a painter was invention. | 1:00:04 | 1:00:08 | |
To paint a still life was considered as the simplest thing you could do | 1:00:08 | 1:00:13 | |
because you had no invention. | 1:00:13 | 1:00:15 | |
You had in front of you some peaches or something, | 1:00:15 | 1:00:17 | |
and you had to copy them. It looked like it was so simple to do so. | 1:00:17 | 1:00:21 | |
Chardin in a certain way breaks this. | 1:00:21 | 1:00:24 | |
He is trying to say, he is proving that in a certain way | 1:00:24 | 1:00:28 | |
it is as difficult and as great to paint something you see, | 1:00:28 | 1:00:32 | |
as something you don't see, | 1:00:32 | 1:00:34 | |
and for the 18th century it was very difficult to accept this. | 1:00:34 | 1:00:37 | |
He had his own way of thinking, his own way of painting | 1:00:37 | 1:00:40 | |
and in fact for him, simplicity was one of the keys of the greatest art. | 1:00:40 | 1:00:45 | |
Simplicity, but what I think is even more important for him | 1:00:45 | 1:00:50 | |
is how to paint silence. | 1:00:50 | 1:00:52 | |
To paint fruit is very easy but to paint silence is very difficult. | 1:00:55 | 1:01:00 | |
Chardin is really a sort of peaceful place, | 1:01:07 | 1:01:09 | |
a sort of peaceful garden out of time | 1:01:09 | 1:01:11 | |
where you forget the trouble of your everyday life. | 1:01:11 | 1:01:16 | |
We are living around objects, objects around us everywhere. | 1:01:22 | 1:01:25 | |
We are not looking at them. | 1:01:25 | 1:01:28 | |
We are forgetting that they are unique in a certain way. | 1:01:28 | 1:01:32 | |
That food is unique, | 1:01:32 | 1:01:35 | |
le gobelet d'argent, silver has always beauties. | 1:01:35 | 1:01:40 | |
An artist, especially an artist interested in still life, | 1:01:40 | 1:01:45 | |
to make you aware of the beauty of things around you. | 1:01:45 | 1:01:49 | |
With such magnificent ability, Chardin's reputation and fame grew | 1:01:56 | 1:02:01 | |
and despite his radical choice of lowly subject, | 1:02:01 | 1:02:04 | |
he became one of the richest painters in France. | 1:02:04 | 1:02:07 | |
In one slightly bizarre work, | 1:02:11 | 1:02:13 | |
we can see him parody his own position | 1:02:13 | 1:02:15 | |
whilst poking fun at his detractors within the Academy. | 1:02:15 | 1:02:19 | |
Chardin knows a lot about optics | 1:02:26 | 1:02:29 | |
and will have had conversations about how the eye works, | 1:02:29 | 1:02:33 | |
and he introduces something very amazing into still life painting, | 1:02:33 | 1:02:37 | |
which is the idea that the eye doesn't see | 1:02:37 | 1:02:40 | |
everything at the same degree of vigilant high focus. | 1:02:40 | 1:02:43 | |
If you look at most Chardin paintings, | 1:02:43 | 1:02:46 | |
there will be one, two or maybe three perches | 1:02:46 | 1:02:48 | |
for the eye to rest on, where things are in high focus, | 1:02:48 | 1:02:50 | |
and the rest will be blurry and that blur | 1:02:50 | 1:02:53 | |
is something very special to Chardin. No-one produced this before Chardin. | 1:02:53 | 1:02:57 | |
He had techniques he didn't want people to see, | 1:02:57 | 1:03:00 | |
because there is no record of what it was like to watch Chardin paint, | 1:03:00 | 1:03:05 | |
but it's very clear he had a lot of unorthodox techniques | 1:03:05 | 1:03:08 | |
for applying the paint to the canvas. | 1:03:08 | 1:03:10 | |
It's very clear he was handling paint, which you shouldn't do. | 1:03:10 | 1:03:14 | |
If you look at the late self portraits, his skin is going grey | 1:03:15 | 1:03:19 | |
until finally it's completely grey and he's dying of lead poisoning. | 1:03:19 | 1:03:24 | |
He has been handling paint all his life and takes its toll. | 1:03:24 | 1:03:28 | |
Paint is a very toxic substance. | 1:03:28 | 1:03:29 | |
Within the French Royal Academy, Chardin would influence | 1:03:33 | 1:03:36 | |
the perception of what still life could achieve. | 1:03:36 | 1:03:40 | |
In 1770, another still life painter would submit works | 1:03:40 | 1:03:44 | |
whilst applying to join the institution. | 1:03:44 | 1:03:48 | |
This artist would face a different kind of prejudice. | 1:03:49 | 1:03:52 | |
She was 26-year-old Anne Vallayer-Coster. | 1:03:56 | 1:03:59 | |
She was one of only four women ever accepted in the French Academy. | 1:04:02 | 1:04:06 | |
At the time, very few female painters | 1:04:06 | 1:04:08 | |
could even dream of a serious career in art. | 1:04:08 | 1:04:11 | |
She was enormously talented, incredibly confident handling | 1:04:13 | 1:04:18 | |
both of composition and the surface texture of things. | 1:04:18 | 1:04:23 | |
She was patronised by Marie Antoinette. | 1:04:27 | 1:04:30 | |
She enabled Vallayer-Coster to get lodgings in the Louvre, | 1:04:30 | 1:04:35 | |
which was absolutely exceptional for a woman, and meant she had | 1:04:35 | 1:04:40 | |
her lodgings and studio in among the other top artists of her time. | 1:04:40 | 1:04:45 | |
The academies were the key institutions | 1:04:47 | 1:04:49 | |
if you wanted a successful career as an artist | 1:04:49 | 1:04:52 | |
but they were of course deeply problematic for women. | 1:04:52 | 1:04:55 | |
At a very straightforward level, | 1:04:59 | 1:05:01 | |
women were not allowed in art academies | 1:05:01 | 1:05:04 | |
because there were naked men there, | 1:05:04 | 1:05:06 | |
and women were not allowed to hire male models to paint from. | 1:05:06 | 1:05:12 | |
However, women were allowed to look at bunches of grapes. | 1:05:12 | 1:05:16 | |
That's one of the reasons why women flourish in the field | 1:05:16 | 1:05:19 | |
of still life painting. | 1:05:19 | 1:05:21 | |
It's one of the few areas they're allowed in! | 1:05:21 | 1:05:23 | |
Women were barred from acquiring the skills | 1:05:23 | 1:05:26 | |
they need for the higher genres, and then they were told that women | 1:05:26 | 1:05:30 | |
were only capable of the lowest ones. | 1:05:30 | 1:05:34 | |
Although they might be seen a equal to men within that sphere, | 1:05:34 | 1:05:38 | |
they could never quite get the higher status and reputation | 1:05:38 | 1:05:41 | |
that was open to men. | 1:05:41 | 1:05:43 | |
Vallayer-Coster is typical of a line of female artists | 1:05:46 | 1:05:49 | |
throughout history, whose desire to paint found expression | 1:05:49 | 1:05:52 | |
through the only genre considered suitable for them. | 1:05:52 | 1:05:54 | |
Women were marginalised in art | 1:05:56 | 1:05:58 | |
and found an outlet in the disregarded genre of still life. | 1:05:58 | 1:06:02 | |
The talent Vallayer-Coster displayed demonstrates that she was the equal | 1:06:04 | 1:06:08 | |
of any other Academy painter. | 1:06:08 | 1:06:11 | |
In the end, her association with Marie Antoinette | 1:06:12 | 1:06:15 | |
and the Royal Court would have a ruinous effect on her career, | 1:06:15 | 1:06:19 | |
as French society was engulfed in the pandemonium of revolution. | 1:06:19 | 1:06:23 | |
By the 19th century, France had been transformed. | 1:06:49 | 1:06:54 | |
Despite the political turmoil, the strict French Academy system | 1:06:56 | 1:06:59 | |
had survived but art too was about to undergo its own revolution. | 1:06:59 | 1:07:04 | |
An unknown painter from a small town in the south of France | 1:07:06 | 1:07:09 | |
was about to change everything. | 1:07:09 | 1:07:11 | |
Still life would lead the charge. | 1:07:13 | 1:07:15 | |
The artist's name was Paul Cezanne. | 1:07:22 | 1:07:25 | |
Cezanne was born here in the small town of Aix-en-Provence in 1839. | 1:07:31 | 1:07:35 | |
It was here he built his studio | 1:07:38 | 1:07:40 | |
and dedicated himself to a revolutionary artistic style. | 1:07:40 | 1:07:43 | |
Today, he is remembered as a monumental figure, | 1:07:46 | 1:07:48 | |
the father of modern art. | 1:07:48 | 1:07:50 | |
But in his own lifetime, many did not or could not | 1:07:51 | 1:07:55 | |
understand him or his work. | 1:07:55 | 1:07:57 | |
To his contemporaries, his radical painting style looked rushed... | 1:08:00 | 1:08:04 | |
..imprecise... | 1:08:07 | 1:08:10 | |
and distorted. | 1:08:10 | 1:08:11 | |
It was the antithesis of the realism | 1:08:14 | 1:08:16 | |
that had dominated European art for centuries. | 1:08:16 | 1:08:19 | |
Cezanne thinks, "Huh, light falling on objects... | 1:08:23 | 1:08:29 | |
"Maybe painting is all about perception. | 1:08:29 | 1:08:32 | |
"How am I going to emphasise painting is all about perception? | 1:08:32 | 1:08:35 | |
"I know! I'll paint something really banal. | 1:08:35 | 1:08:37 | |
"I'll paint an apple," and then he says "I'll stun Paris with an apple." | 1:08:37 | 1:08:40 | |
He's not really painting an apple. | 1:08:40 | 1:08:42 | |
What he's painting is his own way of seeing | 1:08:42 | 1:08:45 | |
and if you look, he's given it a double outline. | 1:08:45 | 1:08:48 | |
It's his way of saying, everything we look at is constantly just... | 1:08:48 | 1:08:52 | |
If you look at Cezanne, it makes you feel a bit sick. | 1:08:52 | 1:08:55 | |
Picasso said the great thing about Cezanne is his anxiety. | 1:08:55 | 1:09:00 | |
Painting an apple was his way of showing his anxiety, | 1:09:00 | 1:09:03 | |
his uncertainty, his sense that what we see is not fixed. | 1:09:03 | 1:09:07 | |
Welcome to Cezanne's studio. | 1:09:39 | 1:09:41 | |
The studio was designed by Cezanne himself. | 1:09:41 | 1:09:44 | |
He wanted a very large picture window on the north | 1:09:44 | 1:09:48 | |
and two other large windows on the south. | 1:09:48 | 1:09:51 | |
The light is very important in the studio. | 1:09:51 | 1:09:55 | |
He wanted to get the same condition he had when he was outside. | 1:09:55 | 1:10:01 | |
Cezanne died in 1906 and the studio doesn't change in any way. | 1:10:08 | 1:10:14 | |
You have the same atmosphere in this hall. | 1:10:14 | 1:10:18 | |
You always smile at the painting and the fruit. | 1:10:18 | 1:10:23 | |
All the objects in the studio were painted by Cezanne | 1:10:25 | 1:10:29 | |
and we can now recognise the main objects, | 1:10:29 | 1:10:34 | |
like this little plaster Cupid, | 1:10:34 | 1:10:37 | |
who was painted by Cezanne in ten works. | 1:10:37 | 1:10:43 | |
The star is this green pot and olive pot. | 1:11:01 | 1:11:05 | |
A ginger pot, a round bottle, a wine bottle, a glass. | 1:11:05 | 1:11:11 | |
All these objects Cezanne painted in his still life | 1:11:11 | 1:11:15 | |
are very simple objects, | 1:11:15 | 1:11:17 | |
and the form and the reflection of this object | 1:11:17 | 1:11:23 | |
was the main interest for Cezanne for painting them. | 1:11:23 | 1:11:29 | |
This is the fruit bowl we see in so many still lives. | 1:11:45 | 1:11:51 | |
You can recognise on this table the specific line here. | 1:11:58 | 1:12:01 | |
Of course, the skulls we can recognise | 1:12:10 | 1:12:13 | |
in his vanities. | 1:12:13 | 1:12:15 | |
And on this bottle, we can see his finger marks. | 1:12:23 | 1:12:28 | |
All around. | 1:12:31 | 1:12:33 | |
It's very emotional to see that this bottle was in the hand of Cezanne. | 1:12:37 | 1:12:43 | |
What is amazing is knowing that the simple objects | 1:12:48 | 1:12:54 | |
became model of still lives | 1:12:54 | 1:12:57 | |
and with the subjects he concretises all his theory on painting. | 1:12:57 | 1:13:05 | |
There are no long strokes. | 1:13:23 | 1:13:25 | |
There are no improvised strokes and Cezanne. | 1:13:25 | 1:13:28 | |
They are very much the record of individual moments of sensation. | 1:13:28 | 1:13:31 | |
He wanted to give a kind of exact transcription not of the scene, | 1:13:31 | 1:13:35 | |
but of his perceiving of the scene, | 1:13:35 | 1:13:37 | |
so it's a very introverted, sensation and consciousness-based kind of art. | 1:13:37 | 1:13:42 | |
His project is to tell no lies about painting, invent nothing, | 1:13:42 | 1:13:47 | |
simply record, and he pursues this project faithfully | 1:13:47 | 1:13:51 | |
and without swerving for years and years without an audience. | 1:13:51 | 1:13:55 | |
It's a very strange story. | 1:13:55 | 1:13:58 | |
He only gets an audience right at the end of his life | 1:13:58 | 1:14:00 | |
when he doesn't need it. Too little, too late. | 1:14:00 | 1:14:03 | |
Cezanne was the first painter of the 20th century. | 1:14:07 | 1:14:12 | |
He wasn't the last painter of the 19th century, | 1:14:12 | 1:14:17 | |
and young painters like Picasso, Matisse, and a friend of him, | 1:14:17 | 1:14:21 | |
Gauguin, thought he was the great painter of all the Impressionists. | 1:14:21 | 1:14:28 | |
Picasso called him the father of modern art, | 1:14:28 | 1:14:31 | |
the father of all the painters of the 20th century. | 1:14:31 | 1:14:36 | |
Cezanne had abandoned the fiction | 1:14:44 | 1:14:46 | |
that a painting is a window into reality | 1:14:46 | 1:14:49 | |
in which we see a 3D object in a 3D space. | 1:14:49 | 1:14:54 | |
The rules of perspective and representation | 1:14:54 | 1:14:56 | |
could now be bent to the will of the artist. | 1:14:56 | 1:14:59 | |
Still life had become an artistic laboratory for the reworking | 1:15:01 | 1:15:05 | |
of the visible world. | 1:15:05 | 1:15:07 | |
This impressionistic approach, | 1:15:09 | 1:15:11 | |
this challenge to the established orthodoxy, | 1:15:11 | 1:15:13 | |
became widespread in 19th-century France. | 1:15:13 | 1:15:16 | |
Artists such as Renoir, | 1:15:20 | 1:15:23 | |
Monet | 1:15:23 | 1:15:25 | |
and Gauguin would establish a new language for still life. | 1:15:25 | 1:15:29 | |
And if the genre could be used as a foundation stone | 1:15:30 | 1:15:33 | |
for a new type of expression, it would also become fundamental | 1:15:33 | 1:15:37 | |
in the development of an entirely new art form. | 1:15:37 | 1:15:40 | |
Photographers started to make photographs | 1:15:47 | 1:15:51 | |
of still life compositions, mainly because they didn't move. | 1:15:51 | 1:15:56 | |
The early kinds of photographic processes, | 1:15:56 | 1:15:59 | |
you had eight-minute exposures. | 1:15:59 | 1:16:02 | |
Quite quickly, photographers began to use in effect | 1:16:02 | 1:16:06 | |
the language of art, the still life language of art, | 1:16:06 | 1:16:09 | |
to develop their technique. | 1:16:09 | 1:16:11 | |
By the 1850s, you get quite amazing still life photography, | 1:16:14 | 1:16:19 | |
really quite amazing. | 1:16:19 | 1:16:20 | |
Artists definitely used photography and responded to it, | 1:16:22 | 1:16:25 | |
so photography changed the way people saw. | 1:16:25 | 1:16:28 | |
Once photography itself exists, | 1:16:32 | 1:16:35 | |
I think it makes suddenly startlingly clear to painters | 1:16:35 | 1:16:41 | |
both the power of that image and its limitations. | 1:16:41 | 1:16:47 | |
It's as if artists suddenly completely reel away in horror | 1:16:48 | 1:16:55 | |
from the photographic, | 1:16:55 | 1:16:58 | |
so if you look at a Van Gogh painting of irises, | 1:16:58 | 1:17:02 | |
it's a million miles away from what a photographer would have done, | 1:17:02 | 1:17:07 | |
and he's emphasising his own expressive interreaction | 1:17:07 | 1:17:11 | |
with the flowers, as he does in the Sunflowers. | 1:17:11 | 1:17:14 | |
He shows them reaching up, he shows them falling down. | 1:17:16 | 1:17:19 | |
He shows the rapidity of their ascent and their descent. | 1:17:19 | 1:17:25 | |
They become images of himself but he's also fascinated by the texture, | 1:17:25 | 1:17:29 | |
which of course you can't capture in a photograph. | 1:17:29 | 1:17:32 | |
He stipples the paint to create that sense of the seedhead | 1:17:32 | 1:17:38 | |
and you would stroke the painting if you could, it's not advisable, | 1:17:38 | 1:17:42 | |
but if you could you would see that it would feel rough to the touch | 1:17:42 | 1:17:46 | |
like an actual dried sunflower seedhead. | 1:17:46 | 1:17:50 | |
He's given this almost sculptural element, I would say, in reaction to photography. | 1:17:50 | 1:17:54 | |
I think photography makes artists scratch their head and think, | 1:17:57 | 1:18:02 | |
well, what can painting do that photography can't do? | 1:18:02 | 1:18:06 | |
And from there, suddenly, | 1:18:12 | 1:18:15 | |
still life becomes the fundamental form of cubism, which is | 1:18:15 | 1:18:19 | |
the single most significant art movement | 1:18:19 | 1:18:22 | |
of the whole 20th century and it's all still life. | 1:18:22 | 1:18:25 | |
Cubism allowed the exploration of an object from every possible angle, | 1:18:27 | 1:18:31 | |
with artists painting the subject | 1:18:31 | 1:18:33 | |
from several different viewpoints at once. | 1:18:33 | 1:18:36 | |
Artists such as Picasso and Braque | 1:18:39 | 1:18:42 | |
would use still life to provide an anchor point | 1:18:42 | 1:18:44 | |
for the fragmented planes | 1:18:44 | 1:18:46 | |
and spatial chaos that became the signature style of the new movement. | 1:18:46 | 1:18:50 | |
When Picasso is tackling still life, it becomes illegible. | 1:18:54 | 1:18:58 | |
He plays around massively within that. | 1:18:58 | 1:19:00 | |
It's still acceptable to audiences | 1:19:00 | 1:19:02 | |
because we can still read this as, "Oh, it's a still life painting." | 1:19:02 | 1:19:05 | |
And, as it were, digest what's happening experimentally | 1:19:05 | 1:19:09 | |
far more easily because it's talking a classical language to us. | 1:19:09 | 1:19:13 | |
Why is it all still life? | 1:19:23 | 1:19:25 | |
Because perception itself, how the artist sees has become the subject. | 1:19:25 | 1:19:28 | |
So, if you paint what everybody sees, i.e. still lives, | 1:19:28 | 1:19:31 | |
what's on the table, | 1:19:31 | 1:19:32 | |
what you're really showing is how you see, | 1:19:32 | 1:19:34 | |
how you perceive this notion that we travel around an object, | 1:19:34 | 1:19:37 | |
that experience exists in time that the flat image is not doing | 1:19:37 | 1:19:42 | |
justice to the complexity of our perception. | 1:19:42 | 1:19:45 | |
Painting becomes a form on philosophy | 1:19:45 | 1:19:47 | |
and at the moment the painting becomes a form of philosophy. | 1:19:47 | 1:19:50 | |
Still life becomes the king sitting on the throne of art. | 1:19:50 | 1:19:53 | |
If art is about the elevation of subject, | 1:20:10 | 1:20:13 | |
then still life might just be the king. | 1:20:13 | 1:20:16 | |
It's been there, acting as an artistic barometer, helping us | 1:20:18 | 1:20:22 | |
explore and explain our relationship with the material that surrounds us. | 1:20:22 | 1:20:26 | |
The very stuff of life. | 1:20:29 | 1:20:31 | |
And in the West during the 20th century, there was nothing | 1:20:34 | 1:20:38 | |
we liked more than stuff. | 1:20:38 | 1:20:40 | |
Big difference that makes the 20th century | 1:20:42 | 1:20:46 | |
different from the previous centuries is the status of objects | 1:20:46 | 1:20:49 | |
themselves because at a certain point in the 20th century it | 1:20:49 | 1:20:51 | |
became clear that everything's going to be machine-made from now on. | 1:20:51 | 1:20:55 | |
We come from a world in which everything that we sit on, | 1:20:55 | 1:20:58 | |
everything that we wear, everything we drive, | 1:20:58 | 1:21:01 | |
all of our appliances and technology is machine made. | 1:21:01 | 1:21:03 | |
We live in a machine world, a machine age. | 1:21:03 | 1:21:06 | |
And at a certain point it's clear that to go on making classical | 1:21:06 | 1:21:10 | |
still life in the machine age is...it doesn't make that much sense. | 1:21:10 | 1:21:14 | |
Still life shatters into becoming an ordinary feature of newspaper | 1:21:17 | 1:21:21 | |
and advertising. It goes to live in advertising. | 1:21:21 | 1:21:24 | |
It's not recognised as still life any more. | 1:21:24 | 1:21:26 | |
In the 20th century, if cubists used still life to explore new | 1:21:27 | 1:21:31 | |
dimensions, it was advertising that fed on its traditional form. | 1:21:31 | 1:21:35 | |
Now today, in the 21st century, | 1:21:42 | 1:21:45 | |
still life continues to evolve in surprising ways. | 1:21:45 | 1:21:49 | |
What I like and interested in, in this particular work, | 1:21:50 | 1:21:54 | |
is the moment of destruction is the moment of creation itself. | 1:21:54 | 1:21:58 | |
Throughout my work, I'm exploring the relationship between painting | 1:22:21 | 1:22:26 | |
and photography and film. | 1:22:26 | 1:22:30 | |
The painting of Juan Cotan that I referred to in my film, | 1:22:31 | 1:22:37 | |
Pomegranate, was at the back of my mind for many years. | 1:22:37 | 1:22:42 | |
There is something quite, I would say, chilling about this painting. | 1:22:44 | 1:22:51 | |
The more I look at it, the more it keeps on giving and giving. | 1:22:51 | 1:22:56 | |
So, thinking about Pomegranate and I was thinking about the bullet | 1:23:07 | 1:23:11 | |
and there is a moment of eruption, there is a moment of interruption. | 1:23:11 | 1:23:15 | |
I was imagining the seeds bleeding. | 1:23:17 | 1:23:19 | |
They are still life | 1:23:24 | 1:23:26 | |
but they are as far as one can be removed from a still life | 1:23:26 | 1:23:30 | |
because what they actually depict is an event that | 1:23:30 | 1:23:34 | |
happened in the most extraordinary speed. | 1:23:34 | 1:23:39 | |
A speed that the human being cannot comprehend or conceive. | 1:23:39 | 1:23:43 | |
I like to make things that have the appearance of something | 1:24:23 | 1:24:26 | |
you've seen before and are subverted in some kind of way. | 1:24:26 | 1:24:30 | |
So, these are the flowers that I've taken | 1:24:31 | 1:24:34 | |
and made moulds of and then cast and then I built on these little | 1:24:34 | 1:24:38 | |
pustules and sores which are based on syphilis and gonorrhoea. | 1:24:38 | 1:24:43 | |
And for me, flowers are pretty primitive breeding machines. | 1:24:43 | 1:24:48 | |
They're basically there to procreate, | 1:24:48 | 1:24:49 | |
that's all they are, they're sexual creatures. | 1:24:49 | 1:24:52 | |
So, I wanted to make them look like sexual breeding machines. | 1:24:52 | 1:24:55 | |
If nature is a barometer of the times we're living in, | 1:25:01 | 1:25:07 | |
the environment, then these things could be taken | 1:25:07 | 1:25:10 | |
as an indication of the pathology of the society that we live in. | 1:25:10 | 1:25:15 | |
That things are sick and poisoned and that there's a problem there. | 1:25:15 | 1:25:19 | |
So over here we've got some still life pictures that I made | 1:25:25 | 1:25:29 | |
and they are recreations of meals that prisoners ate | 1:25:29 | 1:25:35 | |
on Death Row before they're executed. | 1:25:35 | 1:25:37 | |
So, basically I decided that what I was going to do was | 1:25:39 | 1:25:42 | |
photograph them in the style of 17th century Dutch still life painting. | 1:25:42 | 1:25:47 | |
Which means that you're looking at a photograph of a Chicken McNugget | 1:25:50 | 1:25:53 | |
through the framework of a vanitas painting, | 1:25:53 | 1:25:56 | |
which means you're looking at it different from what you'd normally do, | 1:25:56 | 1:26:00 | |
you're thinking about the futility of life and the | 1:26:00 | 1:26:02 | |
meaninglessness of the accumulation of worldly goods and idle pursuits. | 1:26:02 | 1:26:08 | |
This one here, I think is Gary Gilmore. | 1:26:09 | 1:26:12 | |
Burgers, boiled eggs, coffees and little shots of whiskey. | 1:26:12 | 1:26:17 | |
A lot of them are really quite touching | 1:26:20 | 1:26:22 | |
because the meals that they've chosen are from their childhood. | 1:26:22 | 1:26:25 | |
This is Allen Lee Davis | 1:26:32 | 1:26:34 | |
and he had a last meal which made it particularly easy for me | 1:26:34 | 1:26:38 | |
because it was using elements that were present | 1:26:38 | 1:26:41 | |
in a lot of 17th century Dutch still life. You've got the big lobster. | 1:26:41 | 1:26:45 | |
I mean, I think they fit in the tradition of vanitas pictures. | 1:26:49 | 1:26:54 | |
It makes you look at something, reflecting on vanity basically | 1:26:54 | 1:26:59 | |
and there's got to be more to life than consumption. | 1:26:59 | 1:27:03 | |
The very term "still life" if you said it to a person in the street | 1:27:09 | 1:27:13 | |
would sound slightly incongruous | 1:27:13 | 1:27:14 | |
because one thing that we know about life now is that it's not still. | 1:27:14 | 1:27:17 | |
It's dynamic, it's moving, it's constantly shifting. | 1:27:17 | 1:27:20 | |
Still life asks us to arrest a particular moment | 1:27:22 | 1:27:25 | |
and to look closely, to observe closely | 1:27:25 | 1:27:28 | |
and that is something we're not used to doing any more. | 1:27:28 | 1:27:31 | |
Because novelty has such prestige, change has such prestige. | 1:27:33 | 1:27:37 | |
We're constantly asking, what's new, what's different? | 1:27:37 | 1:27:40 | |
Still life asks us to look at the overlooked, the familiar | 1:27:40 | 1:27:44 | |
and to discover depths in it. | 1:27:44 | 1:27:45 | |
We speak of ourselves as a materialistic society | 1:27:47 | 1:27:50 | |
but I think the problem is we're not materialistic enough. | 1:27:50 | 1:27:54 | |
We're hasty in our materialism. | 1:27:54 | 1:27:56 | |
We constantly want to buy more stuff but then we don't study it. | 1:27:56 | 1:28:00 | |
Who sat down with something they recently bought | 1:28:02 | 1:28:04 | |
and actually looked closely at it, | 1:28:04 | 1:28:06 | |
tried to look how it was put together and tried to | 1:28:06 | 1:28:08 | |
appreciate the effort, the beauty, the complexity of an object? | 1:28:08 | 1:28:13 | |
There's so many things that we have around us that are ingenious | 1:28:13 | 1:28:16 | |
and attractive but that we just don't take the trouble to look at. | 1:28:16 | 1:28:20 | |
Still life urges us, before we go on another shopping trip, | 1:28:20 | 1:28:23 | |
stop and take a proper look. | 1:28:23 | 1:28:25 |