Great question! I’ll preface by saying that I primarily study American landscapes, so still life paintings and the Northern tradition they’re most readily associated with are not precisely my academic wheelhouse, but I’d like to think I can give a crack at an answer.

So, if we’re going to talk about still lifes, we need to first understand some of the hierarchical and thematic conventions of post-Renaissance European painting. By the seventeenth century, European painting was stratified into a well-defined hierarchy of style. At the top of this hierarchy were history paintings, or in the case of Catholic countries, religious scenes. History paintings were typically quite large and featured dramatic scenes from recent or ancient history. Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe, for example, typifies history painting, at least of the eighteenth century. It’s a dramatic and historically significant scene that his contemporaries would recognize. Wolfe experienced tremendous professional success during the 1859 Battle of Quebec, where he led the English Army to victory over the French. He also experienced tremendous personal failure, as his body was riddled with gunshot wounds and he died on the battlefield. West makes liberal use of Western, and particularly Christian, forms and iconography that, though slightly disguised, would be immediately apparent to his clued-in contemporaries. Note the pyramidal construction of the main group in the foreground, a common Western compositional trope. General Wolfe also holds the immediately recognizable posture of the Lamentation or Deposition of Christ, a posture that again would be immediately recognizable to West’s peers and carry, as you can imagine, a very loaded connotation of sacrifice and purity.

This may seem like an unrelated tangent when considering still lifes, but bear with me. Latent religious or otherwise symbolic content were crucial to understanding history painting. While these works were absolutely meant to mark a certain noteworthy event, equally as important were these latent symbols that transmuted history into allegory. That wasn’t exclusive to history painting, and I would argue that, particularly in the Dutch Golden Age, still lifes were often thinly veiled vehicles for symbolic representation.

History paintings and still lifes occupied opposite ends of the hierarchy (generally, the hierarchy went history painting—portraiture—genre—landscape—still life). So, while still lifes may not have been afforded the individual prestige of history painting, they were a far more ubiquitous form in Dutch culture and took on particular significance. I’m not a social or religious historian, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that the Reformation is probably the most significant vehicle of social change going on roundabouts the Dutch in the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries. From an art historical perspective, Protestantism radically changed how Europeans used art, particularly in newly Protestant areas. Whereas the Catholic Church in Rome had no qualms with representing Biblical figures, including Jesus, or even God, in their art and indeed painted Jesus in practically every canonical scene (and many non-canonical ones!) imaginable, the Protestants took a more strict interpretation of the Third Commandment (“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”).

Practically, this meant that Protestant artists began eschewing direct representations of anything that could be considered idolatrous. So works that, only a few decades earlier, had been significant destinations for pilgrimages began to draw the ire of civil and religious authorities.^^1 But despite the moratorium on explicitly religious iconography, Protestant artists certainly did not appear to become ay less devout or interested in painting scenes of moralizing religious content. Instead, they simply created more circumlocutive ways of expressing this devotion. The Dutch Golden Age is famed for its dense, symbolic iconography. Indeed the very notion of Iconology (the method of interpreting icons within a specific edit: reconstructed cultural context) derives specifically from Erwin Panofsky’s study of the Northern Renaissance tradition that the Dutch Golden Age grew out of.^^2 So let’s take a gander at a couple of Golden Age still lifes, and maybe some other odds and ends, and see if we can’t glean anything about social values in still life.

I’d like to talk about one of my favorite paintings, and really the reason I began this tangent-rife answer in the first place, a still life painted by Pieter Aertsen, one of the fathers of the genre (not to be confused with genre painting, an entirely different genre) in 1551. I didn’t give you the title of the painting, because it’s a little too on the nose and it takes away from a fun little exercise. So, if you can, try to open the image without looking at the title, and spend a bit of time just looking. Aertsen was a master of painting in the truest sense; his ability to handle paints and command detail is immediately apparent and overwhelming. Okay, done gushing. There’s a ton going on in this painting, and I’m here for all of it. We’ve got your severed cow head, some tasty looking sausages, pigs’ feet, the works. What else do you see? I’d like to call attention to a few details that may be easier to gloss over as your eyes (if they’re like mine) keep getting pulled back to the cow’s head.