Caterpillage: Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting 9780823291113

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Caterpillage

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Caterpillage Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting harry berger, jr.

fordham university pre s s

New York

2011

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Copyright © 2011 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berger, Harry. Caterpillage : reflections on seventeenth century Dutch still life painting / Harry Berger, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-3313-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Still-life painting, Dutch—17th century. 2. Death in art. I. Title. II. Title: Reflections on seventeenth century Dutch still life painting. ND1393.N43B46 2011 758 ⬘.40949209032—dc22 2010041137 Printed in the United States of America 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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the roses had the look of flowers that are looked at. —T. S. ELIOT, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it; As a mantis, arranged On a green leaf, grows Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows. —RICHARD WILBUR, “The Beautiful Changes”

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For Beth Pittenger to celebrate all the years in which I’ve looked at still life through her eyes and thought about it in terms of the words and the love she gave me

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Contents

Illustrations

xi

Acknowledgments

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

xiii

Prologue

1

Hyperreality and Truthiness Reading Blake’s “The SICK ROSE” Ethics Versus Technics in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Vanitas: The McGuffin of Still Life Still Life, Trade, and Truthiness The Pretext of Occasion: Floris van Dijck’s Laid Table with Cheese and Fruit, c. 1615 Nature Mourant: The Fictiveness of Dutch Realism The Embarrassment of Niches: Christoffel van den Berghe’s Vase of Flowers in a Stone Niche, 1617 Nature Mourant: Bosschaert’s Leaves, Merian’s Caterpillars “Small-scale Violence” The Darker Spirit: Van Huysum’s Heaps Posies: The Bouquet as Pretext of Occasion Joris Hoefnagel and the Roots of Dutch Flower Painting

4 7

39 46 55 63 69 77

Conclusion: Allegorical Capture and Interpretive Release

90

Epigraph Sources

93

Notes

95

Index

115 ix

10 12 19 24 35

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Illustrations

Title-page spread: Maria Sibylla Merian, Hawthorn Branch, Hairy Caterpillars, and Various Metamorphoses, British Museum, Sloane Album 5276, 120. Watercolor on vellum, pasted onto gray paper. © Trustees of the British Museum. Plates (following page 48) 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

William Blake, “The Sick Rose.” San Marino, Calif., The Huntington Library. Floris van Dijck, Laid Table with Cheese and Fruit, c. 1615. Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Balthasar van der Ast, Still Life with Fruits and Flowers, 1620–22. Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Christoffel van den Berghe, Vase of Flowers in a Stone Niche, 1617. Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Museum of Art. John G. Johnson Collection. Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Vase with Flowers in a Window. Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. Maria Sybilla Merian, caterpillars at work. Hand-colored engraving, from Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (Amsterdam,  1705), pl. 19. The Merian archive of Arader Galleries, Philadelphia. Abraham Mignon, Still Life with Fruit, Oysters, and a Porcelain Bowl. Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Abraham Mignon, The Nest (Game, Fish, and a Nest on a Forest Floor), 1670s. Paris, Musée de Louvre. xi

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xii 9.

Illustrations

Jan van Huysum, Fruit Piece, 1722. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum.

Figures 1. Joris Hoefnagel, “Aeternum Florida Virtus.” From Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592), in Natur, Dichtung und Wissenschaft in der Kunst um 1600, ed. Thea Vignau-Wilberg (Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 1994), Part II, plate 2, p. 127. 2. Hans Boulenger, Tulips in Vase, 1639. Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 3. Maria Sybilla Merian, ragged garland. From Flowers, Butterflies, and Insects: All 154 Engravings from “Erucarum Ortus” (New York: Dover, 1991), plate vi. 4. Maria Sybilla Merian, fat caterpillar. From Flowers, Butterflies, and Insects: All 154 Engravings from “Erucarum Ortus” (New York: Dover, 1991), plate 21. 5. Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Festoon of Fruits and Flowers. Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. 6. Joris Hoefnagel, “Flos Cinis.” From Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592), Part I, pl. 8, p. 113. 7. Joris Hoefnagel, “Tarantula.” From Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592), Part II, pl. 4, p. 131.

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43 51

53

60 86 88

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Acknowledgments

I’ve been blessed all my writing life with readers who approached my books and essays with open minds and good hearts, readers who wanted and were able to make what I was trying to do better and—more specifically— clearer. In the present study of still life, my luck holds up. I began thinking about Caterpillage more than forty years ago. Since then I’ve worked on it sporadically, sometimes shelving it in frustration and sometimes throwing it away. What saved me were the friends who were there to buck me up or calm me down and give me the ideas that kept me going. I’m deeply grateful to Peter Erickson, to Sarah Greenleaf Whittier, to Elizabeth Honig, to Tyrus Miller, and to Deanna Shemek. They helped me not only to see what I was looking at but also to think and talk more clearly about what I saw. More recently, the stimulating criticisms and suggestions of the anonymous reader for Fordham University Press led me to make several changes and to modify the organization of the chapters. Sections or shorter versions of the book were presented as lectures at several venues, and it gives me pleasure to acknowledge the many responsive and incisive comments of the audiences at Yale University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Davis, The University of Southern California and the Huntington Library, The NYU Humanities Institute (especially Lawrence Weschler), and The NYU Institute of Fine Art (especially Mariët Westermann). Once again my thanks go to Helen Tartar, who has been my Dream Editor for so many years. Her attentiveness to the details of literary, expository, and xiii

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xiv

Acknowledgments

rhetorical form has become my touchstone. Thanks also to Helen’s colleagues, Thomas C. Lay and Katie Sweeney. Tom was there for me time and time again during the difficult period of securing illustrations and making last-minute revisions of the manuscript. Thanks to Tom for his many positive suggestions and interventions. And finally, it gives me pleasure to thank Helen Hill for her wonderful help and support. My dedication only hints at the deepest source of all my musings about still life. For the better part of twenty years my adventures in the world of still life have been shared with my loving friend, partner, and wife, Beth Pittenger, whose preternatural gift of observation is matched by the quiet eloquence with which she translates what she sees into the poetry of her language. Her brilliance of insight and fullness of love make my work possible and my life whole.

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Caterpillage

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Prologue

Ever since its emergence at the turn of the seventeenth century, the aesthetic body of Dutch still-life painting has been hamstrung by iconography. Viewed through the magnific lens of Brittanica Online, iconography is “the science of identification, description, classification, and interpretation of symbols, themes, and subject matter in the visual arts. The term can also refer to the artist’s use of this imagery in a particular work.”1 The Wikipedian etymology gets us closer to the problem: “The word iconography literally means ‘image writing,’ and comes from the Greek eikon (image) and graphein (to write).” Iconography, then, is the practice of “writing” on images and reading them as texts. In iconographical discourse, the text most frequently inscribed in or on still-life painting is said to be the vanitas. “A vanitas painting contains collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures; it exhorts the viewer to consider mortality and to repent.”2 This definition may be shopworn, but it’s accurate as far as it goes. Vanitas embraces both senses of the term vainness: futility and conceit. It is the vanity of being mortal, the vanity of failing to be art, the stupid hope that art can conquer death. A more interesting account of the vanitas as a cultural attitude or structure of thought lurks in the titular pun of Simon Schama’s impressive if problematic study: The Embarrassment of Riches.3 Schama takes issue with the thesis articulated by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.4 Weber claimed that the Protestant ethic gave aid and comfort to capitalism 1

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by presenting the pursuit of wealth as a godly duty, a calling, rather than as a sin or frailty.5 Schama objects that the abundance of wealth with which the Dutch were blessed was also a moral burden.6 He documents the various strategies they used to equilibrate one embarrassment over against the other so that they could, with clearer conscience, go on making and having enough to be embarrassed about.7 The Embarrassment of Riches as a whole is an extended meditation on the pervasiveness of the vanitas in Dutch culture. In Schama’s terms, the business of much still life is to register the pressure of embarrassment and the claim of morality, and then to move on. Yet, as he shows in a later essay on the genre, vanitas as an ambience retains predicant force.8 Its moral patina oxidizes still life so that the debt sinfully successful burghers owe their culture is acknowledged and rubbed off. Its tarnish coats a genre that too readily suffers the happy predicament of a Golden Age: “the embarrassment of riches.” But since still life luxuriates in its vexing profusion, the vanitas symbolism may be forced to present itself as a target of parody. My argument in this study is that, if it is strategically useful for iconography to seem more important than it actually is, that may be because the vanitas it privileges is actually less important than it seems. To put it in terms borrowed from a sister medium, iconography is the McGuffin of still life: McGuffin: In a film (now also in a novel or other form of narrative fiction): a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops. (OED) In effect, the function of a MacGuffin [in a Hitchcock film] is like the “meaning’” of a poem—which T. S. Eliot compared to the bone thrown by a burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind while the poem goes about its own, deeper business.9 The chief use of the “meaning” of a poem . . . may be . . . to keep . . . [the reader’s] mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him; much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog. This is a normal situation of which I approve.10

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Prologue

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But even in the face of parody, the watchdog of the mind is never fully distracted. The persistence of recognizable vanitas symbols keeps it snarling on its chain. Recent interpreters of still life have conferred new depth on the vanitas, partially extricating it from the shopworn sense featured in the Britannica definition cited above. They concede its “chief use” may be to divert the watchdog by throwing it a moral bone while the painting “goes about its own . . . business.” But they also show that there is much to be diverted from. In their critiques of the culture that produced still life, they uncover darker enactments of vanitas, episodes of bad faith unfolding at both the local and the international levels.

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Hyperreality and Truthiness In the marine amphitheater where the trained whales perform, these animals are billed as “killer whales,” and probably they are very dangerous when they’re hungry. Once we are convinced that they are dangerous, it is very satisfying to see them so obedient to orders. . . . So with its killer whales and its dolphins, its strokable tigers and its elephants that gently sit on the belly of the blonde trainer without hurting her, Marine World presents itself as a reduced-scale model of the Golden Age, where the struggle for survival no longer exists, and men and animals interact without conflict. —UMBERTO ECO, Travels in Hyperreality

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eventeenth-century Dutch still life may seem to present itself as an earnest of the peaceable kingdom. Especially in such subgenres as the floral piece and the banquet piece, still life aspires to the condition Umberto Eco attributes to Disneyland, Marine World, Hearst Castle, and other “reduced-scale model[s] of the Golden Age”: hyperreality. The genre’s practitioners would no doubt resent the hilarious tone of bemused and awed contempt with which Eco bumptiously catalogues the horrors of a culture in which the “‘completely real’ becomes identified with the ‘completely fake’ ” and “absolute unreality is offered as real presence.”1 Since Eco’s target is “an America of furious hyperreality,” we couldn’t redirect his comments to Dutch still life without a significant upgrading of tone. Yet if properly qualified, the definition quoted at the end of the preceding paragraph applies to the motives of still life. The qualification consists in retaining the scare quotes around Eco’s statements. Still life proudly pretends, but only pretends, that its absolute unreality is the simulacrum of real presence. It parades the completely fake as the copy of a completely real original. But it lets us suspect it may be lying. Its emphasis is on the completeness, the conspicuousness, of its fakery. As Richard Leppert puts it in his powerful essay on the genre, the “rhetorical power” of still life is “in part produced by the tension of frustration engendered in the move from the three-dimensional world of material reality to the two-dimensional world of representation.”2 To borrow the Dutch idiom, still life pretends to be naer het leven, “from life,” or “after life.” As we’ll see later, the temporal relation featured by the formula is important. “Life” was there first, even if it wasn’t. The name of this practice and effect is not hyperrealism. It’s just realism. With their compositional fluency, decorative richness, and mimetic mastery, examples of the genre abundantly display their commitment to the virtues enumerated by Philips Angel in his 1642 manifesto of realism, “In Praise of Painting.”3 But the project dramatized in Dutch still life goes well beyond that commitment.4 This is because still life is notable for its devotion to the special quality of evasiveness Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness”: “Truthiness is what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are. What feels like the right answer as opposed to what reality will support.”5 Truthiness: the spirit

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of iconography; the objective of the vanitas. Colbert’s critique of evasiveness reminds me of a similar critique voiced by Shakespeare’s Lafew in All’s Well That Ends Well: “They make trifles of terrors, ensconcing themselves in seeming knowledge when they should submit themselves to an unknown fear.”6 In the past, such truthiness and trifling marked the iconographic dimensions of much academic commentary on still life. More recent generations of art historians have significantly raised the level of discourse, and my own approach owes much to their work. The discussion that follows is deeply indebted to studies by Beatrijs Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, Celeste Brusati, Norman Bryson, Anne Goldgar, Hanneke Grootenboer, Lee Hendrix, Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Martha Hollander, Elizabeth Honig, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Richard Leppert, Claudia Swan, and Paul Taylor. These studies have taught me that traditional iconography tends to ignore still life’s often tart representation of truthiness. Still-life painters frequently indulge in a Colbertian form of mischief: while they showcase their commitment to the truthiness of realism, they gesture toward a reflexive form of irony in which they showcase their showcasing. The conventions of the genre encourage its practitioners to venture out on the precipice of self-parody even as they pay their respects to the proprieties of iconography. In the sections that follow, I begin with William Blake’s critique of those proprieties and then proceed to explore the ways the critique gets preemptively expressed in Dutch still life itself.

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Reading Blake’s “The SICK ROSE” O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. —WILLIAM BLAKE, “The SICK ROSE”

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t first glance, “Rose” connotes whatever is natural, beautiful, fragile, innocent, and open or vulnerable to the world, while the worm brings evil, corruption, disease, mortality, and worldly experience. But at second glance, this changes by the time the elevated “thou art” gives way to the colloquial and sharply terminated sibilance of “sick.”1 The apostrophe uttered by the voice of Experience marks a performative act of mystification. It represents a speaking to, and a gazing at, something that seems simultaneously to be definite and familiar to the speaker but indefinite and unfamiliar to us readers. “Rose” appears as a proper noun, and the possibility that it names a woman flickers into thought for a brief moment because “O Rose” is a vocative. In Plate 1, a thorny, leafy rose plant shooting up from the ground on the left arches around the inscribed verses and is dragged earthward by its heavy, fallen blossom. Three women are depicted in various postures of despair, all dressed in the rose’s hues. The first emerges from the blossom, and the other two are above it. The second is a budlike form “huddled [on a shoot] as if weeping,” and the third, higher up, has “her head buried in her arms, her left leg pulled up but dangling, her long scroll-skirt tangled almost worm-like down the main stem.”2 In addition, there are at least two visible worms: a voracious caterpillar at top left works on a leaf, and a banded caterpillar or earthworm attacks the fallen rose. I say “at least two” not only because some versions show a wormlike swelling between the two leaves at the upper right but also because of what David Erdmann describes as the highest woman’s “wormlike” skirt. It curls down like a long caterpillar. Its tail is wrapped tightly about the main stem in a stranglehold that seems partly responsible for the sickness of the rose. The utterance that descends into a darkening field is at once sympathetic and sardonic. It projects the surprised and pained observation of a lamenting child. It projects the grim, retributive disgust of the punishing Judge. Yet the voice that reverberates through the rhetorical storm makes the Rose not only the victim but also the accomplice of the worm. It registers both the helplessness of a futile warning and the bitterness of the cynic’s fulfilled prophecy. Its bite penetrates most sharply in the phrase “has found

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Reading “The SICK ROSE”

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out”: “has discovered and exposed what you tried to conceal, ‘thy bed/Of crimson joy.’ ” Blake conjures up a haunting, lamia-like presence, whose ability to destroy its destroyer lurks in the instability, the reversibility, of the poetic inversion “his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy.” Thy life destroys his dark secret love. Thus innocence is fulfilled in being violated by experience and unknowingly desires “her” own destruction. It’s with “her” permission that the violator finds its home, finds its bed, finds its pleasure, in the Rose. By the end of the poem, the women no less than the worms infect the image like allegorical swellings. Scholars have applied the standard iconographic compresses to them—vanitas and resurrection—along with particular allusions in the domain of intra-Blakean iconography.3 But the two stanzas inscribed in the picture’s central depths project a speaking voice that turns the banality of such iconographic trifles into the terrors of erotic and sadomasochistic complicity. From this Blakean standpoint, the moral McGuffins of the vanitas exemplify the evasive action censured by Lafew: they help iconographers “make trifles of terrors, ensconcing themselves in seeming knowledge when they should submit themselves to an unknown fear.”4 Objectively, the vanitas motif represents the threat of disorder. Reflexively, it represents the fear of that threat. Blake caricatures the “rational” desire to repress or neutralize that fear in the figure of Urizen. Urizen is the spirit of truthiness, whose motto is: One command, one joy, one desire, One curse, one weight, one measure, One King, one God, one Law.5

Urizen is Blake’s version of Milton’s God, and it’s as if to forecast and mock the emergence of modern iconography that he feints toward the vanitas motif in “The Sick Rose.”6 Urizen is the drive to capture the world for allegory, and my interest is in the way still life challenges Urizen by producing images that either resist capture or represent allegory’s failures.

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Ethics Versus Technics in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life

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thics Versus Technics: this opposition could be rephrased as “Iconographic Versus. Aesthetic Interpretation,” but a more resounding alternative, and the one I prefer, is “Allegorical Capture and Interpretive Release in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life.” I use the words ethics and allegorical capture to refer to the effects of iconography on the meanings of still life. “Interpretive release” designates the freedom to resist or defer ethical closure until the detail and drama of technical play have been explored in the spirit of “negative capability”—“without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”1 I borrow the term capture from Gordon Teskey’s Allegory and Violence, and my sense of “release” is infused with the spirit of Angus Fletcher’s great book Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode.2 In Allegory, Fletcher notes that, because agoreuein “connotes public, open, declarative speech” and because allos inverts this sense (allos + agoreuein = “speaking other than in public”), Quintilian and others have called allegory “inversion.” But what they call inversion Teskey all but rewrites as invasion, presenting allegory as a violent force that “captures,” “seizes,” “tears,” “ravishes,” “actively subdues” the matter it works on, a force that negates “the integrity of the other, of the living.”3 This is a terrifyingly calorific intensification of the idea of capture expressed by Barthes in “Myth Today”: “the materials of mythic speech . . . , however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are seized by myth.”4 10

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Ethics Versus Technics

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Allegory and Violence is a deeply serious study about large issues and landmark texts. But I think the range of its applicability can be extended from great things to small by putting into play what might be called “softer” conceptual equivalents of violence, capture, and negation. Teskey’s idea of the relation between allegory and violence stems from Benjamin’s concept of nature, or physis, as “an anarchic region of struggle, a forest of entangled, urgent competitive growth. In this forest, meaning, and even order, is possible only when the life is destroyed.”5 I propose to soften this idea by passing it through Christopher Wood’s account of the difference between description and the world in the following statement: “Description of the world differs from the world. . . . the gap between the animation and durability of the description, and the ephemerality of the object in real life—that is, the knowledge that the actual model for the painting has long since disintegrated—is the emblem of mortality. . . . Descriptive painting did not emerge to fulfill the requirements of the vanitas topos. . . . Rather, the topos followed from the technique.”6 It may seem ridiculous to map this statement onto Teskey’s statement about struggle and competition. But it seems right, too. Wood is concerned with the relation of description and technique to “the world,” Teskey and Benjamin with the relation of meaning and order to physis. Both statements speak of the ways in which art and allegory help to damage or to devalue nature. Or to ruin it. Wood’s topic is the so-called fijnschilders’ technique invented by van Eyck and practiced in seventeenth-century still life, a practice in which a descriptive detail becomes invested with special significance (aura) “simply by being singled out of the chaos of experience.” Art does more than redundantly double actuality. But since, as Benjamin says, in the actual or profane world “the detail is of no great importance,” the effect of its capture by art or allegory is that “the profane world is both elevated and devalued.”7 As with the familiar case of the Petrarchan mistress, elevation is itself the devaluation, the violence, the contempt, implicit in the form of capture known as idealization.

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Vanitas: The McGuffin of Still Life ALL the flowers of the spring Meet to perfume our burying. — —JOHN WEBSTER, The Devil’s Law Case

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. ................................ And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm. —DYLAN THOMAS

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lake’s tiny nightmare gives substance to the genre name that seems to have been bestowed on still life in 1756, the year before his birth: nature morte.1 Having said that, I confess that the motive behind my starting a discussion of still life with “The Sick Rose” is a tad perverse. It’s to prepare the way for a review of recent approaches to the genre that depart from the old and respectable method of iconography by which stilllife commentary was long dominated. I don’t by any means expect to find a genuine Blakean alternative to that mode. But I want at least to profile readings of still life that glance in the direction of such an alternative. My view of still life has been instructed and profoundly affected by three studies: those of Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Anne Goldgar, and Richard Leppert.2 In different ways, their work either challenges or modifies the so-called vanitas interpretation. That interpretation goes back a long way, and I now pause to illustrate it with an example from the work of the renowned sixteenth century painter and illuminator Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1601). Figure 1 is a plate from Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii, a collection of engravings Hoefnagel’s son made after his father’s drawings and published in 1592.3 The central figure in the upper half of the plate is a single rose thrusting up from the ground. Its wide-open petals are beginning to droop, and with good reason: a snail, stretching fantastically out of its shell, is coiled tightly around the stem of the rose. Against the left and right edges of the plate, the cut stems of a wild daffodil and a columbine are enclosed in hollow bolts nailed against the sides of the frame. The flowers lean inward as if better to observe the drama. Beneath the snail a prone winter radish, along with its shadow, stretches across the ground near the bottom of the plate. Curled in an arc atop the radish, a spiked and bristly caterpillar sits ready for action. The Erasmian inscription lettered just above the rose is “Aeternum florida virtus” (“Virtue forever flourishing”).4 At the bottom of the page, a smaller cursive text beneath a prone winter radish tells the truer, sadder, side of the story: “I wondered at the speed of decay in this fleeting life, and that while roses are blooming they are also fading.”5 I’ll come back to this plate later, because I find the inscription misleading (see Chapter 13, below).

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figure 1. Joris Hoefnagel, “Aeternum Florida Virtus.” From Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii, 1592, Part II, plate 2.

What actually goes on in the image reduces the inscription to a McGuffin, a “bone thrown . . . to distract the watchdog of the mind.” Hoefnagel’s Archetypa seems to have interested several early-seventeenthcentury Dutch still-life painters, who included caterpillars, snails, and wellchomped leaves in their imaginary bouquets. These critters are sometimes depicted realistically. More often, they are toylike or jewel-like, as exquisite as the exotic-looking shells and enamelled porcelain ware with which they so frequently share the picture space. Iconographers tend to downplay the terrors, diminish the impact, of these lovely agents of decay by reading them not only as in malo reminders of mortality in the vanitas tradition but also as in bono figures of religious allegory—insect metamorphosis either as resurrection or as symbolic of the perpetuity of the natural cycle. Sam Segal, for example, writes that nibbled leaves in Dutch flower pieces “underscore the sense of transiency” and enhance “the impression of naturalness.”6 He captures realism for allegory when he argues that “in the

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The McGuffin of Still Life

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first half of the seventeenth century the Dutch flower still-life is almost always read as a vanitas.” Segal’s emphasis is elegiac rather than moral or religious: Flowers bloom for only a short time, so their beauty is of brief duration. So it is with the life of man, which like a flower is bound by time. The damaged rose petals strengthen the idea. The snail means that time appears to proceed slowly but irrevocably creeps forward. The snail is bound by the earth, i.e., the material realm. This pertains also to the caterpillar.7

This is surely a possible way—the way of truthiness—to interpret the presence of snails and caterpillars. But it isn’t the only way. Shortness of life is one thing. Damage is another. Segal’s vanitization of the caterpillar as representing the tooth of time comes down to this: the caterpillar is—and was then represented as—the feeding stage of the butterfly. Seventeenth-century gardeners and painters may not have had access to the truths of modern caterpillar science, among them the fact that, during its two- or three-week tenure on earth, the constantly chomping caterpillar can grow several thousand times its original size.8 But they had eyes to see with. And they had ideas that transformed the caterpillar into a redeemable monster: its metamorphosis into a moth or butterfly still gets interpreted as a symbol of resurrection.9 By reading such images as symbols, iconography captures their details and transforms them into textual denotations. They become metonymies, interchangeable parts of preexisting wholes. The presence of objects like a skull, a timepiece, or a burning fuse has a contagious effect. All the items in their neighborhood contract the vanitas and become symptoms of supposedly preexisting bodies of belief. It would be misleading to overstate the prevalence of this malady. And in recent decades scholars have given new depth and richness to the concept of vanitas. Their attitudes range from careful specificity to mild skepticism. The most energetic contemporary apologist for iconographic truthiness has been Eddy de Jongh, but his defense is measured and exploratory rather than dogmatic. His strategy consists in confessing that lack of real evidence forces the latter-day scholar to compensate in two ways. First, he imagines what a seventeenth-century iconological treatise would say if only it had

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been written, and second, he deduces from this erudite fantasy what meanings seventeenth-century painters would have found in the treatise and thought obligatory to convey.10 De Jongh cautiously rejects the idea that “all still-lifes of the period were overburdened with references”: some artists may have “preferred to arouse only vague associations in their public,” while “in certain works there is precious little or no deeper content at all.”11 He insists that “iconology cannot be practiced without a certain element of speculation.”12 And he is careful to sort out different levels of symbolic potentiality. On the one hand, the “unambiguous” vanitas still life contains a skull. “Dishes and items of food,” on the other hand, “just do not have it in them to make as strong a semantic impact as skulls.”13 This is part of de Jongh’s commendable polemic against excessive iconography. He is intent on protecting the practice from symbol hunters whose enthusiasm would give his art a bad name. He goes on to concede that, in the absence of any early treatise, “we have to resort to a method of interpretation that can produce nothing more substantial than twentieth-century reconstructions of possible seventeenth-century answers.” The phrase “nothing more substantial” is disarmingly modest. But the author immediately raises the bar: “these reconstructions,” he sternly adds, “do not necessarily have to be devoid of good sense.”14 The topic is more systematically explored in Paul Taylor’s illuminating account of floral symbolism.15 Before sampling explicit—textually supported— instances of “transience iconography” and their “relish for semantic overkill,” he drily notes of viewers who contemplate “the flowers in a painting” that the possibility of their “causing moral fruit to ripen from each one . . . was probably not too frequent an occurrence.” But if and when they did, “their minds must have strayed down paths of meaning” he describes in an extended account of the symbolic valencies of twelve flowers and three insects.16 Taylor is careful to emphasize the diversity and flexibility of response (or nonresponse) in “a society where symbolism could be attached to or withdrawn from virtually anything at will.”17 Like de Jongh, he generally accepts and works with the conventional range of meanings ascribed to the vanitas. In one comment, however, he briefly anticipates the more complicated sense of the vanitas that Anne Goldgar would develop: “Dutch people

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in the Golden Age were perfectly able to pay enormous sums for a flower, use it as an emblem of the vanity of earthly riches, and see no discrepancy at all between their actions.”18 The most ironic manifestation of the vanitas occurs at the botanico-historical level. It concerns the true cause of the apparently spontaneous generation of the brilliant “flames” or “breaks” that made tulips so valuable: What the Dutch could not have known was that a virus was responsible for the magic of the broken tulip, a fact that . . . doomed the beauty it made possible. . . . for several hundred years tulips were selected for a trait that would sicken and eventually kill them. . . . The more beautiful the breaks produced by the infection, the greater the number of infected plants in Dutch gardens and the more total virus in circulation.19

The vanitas receives new depth and meaning in Goldgar’s Tulipmania. She argues that, although its customary deployment preceded the tulip crash of 1636, it takes on more intense significance when the crash is coupled with the plague in 1636–37.20 The theme of her powerful chapter entitled “Bad Faith” is that the titular phrase picks out the vanitas by which behavior in the tulip trade was stigmatized. “Bad Faith,” which centers almost obsessively on issues of trust and distrust, shows how the tulip becomes the symbolic displacement as well as the material cause of sharp practices among dealers: “Tulips were perhaps particularly susceptible to problems over trust. The nature of the flower made this so. There were perhaps two weeks in the year in which the flower’s blossom . . . was actually visible to buyers. For the rest of the year, buyers had to take the promises of the sellers on trust.”21 But the promises were unreliable and “the tulip crash proved a tremendous shock to notions of trust.” For the most part “the damage was . . . not financial. It was the confusion of values, the breakdown of honor, and the destruction of trust bound up in the events of the 1630s that caused this damage to Dutch society.”22 In Goldgar’s vision, vanitas takes on the specific qualities of the bad faith of tulipmania: In the pamphlets and tulip songs, the unreliability of the flower was partly intended to be a contrast with the reliability of God. . . . The tulip, like

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Caterpillage Flora, is in some ways a metaphor here for its own sellers; to rely on them was also to build on sand. . . . When the tulip trade crashed, some authors suspected that it was not through any economic mechanisms that they in any case would have been ill equipped to explain. It was rather the fault of certain deceitful practices carried out by a cabal of essentially criminal florists. . . . It was this social anxiety . . . that was most frightening for contemporaries. It was crucial to this society, a society anxious for order, to know just who was who.23

If Goldgar focuses on the vanitas of bad faith within the local Dutch tulip trade, Julie Berger Hochstrasser expands the scope of inquiry to the bad faith of the Dutch colonial trading empire. The thesis of her Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age, published in the same year as Goldgar’s Tulipmania, is that “trade” is a euphemistic way to describe the violent and piratical pursuit of the commodities depicted in still-life pictures. Yet even when still life is depicted under the sign of vanitas, the “visual language of the commodity” affirms and exalts the power of the merchants whose spoils the artist imitates: their aspirations bleed into his. This language betrays “what now reads as a political agenda of legitimation, even entirely apart from any calculated strategies on the part of the artist.”24 In other words, Still Life and Trade explores the truthiness of still life in political and ideological terms. A brief outline of the book’s argument follows.

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Still Life, Trade, and Truthiness what appears in the painting is not negative example, but sanctioned practice. —JULIE BERGER HOCHSTRASSER, “Feasting the Eye: Painting and Reality in the Seventeenth-century ‘Bancketje’”

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till life paintings had an implicitly reflexive function in early-seventeenth-century Holland: they celebrated the triumphs of the Dutch culture of commodities, and they were themselves commodities. “The genre’s evolution toward increasingly lavish content, composition, and styles suggests . . . correlations with contemporaneous developments of the prosperity of the Netherlands, with the material culture of trade.” The focus of earlier still-life painters on the representation of locally available commodities gave way later in the seventeenth century to depictions of “commodities gathered from around the world.”1 In the studies of foreign and overseas trade that take up most of Still Life and Trade, Hochstrasser interrogates the “obdurate silence” with which still life “delivers the goods as if by magic” without disclosing “the mechanisms of their acquisition.”2 The silence “leaves untold ever more involved and disturbing truths about the acquisition of the various objects they picture.”3 “On the surface there is a more positive, assertive message that draws on and appeals to the power of the Dutch nation, the Dutch consumer, and the Dutch artist.” But beneath that surface lurk “many untold narratives regarding the procurement and production” of the things depicted, narratives whose “troubling complexities” were “glossed over by these elegant renderings.”4 Hochstrasser’s account of sugar production in Brazil, for example, centers on the “persistent corruption, thievery, bribery, and villainy” required to keep the sugar mills going. This operation “was entirely dependent on slave labor” and was “so arduous, grueling, and even deadly, that . . . the indigenous Indian population could not survive it”5 Similarly, in their quest for pepper and spices, the Dutch not only exploited “indigenous peoples” but “forcibly removed [them] from their home islands” and slaughtered them or starved them to death.6 Thus, as overseas trade expanded into the New World and Asia, and as Dutch trading vessels came routinely to be equipped with armor and military cohorts, the trading empire began to look and act like a conquest empire. Such sordid realities went unreported in contemporary accounts of these activities. Nor are they recorded in the visual record of still life. Hochstrasser’s argument as a whole drives toward a conclusion that supports and amplifies Goldgar’s thesis: the standard vanitas is a McGuffin. Whether

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intentionally or not, it works to divert the viewer from the real vanitas. The pious iconography of (or at least attributed to) still life is therefore complicit with the ideology that justifies colonial barbarism. “You cannot argue with a song.” 7 In his analysis of the evolution of the Merina kingdom in Madagascar, Maurice Bloch has shown how the rhythmic formalization of language can be used to express, maintain, and control hierarchic relations in systems of traditional authority. Ritual communication is among the ideological apparatuses Bloch examines in analyzing the means by which the Merina converted power into authority—the means by which “a turbulent state based on . . . unscrupulous exploitation” came to be represented as a harmoniously integrated hierarchy. The archaism and change-resistant formality of ritual communication “makes the social world appear organized in a fixed order which recurs without beginning and without end,” and so “the political, the social, the discontinuous, the cultural and the arbitrary” are projected “into the image and the realm of repetitive nature,” an image that focuses on its “beneficial cyclical aspects, fertility and reproduction.”8 Mutatis mutandis, you cannot argue with a still life. Hochstrasser discusses the way several painters compulsively repeat “the same subjects” in one painting after another (cheese, beer, wine, carved herring, pepper packets, peeled lemons, tobacco). She appeals to Homi Bhabha’s account of repetition in colonial discourse as the mechanism that “naturalizes the image of subjugation” and helps the colonizer deal “with deep-seated anxieties inherent in the colonial relationship.” And she asks whether the repetitions in still life are “confidently in control” or “rather infused with this same anxiety? . . . Control and anxiety inhabit opposite faces of the same fragile panel.”9 Apart from repetition, what would such markers of anxiety be? As Hochstrasser shows, the discourse of still life is reticent on this score. For the most part, the paintings she considers “register no agency.” She finds them “pernicious” in that they are mum about the violence behind the acquisition of commodities. In fact, they are misleading. They focus not on taking but on giving: on the drama of display and donation, and on what happens when the objects are “brought into the personal space of the individual viewer, who is offered . . . consumption of the goods at hand.”10

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At the same time, ironically, when still life gets iconographic, it moralizes not against acquisition but “against consumption.”11 Its innocence in this respect is safeguarded by conventions that deflect painters’ efforts from ethics to technics and to the pursuit of realism. They seem to participate in an uncritical ritual of mimetic celebration. Furthermore, if the “disturbing truths” about acquisition are strategically excluded from still life, they aren’t conspicuously excluded. Their exclusion isn’t noticeable until the interpreter points it out. “Conspicuous exclusion” is my term for a trope in which readers or observers are cued to notice that something they might have expected to see has been left out.12 The strategic exclusion targeted by Hochstrasser is a tactic, not a trope; a tactic furtively practiced by politicians, not a trope proudly foregrounded by painters. There are, nevertheless, devices in still life that contend against the allegorical capture they seem to encourage. There are images that acknowledge an obligation to truthiness and realism only as a prelude to their escape into the freedom of interpretive turmoil and technical play. Still Life and Trade differs both in geographical scope and in rhetorical timbre from Tulipmania. Nevertheless, the two books taken together give new, deep, and distressing resonance to the concept of vanitas: the resonance of disordered desire. And in a strange collocation, the frequencies of this resonance pulse in close harmony with those of a disorder that was much noted by Thucydides and Plato in fifth-century Athens: the disorder known as pleonexia. In Thucydides’ lexicon, pleonexia is a key term for what ails Hellenic society, and it has a similar eminence in Plato’s dialogues. Pleonexia means not only “having more” (a literal translation) but wanting to have more—wanting to be bigger, better, superior. It means never having enough because you aspire to total and immortal self-sufficiency, even if that involves draining the rest of the world of power, wealth, pleasure, and being. But there’s also a more defensive side to pleonexia in a society whose members are aware of competing with each other: pleonexia involves wanting to take from another before another takes from you. Goldgar’s local bad faith and Hochstrasser’s global bad faith are both versions of pleonexia, but versions situated in a Christian culture beleaguered if not dominated by Calvinism’s injection of guilt into the conscience and

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consciousness of parishioners. The brutality documented by Hochstrasser and the intense if low-key voracity that drives the double-dealing of Goldgar’s merchants throw a shadow over the more benign characterization of Dutch culture formulated in Schama’s terms. The shadow of pleonexia or vanitas that falls across the embarrassment of riches in the time of tulipmania has the form of an enormous, incessantly munching caterpillar.

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The Pretext of Occasion: Floris van Dijck’s Laid Table with Cheese and Fruit, c. 1615 [The representational stratagems of Dutch still life] perform a double function, on the one hand, creating compelling pictorial fictions, and on the other, inviting the viewer to reflect on the artifice by which those illusions are produced. —CELESTE BRUSATI, “Natural Artifice and Material Values in Dutch Still Life”

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he occasion that provided the original pretext for these reflections was the exhibit entitled Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands, 1550–1720, which opened in the newly renovated South Wing of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in the last year of the twentieth century.1 The curators cleverly placed vases containing large bouquets of flowers—the garden variety—in both the anteroom and the second room of the exhibit. The vases marked a threshold across which viewers passed from real to imaginary flowers. Bees and butterflies inhabited many of the flower pieces in the room, but none hovered about either vase. The vase didn’t resign itself gracefully to this ancillary function. It invited visitors to pause long enough to appreciate the cleverness of allusion, take in the arrangement, and smell the flowers. It threatened to compete with its imaginary neighbors, not only because it was much larger than the bouquets in the framed pictures on the walls around. It was also brighter and more intense, since the relative range of hues and degree of saturation are proportionally greater in nature’s palette than in art’s. Nevertheless, something about its size and flashiness made it too importunate and accessible. Real bouquets are merely what they are and shouldn’t take on airs. They consist of real—and locally obtainable—flowers. They aren’t corporeally challenged or deprived. They display themselves directly in three dimensions and ask only to be glanced at, touched, admired, and enjoyed. But still life offers its illusionary bouquets to be studied, minutely scrutinized, and wondered at. Moving through the exhibit, I glanced back at the vase. Some of its specimens looked papery, and I belatedly wondered whether its flowers were fake. The real bouquet was beginning to turn into an imitation of the imaginary bouquets.2 But I also recognized how strategically misleading this mimetic fantasy was, how subtly it performed its task of privileging the painter’s work over that of the floral arranger. For if both real and imaginary bouquets invite us into their respective spaces, only the former makes it possible for us to accept the invitation. The conspicuous illusoriness with which still life tempts us to cross the threshold of its frame and pass through the surface into its looking-glass world is what denies us access. Imaginary flowers tease us by stirring up and then baffling our desire for truthiness. They simultaneously assert their reality and throw it into question.

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But they aren’t simply parasitic upon real flowers. They belong to a different order, an order in which the artist presses us to wonder not at the flowers themselves but at his rendering of them. They aren’t in the painting the same way the real vase of flowers is in the room. This drama between two contradictory messages—one inviting and the other denying access into imaginary space—is what distinguishes the relation still life constructs between itself and its observer. The influence and proximity of imaginary bouquets may for a moment allow their fictiveness to rub off on the real vase of flowers, but this momentary impression only sharpens our sense of the radical irreality of still life fictions. And this may have been the function of the real bouquet, the message the curators may have intended to convey (and then again, maybe not). Later, I noticed fallen petals drying up at the foot of the vase and wondered briefly how old the flowers were and whether they needed water. After that I tried unsuccessfully to get inside one still life after another. The exhibition of still life painting in the Rijksmuseum offered an embarrassment of riches to anyone who loves looking at group portraits of flora, food, and fauna.3 Collected from some sixty lenders in Europe and North America, a cornucopia packed with examples of the major still life genres spilled out in room after room. Among them were: bouquets of flowers with their attendant bees, flies, butterflies, dragonflies, snails, and caterpillars; tastefully posed specimens and mounds of dead fish and game; tables groaning under sumptuous banquets or serving up more modest snacks, some of them ready to eat but more of them already half-eaten, their beautifully painted remains strewn among disarranged table settings—glasses upended, tazzas overturned, bowls askew, plates on edge. Invitations to eat well jostled up against the vain ghosts of long dead diners who ate perhaps too well or too carelessly. If there is a message in all these exquisite messes, if—as we’re often told—they were intended to provoke iconographic pricklings, museum going fails to support the program. Painted feasts for the eye tend to encourage an eye for the feast. So it isn’t surprising that someone who saw me staring at Floris van Dijck’s early-seventeenth-century still life of food on a table (Plate 2) asked if it made me hungry. I smiled more mysteriously than appreciatively but didn’t respond, and my inquisitor moved chuckling onward.

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Not, however, entirely out of my life. We don’t want to be too dismissive of the “MmmYum” response to banquet or breakfast still lifes. After van Dijck took the trouble to depict one fancy-figured tablecloth atop another, the former a “lace-edged damask table-cloth with a lustrously patterned weave,”4 he proceeded to litter them with plates full of cheese, fruit, and olives, with four ghostly glasses in addition to the half-filled roemer, with a cut melon, a pear, two rolls, and the scattered remains of bread and nuts, and finally with the languid length of apple peel that slouches lazily in all van Dijck’s extant table pieces. Commodities from home and abroad celebrate local production and foreign trade. The juxtaposition of luster with litter produces the vanitas effect. A dish of nuts and bright apples rounded by the fall of light adds not only weight but also luminosity, which helps anchor the viewer’s gaze and its objects safely in the table’s “middle distance.” I emphasize “safely” because so much of the composition seems organized to arouse insecurity. This is why my inquisitor’s phatic question missed the point. It may have had no more force than a sociable aside about the weather but it reminded me that at the moment I wasn’t looking at what he thought I was looking at. I wasn’t looking at the three cheeses of varying size, color, and age, stacked one on the other, two plump half wheels showing the observer their hard, unevenly cut faces and a smaller, darker, crescent-shaped remnant lying on its back atop the middle wheel.5 I had already confronted and rejected their charms and was distracted by something else; something that didn’t so much entice as perplex me. I was trying to figure out how to help the Flemish-style perspective keep things from sliding off the table and what to do about the predicament of the precarious pewter plate that sets the observer on edge in this still life, as in so many others. But it was hard to concentrate. At my back I always heard the genial susurrus of smacking lips. Confronted by van Dijck’s table, tourists tended to gather around the Gouda. And that’s certainly one response the so-called banquet still life seems intended to evoke. There’s also another, for the examples of the banketje genre always tell two stories. The first is a story of preparation and consumption. In this story, the painter’s act is always already preceded by the occasion in which people set the table, used it, and left it as we see it. The title of this story is the pre-text

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of occasion. But the “pre-text” is also a “pretext”—a cover, an excuse, a disguise. Etymologically it’s a term of art (a woven disguise), which I want to nudge toward the idea of an imaginary relation (a “pretense”). Consider, for example, the Pewter Plate Perilous. Both the tour de force of an impending gravitational disaster and the conventionality of the motif identify it as a painter’s trick. And this is the second story: the pretext of occasion pivots from its mimetic to its imaginary foot. As van Dijck’s painting feints toward realism, then flaunts the fictiveness of its mensal anecdote, the (not so) secret history it announces is that it was the artist, not the housewife, who “set” or “laid” the table and “posed” the objects “on” it. The feint and the flaunt together perform a critical function. They allow iconographers to point morals and fingers. Yet van Dijck’s cheeses do have their own substantial and pre-iconographic charms. The stack sits near the back of the table. The lowest and largest piece is also the youngest. Its yellow face, pockmarked with specks of mold, dominates the scene, smiles complacently at the passersby who fancy it, and overwhelms the pewter dish it is posed on, because the black shining of the dish yields to the yellowy reflection of the cheese. The dish in turn beams the reflection back to the cheese, which is brightened by it where, in an excess of self-delight, it reflects its reflection. On the edge of the same dish rests a knife, which points its tip toward the cuts in the cheese. At first glance, the objects surrounding the stack hold it in place by registering a series of similar tonal or directional pointers that converge on it. Centripetal lines of force travel toward the stack from the dish of grapes through the top of the glass, from the apple peel and the left tablecloth crease through the glass and knife, from the pewter apple dish through the dish of olives, and from the pear through the earthenware jug, roll, and cut melon. They culminate in the yellow cheese and lead the eye toward its sunny countenance. But the stack of cheeses is not merely the recipient of stabilizing vectors. It anchors and energizes a solar system of its own. Each cheese is turned at a different angle, so that the stack seems slowly and majestically to rotate, and this imparts motion to its retinue, the ring of satellites surrounding it on the table: the dishes of fruit, the plate with half an apple on it, the scatter of nuts and nutshells, the jug against which nestle the roll and the

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pear. The two ghostly goblets gleaming in the background on each side of the stack complete the circuit. Thus, although everything is stationary, everything registers movement. What kept me fixed for a long time before van Dijck’s imaginary table was not the impression of movement alone. It was the plane of movement. The axis of the solar system tilts forward. Both the orbit of the satellite objects and the table that materializes it incline precariously toward the observer and make the objects appear to slip forward and slide down the tilted table. This sense of vertige is most sharply induced by the black plate. In spite of the apple, it teeters on the abyss between the tablecloth and the observer. Its forward push is sharpened by the starched crease of the tablecloth, which points straight outward. And this is why—to respond finally and belatedly to the inquisitive passerby—I wasn’t gazing at the cheeses and longing to take a bite. It was the imperiled plate that preempted my attention and even called my bluff by coyly inviting me to reach in and forestall a looming catastrophe. By van Dijck’s time, as the catalogue entry notes, the Pewter Plate Perilous was “already part of the standard visual repertoire” of still-life painting.6 Its repeated appearances in work after work impel the exhibition’s co-curator, Wouter Kloek, to ask why pewter plates and other objects “have to teeter so precariously on the edge of the table,” It is, he surmises, “to reinforce the feeling of depth in the painting” and to provide a test “of technical accomplishment.”7 The phrase “reinforce the feeling of depth” places the emphasis on going back into space rather than on moving forward toward the observer. But the teeter on the near edge can also signify a forward extension, a falling space between the table and the observer, an invitation to intervene: “Someone has left this knife resting on the edge of the plate, its handle jutting outward toward us; someone plans, in a moment, to pick it up again.”8 Kloek himself seems to entertain this possibility when he states that stilllife objects “appear to emerge from the painting.” He goes on to insist that it isn’t “the painter’s intention to draw the beholder into the picture’s space. The table is for displaying things, not for walking around. The admiration demanded for the painter’s skill also distances the viewer, who is meant to

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be astonished, gripped by the game of reality and illusion, but must accept that his place is definitely on the other side of the looking-glass.”9 It is true that illusionistic tours de force not only astonish but also distance viewers by reminding them they are looking at paint applied to flat surfaces. Kloek’s insight is that (regardless of the painter’s intention) “the feeling of depth” is simultaneously reinforced and disavowed. When the dish appears to teeter on the table’s forward edge, the observer is invited to intervene, and it’s this very invitation that dialectically prods the same observer to appreciate not only its impossibility but also the painter’s virtuosity. Still lifes always tempt us with the plasticity of their objects and encourage us to imagine what they would look like from behind. But they prohibit what they invite by reasserting their two-dimensional form through the bravura display of an illusion that parades its fictiveness. “The table is for displaying things, not for walking around”: what would it be like to turn the table on van Dijk’s still life and view it from the rear? The question is prompted by the rightward rotation of the cheeses, which— despite Kloek’s statement—urges the viewer to imagine a walk around the table and into the backstage darkness. From there we could make out only the silhouettes of objects lit for another angle of display and could watch the faces of passersby in the museum lighting up at a prospect denied us. This tiny thought experiment underscores the performative effort of the still life both to control and to tease the viewer by presenting itself—posing—as a fantasy of three dimensions into which it forbids entry. One of the means by which the van Dijck produces this conflicted effect is its idiosyncratic deployment of perspective. According to the SLP catalogue essay, “the trompe l’oeil effect” of such “clever devices” as the precarious plate is “actually moderated by the high viewpoint.” As in the perspective convention of earlier Flemish painting, the high viewpoint is signified by tipping the ground plane forward. This offers the eye a better view of the dishes and their contents, and it rationalizes the downward tilt: what might otherwise be the image of a gravitational disaster is securely positioned as a quiet image of display.10 Or is it? Van Dijck “has depicted the objects in a diffuse light that is bright at the front but gradually darkens toward the back. Combined with the elevated point of view, this strategy displays and celebrates the food and vessels.”11

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Yet the perspective effect is more complicated. The vanishing area implied by the tablecloth creases is near the top of the painting and close to the right corner. It isn’t precise, not a vanishing point, because the orthogonals inscribed as the outside edges of the white cloth don’t converge. In that respect the perspective as an indicator of eye level is strategically weak and diffuse rather than strong and focused. If it signifies and encourages the bird’s-eye view, it doesn’t technically suppress alternatives to that view. The geometrical center of the framed rectangle is marked by a shallow indentation in the lower left center of the big young cheese on the plate, for example. Objects and their patterns of spatial relationship conspire to pull the eye in toward that area.12 But the positioning of the middle cheese differs from that of the bottom cheese. We look down at the former more than at the latter, and this difference further destabilizes the stack. The middle cheese begins to slip down toward the left, while the top remnant, now on the verge of rocking or skidding forward, repeats the precarious pose of the black pewter plate. When the bird’s-eye view convention is thus challenged, the stabilization it implies gives way to the effect of gravitational vertige. The darkness behind the table and the shadows slanting up (back) toward it only intensify this effect. In addition, the lace edges of the creased white tablecloth reinforce the effect of slippage. Whereas its left border breaks upward toward the right at the front edge of the table, the straight vertical of the right border all but neutralizes the table edge signified by the dark-light contrast below the pitcher. It climbs up the picture plane and accentuates the vertical tilt. Some of the objects are positioned so as to reinforce the fear and danger of slippage by staging resistance to it. The glass of wine leans backward toward the cheese; the roll and pear prop up the jug; a walnut props up the pear; the cut apple is set back on the forward plate. But since this looks and feels like resistance, it only confirms the impression of artistic brinkmanship. The perspective scheme pushes viewers toward the right, from which the winds of perspective seem to be blowing the objects leftward down the table and into our laps. Schama cites Paul Claudel’s observation that Dutch still lifes “were caught (in the Dutch) at their toppunt: the zenith before the fall; the moment of perfect ripeness before decay.”13 This comment refers to the temporal

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predicament of flowers and food rather than to the gravitational predicament of objects on tables. Nevertheless, it suggests a correlation of these two referents. Let the gravitational predicament stand as an image of the temporal predicament. Let it be a spatial hyperbole of the danger that both motivates and threatens the pleasures of the table. Let it be the signifier of the vanitas that both threatens and motivates domestic order, the order reaffirmed and imperiled with each new table setting. It’s almost too easy to rest content with an allegorical fix that freezes the still life into a symbol of the Fall, of vanity, of conspicuous consumption, of abundance spilling over into excess—a symbol of a flawed moral or social condition. But there is a more dynamic iconography at work in van Dijck’s painting. It can best be approached by meditating on the creases in the white linen. They articulate a history, the history of a ritual repetition deeply inscribed in the domestic order of Dutch culture: the washing, pressing, folding, storing, unfolding, and spreading of the tablecloth, its importance to gestures of hospitality, its virtue as an index not merely of the prideful desire to display possessions but also of the domestic care that ensures the continuity of household order.14 This implied history underwrites the plot of the banquet still life: the table was set, food was laid out, and people partook. The broken bread, nuts, peels, and cuts in the cheeses all index these acts of preparation and consumption—acts that the pristine crispness of the cloth renders at once more sociable and more unruly.15 Do they also invite the viewer to continue where the absent diners left off? Or to clean up after them and put things away? Are we tempted to step through the looking glass into still life’s dollhouse and recover the reality it had for the painter? If so, we are in good seventeenth-century company: Many still lifes were claimed to have been made after life. Van Mander states that the still lifes of Aertsen, Beuckelaer, as well as the flower paintings of Cornelis van Haarlem and de Gheyn were all painted “nae ‘t leven” (from life). . . . Painters began to claim that their work was virtuosic and especially faithful to nature. Brueghel wrote that he painted directly from real flowers without the aid of drawing or sketches, and that he needed to travel to Brussels in order to see rare blossoms.16

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In the case of van Dijck’s painting, the scenario implied by these assertions is that the table was already laid and the food consumed before the act of painting took place. Regardless of what commentators say, it would be safer to treat the nae t’leven claim with skepticism because we don’t really know how the painter did what he did. Van Dijck could have copied his painting from a picture or a verbal description; his extant paintings look like variations on each other. He could have done it from memory. He could have invented a composition that freely combined prior sketches of individual objects into a scene whose shapes are interrelated like those of the human sitters in a group portrait. Nae t’leven or naer het leven is the Dutch formula for mimesis: “from life,” or “after life.” Its causal and positional implications converge with its temporal sense: van Dijck’s original was “before” the painter. It was in his presence and therefore existed prior to the copy he made of it. The German cognate, nachleben, also conjoins temporality with mimesis: it means both “to live later” and “to conform to.” But Nachleben, which means “afterlife,” may allow the value of exemplarity to be shifted from the prior “life,” the original, to the copy that lives after it. The copy preserves the original. It may even improve or revise it. Or invent it. Nae t’leven seems less like a truth about practice and more like a boast: its message is not “from life” but “as if from life.” For the painting to convey the emphasis “only as if,” it would have to indicate that it is emphatically “not from life.” This is taken for granted in the case of flower still lifes: the standard opinion is that they “were not portraits of existing bouquets or formations of flowers.”17 In the case of still lifes of the table, painters like van Dijck expose their images to perspectival and gravitational pressures that would destabilize their real-life equivalents.18 Charles Sterling ‘s excellent discussion of the origin of the term still life connects it to the nae t’leven formula. The Dutch term still-leven appeared in “the jargon of the studios” in the 1650s, when “leven (life or nature) simply meant ‘model’ or ‘living model’; still, of course, meant ‘motionless’. Stillleven, then, in contradistinction to the painting of figures or animals, was the painting of things incapable of moving.”19 In other words, the objects of still life were described as things incapable of making the kind of trouble sitters in group portraits make for their painters and each other.

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Sterling adds that in eighteenth-century Paris, under Dutch influence, “still lifes were designated . . . as nature reposée, i.e. things at rest,” and that nature morte, which was first used in 1756 and finally prevailed in France, “undoubtedly connotes a shade of contempt. It came into use when the idea of motionlessness was extended to include everything that is inanimate or dead.” But “there are few Frenchmen today for whom the term nature morte evokes the opposite of life.”20 Yet this evocation lurks in the wings when Sterling enumerates the motifs to be found in vanitas pictures: We . . . find symbols of the destruction of life and matter (shabby books, wilted flowers, blighted fruit, stale bread, worm-eaten cheese, severed ropes), and symbols of the inexorable flight of time (hourglasses, timepieces, guttering candles). Still other symbols remind us of the precariousness of man’s life, by likening it to a soap bubble, or of the brief duration allotted to earthly things, by likening them to a flitting butterfly, a flower, a cloud of smoke.

Sterling finds a rationale for this list in Claudel’s account of désagrégation: “common to the majority of seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes is a compositional device” that consists in suggesting a latent movement which, we are made to feel, is already going on under our very eyes. “The Dutch still life,” wrote Paul Claudel, “is an arrangement in process of disintegration, it is something that has fallen prey to duration.” In the Vanitas, which is entirely devoted to the idea of transitoriness, this Baroque dynamic was perhaps pursued with greater lucidity than in any other type of picture.21

Claudel’s move is interesting because it shifts the terminological weight from a metaphoric or hyperbolic sense of “dead” to a literal sense of “dying”: from nature morte to nature mourant. Sterling’s deployment of Claudel is equally interesting because it identifies mourant with désagrégant and both with a “compositional device” common to most still lifes.

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Nature Mourant: The Fictiveness of Dutch Realism Fruit about to roll off the edge of a table, a crystal goblet toppling to destruction from a dangerously tilted salver, a rich pie cut open, its fruity interior spilling over onto an immaculate white napkin, the fly polluting a slice of fresh white bread. Symbols of a society on the brink of dissolution or just a way of enlivening an otherwise static arrangement of objects? —GILLIAN RILEY, The Dutch Table

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n different ways for different subgenres (ontbijtjes, banketjes, bloemstilleven, pronkstilleven), the power, the meaning, and the value of “realism” in Dutch still life derive from the genre’s conspicuous counterfactuality. When still life presents itself as if done from life, it puts its truthiness on parade. It represents the painter’s act as always already preceded by those of the people who set the table and consumed its contents. Under this narrative construal, the domestic occasion, the referent, precedes its representation. This is the “mimetic foot” of what I called the pretext of occasion. Nevertheless, a moment’s thought will pivot this phrase to its “imaginary foot.” “Pretext,” as I note above, suggests not only a temporal but also an imaginary relation. Thus “the pretext of occasion” simultaneously states and interrogates the claim of “realism”—the claim that the table had been set, the meal prepared, and the food eaten before the painter came into the room and copied what he saw. Such conspicuous anomalies as those produced by van Dijck’s perspectival mischief work to deny that claim. The image is staged as a fictive anecdote. It foregrounds the fictiveness of its reality effect. In the 1999 Netherlands Still Life exhibit, this flourish was reinforced by a repeating video that showed a man in informal modern dress setting a table. He assembles, arranges, and rearranges the objects on it to produce an aesthetically pleasing composition. The video seemed intended to dramatize the opinion that artists were at almost complete liberty to arrange all manner of objects. A flower painter did not paint an aspect of nature or a bouquet as he found it, but could compose the bouquet as he saw fit. . . . Even more emancipated was the painter of a laid table, who would arrange and rearrange the inanimate objects until he was satisfied. . . . Seen in this light, still-life painters . . . could bend nature to their will and select objects for their visual possibilities. They would then reproduce the model they had created, imitating every texture and every surface to the best of their ability.1

The video focused on the painter as the motivating source of aesthetic composition. In so doing it left open the question of the way painters, burghers, and viewers differentially relate to the composition. Given the scenario of the pretext of occasion, setting the table for visual

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display can be motivated by—and can reveal—the householder’s desire and art as well as the painter’s. These two levels mutually modify each other as the discourses and figures of daily life interact with those of painterly composition and emulation. The table scene may represent the householder’s affluence and taste, the hospitality extended toward the viewer as guest, the hospitality already enjoyed during the occasion “documented” by the painter. Alternatively, it may represent the vanitas. As a scene of appetite and sociability, still life has a latent narrative function that gets activated in genre scenes of merry companies and also in portraits of groups depicted in a festival pretext of occasion. “Doesn’t it make you hungry?”: setting the scene of still life, like setting the table, may be motivated by a concern for the aesthetics and arousal of gustatory desire.2 This is the burgher’s viewpoint, the viewpoint from which the labor of painting, the aesthetics of composition, and the painter’s product play a subsidiary role that enhances the ritualized labor and aesthetics of consumption. A more negative assessment of the burgher’s viewpoint dominates Hal Foster’s critical account of pronk (ostentatious or showy) still life as an “art of fetishism” that addresses but fails to assuage “anxiety about affluence, expenditure, speculation”: Certainly in pronk pieces the concern with social position, with excess and ostentation, or, even less generous, the emphasis on moral probity, . . . overwhelms the sense of offering or gift vestigial in still life. The offering is somehow denied before the fact; the gift has a social, moral or economic tag attached; the presentation intimidates more than it welcomes. Even when pronk paintings represent food, which implicitly is ours by carnal right, it seems somehow spoiled, tabooed, inedible. Again the chill of the commodity is felt.3

The reach of the italicized “somehow” is puzzling. Spoiled in what way? My taste may be cruder than Foster’s, but I’ve encountered more than a few representations of unspoiled and markedly edible specimens without being intimidated by the “tag” and without feeling the chill of the commodity.4 The moral probity behind Foster’s wholesale dismissal of pronk pieces as spoiled leads him to overlook the specific kinds and instances of spoilage

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that characterize so much painting in the genre of nature mourant. What Foster has trouble with is more positively and convincingly explained by Mariët Westermann: “these paintings have something unreal about them, a sense that regular human use could hardly have created such artful balance. And yet, such interiors and the things in them offer convincing images of an actual domestic past, even if they present phantom ideals of cleanliness, luxury, tranquility, and contentment.”5 Paintings of laid tables may end up on the wall above actual laid tables. The painters surely hope so. But the pretext of occasion always pivots from its temporal to its imaginary foot: it feints toward the reality effect, then declares its brilliantly self-contained and self-subverting illusionism. As Leppert phrases it during a discussion of Jan Brueghel and Rachel Ruysch, Brueghel technically denies “the very artificiality of his enterprise”: “the work of painting is made visible, ironically, by its invisibility; that is, Brueghel’s technique involves the absolute hiding of the act of making brush strokes.”6 More generally, “the dignity of form serves to sing the ironic praises of humble and unworthy subjects in order to rouse the admiration” of viewers “for the technical skills” of the painter.7 Others made morals; all were puzzled and joyed By this gratuitous song.8

But as we’ve seen, this innocent surmise has been interrogated by Hochstrasser, who speculates about the political value of “technical skills” and “gratuitous song.” She suggests that the allure of still life lay not only in its parade of exotic products but also in the permission it gave observers “to enjoy them without any troublesome concern for their true costs” to remote, exploited populations in the New World. And she goes on to argue that, in still lifes containing self-portraits such as those by Simon Luttichuys and David Bailly, the self-referential elements remind us “that these are, after all, not laid tables in fact, but paintings of laid tables. . . . The artist’s reflection at the center of all insists upon that fact, calling us back from the seeming reality of the luscious foods and drinks on offer to the accomplishment of his rendering of them” and redirecting our attention from economic and domestic labor to the painter’s labor.9

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The Embarrassment of Niches: Christoffel van den Berghe’s Vase of Flowers in a Stone Niche, 1617 Writers on Dutch painting often characterize it as the realist art form par excellence. The artists are thought of as humbly attempting to reproduce the world before their eyes. . . . Yet . . .floral still life . . . is not so much an art of transcription as an art of illusion. This hyper-realist art form was founded on artifice: the painters never saw the bouquets they painted, since the bouquets never existed. —PAUL TAYLOR, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600-1720

What is immediately surprising in the Bouquet in a Niche by Ambrosius Bosschaert . . . is that while there is a sense of abundance—the vase could scarcely hold one stem more— the abundance is . . . not that of nature. —NORMAN BRYSON, Looking at the Overlooked

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lthough he comments in passing on the “sense of abundance” in flower painting, Norman Bryson doesn’t pause over the aesthetic and cultural implications of this sense. He mentions it only to make the point that the abundance is “not that of nature” but derives from the influence of botanical classification and illustration. “Not that of nature” is a standard observation about flower still lifes: “all writers on the subject” insist that the flowers in these pictures “could never have been placed in a real vase together” because “they bloomed at different times of the year.”1 The most roguish and remarkable variations on this theme are Rachel Ruysch’s paintings of “‘vase flowers’ without their vase” in woodland scenes.2 This is one of three basic assumptions scholars make about floral still life. The second is contained in Beatrijs Brenninkmeijer–de Rooij’s objection to the idea that pictures of vases full of rare flowers were realistic imitations. “People forget that bouquets like these would have been out of the question in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, when the depicted flowers were rare and extremely expensive. They were not placed in vases.”3 Paul Taylor is more cautious: Vases of cut flowers, if their infrequent appearance in Dutch genre paintings can count as evidence, were not particularly common objects in Dutch households. We find them on occasion, but even when we do, it is hard to tell whether their presence is due to the artist’s effort at realistic portrayal, or whether they are there for symbolic reasons. . . . The painters themselves, obviously, did not sit down to delineate a vase filled with flowers which blossomed in different seasons. Many of them made use of sketches, and composed their bouquets from the painted blooms which they had to hand.4

It isn’t so obvious that painters could not have seated themselves before a vase filled with flowers of some sort. Even if images of bouquets in vases don’t reflect a household practice, they may reflect a studio practice: putting flowers in a vase on a table in an interior and copying them. The third assumption is “the link between still life and collecting” articulated by Elizabeth Honig and several other writers.5 Honig links still life to the activity of collecting and “the logic of collection,” and enumerates the positive concomitants of this activity: “the process of collecting assures

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that precisely as things are extracted from their economic status, they keep or even increase their sociability. Acquiring objects for a collection, particularly perhaps in the seventeenth century, involved building social networks, initiating contacts, exchanging gifts, and finally, establishing communities of appreciation.”6 Van Dijck’s elegant tablecloth, pitcher, and plates may provide incentives for vanitas hunters, but they also suggest dressing up for company, and the disarray tells us the company has come and gone. Such scenes, Honig shows, celebrate more than commodities and consumption. They represent not merely commerce and appetite but sociability. If flowers that couldn’t have co-existed are brought together in a painting, its visual charge is less that of (what we today call) a bouquet than that of the Wunderkammer. In Goldgar’s words, “by picturing them, the artist collected them in the only form they actually could be collected. Still lifes have also been called collections because the logic of the relationships among the different objects is not immediately apparent and requires the logic of the collector’s creativity to explain them.”7 A bloemstilleven, then, is the “copy” of a collection, but of a collection that never existed until viewers assume or decide or get persuaded that it’s the copy of a collection that preexisted it. Bryson’s phrase, “sense of abundance,” is a euphemism, a way of understating a more mundane problem: crowdedness. It is the feature that stands out in the flower piece by the Middelburg artist Christoffel van den Berghe (Plate 4), who may have studied with Bosschaert. And it accounts for its stereotypical topheaviness: the large number of flowers jammed into their container, some of them disproportionate in size. As the SLP entry puts it, van den Berghe’s is “a crowded bouquet,” and the “improbably stiff and long stems of tulips and the iris” contribute to a sense of performative strain.8 There is something pushy and uncomfortable about the thrusting forth of so many pretty faces competing for the observer’s attention while their short and densely packed stems struggle for existence in a brackish underwater bottleneck. Flowers and other objects seem forced to jostle with each other and compete for space or for privileged positions of display. The exotic shells index the success story of Dutch trade, if not its costs. The green glass within which the flower stems struggle is (like those in van Dijck’s table piece) a roemer. The term has often been translated as

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“rummer,” but that is misleading. The Dutch word is built on roem, “glory, renown, or celebrity.” A roemer is a glass for toasting or boasting (roemer also means “a boaster”). Crowdedness is a common feature of Dutch flower compositions. Another characteristic is the representation of “life” in the guise of implied force and motion. Hans Boulenger’s 1639 flower piece in the Rijksmuseum (Figure 2) well illustrates this. The museum text emphasizes crowdedness and decay: “The vase can hardly accommodate the abundance of tulips, roses, anemones and carnations. Some of the flowers are still fresh, others have already wilted. Insects and a small salamander are crawling around on the table.”9 But what is most striking is the dynamic sweep of the composition, which describes an arc curving leftward and upward from the salamander’s head to the top flower on the right. The flowers appear windswept. They yield to a force that bends their stems and disturbs (shakes or flattens) their petals. In van den Berghe’s painting, the effects of crowdedness and topheaviness are also produced by dynamic means. Although the ledge at the bottom runs parallel to the frame, we are shown only the right side of the niche. Its interior wall and arch recede at an obtuse angle that, if matched on the other side, would indicate a wide, curved hollow space within which the depicted objects are crowded asymmetrically toward the right. Asymmetricality is accentuated by the fact that the composition is rotated within the niche: the two cups leaning against each other on the left are a little behind the vase; the two shells leaning against each other on the right are in front of it; and the flowers that face or droop forward are mostly clustered on the right. Adding force to this rotational vector, the stems appear twisted and strangled as they twine around themselves in the inadequate space of the small roemer. The bottleneck that imprisons them controls the spread of the bouquet, forcing the flowers to assume uncomfortable poses as they explode out of the glass. They overlap, jostle each other, vie for attention, and all but strike attitudes. The ornaments circling the vase further emphasize the rotational movement, which is beautifully condensed in the helical design of the shell in the right corner. Since the floor of the niche, like the rim of the cup, is tilted forward, it implies a higher viewing point. But it also produces an

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figure 2. Hans Boulenger, Tulips in Vase, 1639.

instability similar to the one described above in the account of van Dijck’s still life. This adds a downward as well as rightward spin to the compositional rotation, a vector effect intensified by the topheaviness of the bouquet and countered only, so to speak, at the last moment by the weightlessness and flatness of two tall tulips. The downward or forward movement is a

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hyperbolic indicator of the performative push of flowers that thrust themselves meretriciously forward like so many pretty faces competing for the observer’s attention. The SLP catalogue entry contains a brilliant description of the tonal effect of van den Berghe’s niche: Pocked with deep gouges and cracks, the rough stone niche creates a deliberate, defining contrast to the exquisite surfaces and vulnerable perfection of the flowers, shells, and porcelain housed within. The distressed surface functions mainly as a visual and metaphorical opposite to the artistry and variety of the display, rather than (as some have claimed) as a ubiquitous statement of mortality and vanitas. There is nonetheless a tacit recognition of the perilous ownership of such fragile and costly objects.10

The deep, fortresslike setting, the scarred and timeworn stone, and the darkness squeezing the bouquet also conspire to produce another effect. They perversely accentuate the garishness and the vulgarity of the flower show, giving it an air of affettazione (failed sprezzatura). The vanitas indexed by the contrast is the wealthy burgher’s pride not merely in the ownership “of such fragile and costly objects” but also in their display. This display seems even more pretentious when you take into account the residual symbolism of niches (sacred space, encastellated aristocratic space). But such effects are appropriate in an important way: they showcase the iconicity of tulips, their status as cultural objects of desire and value. The lure of obscurity and depth is played off against—and intensified by—the decorative flatness and brilliance of precise graphic detail. Van den Berghe presses on the ambiguity of the pretext of occasion, at once inviting and prohibiting entry into the imaginary space of still life.11 He invites the viewer’s participation but prohibits what he invites by reasserting the twodimensional ground of illusion. The illusion thus gestures toward fictiveness without disturbing its parallel (or opposed) gesture toward iconicity. In spite of the small mob of critters exploring the space of van den Berghe’s still life (a moth, four butterflies, assorted flies and bugs, two caterpillars, and one small, raggedy bird), relations among them are surprisingly peaceful. For more exciting and dangerous prospects, we have to look elsewhere. The most melodramatic figure of danger in still life is a

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self-disarming parody of the predatory impulse: the cooked lobster that trains a beady eye on or extends a grasping claw toward edible neighbors. One gropes toward a lemon while another creeps up on a crab.12 Erika Langmuir’s description of the former, Kalf’s lobster, is well worth quoting: Kalf suggest a dynamic instability of multiple viewing points . . . by using the bunched folds of a multi-coloured oriental rug to tilt the pewter or silver platter. On this slippery slope, lustrous with scarlet reflections, the fiery lobster takes on a menacing appearance. We view its powerful claws from above; as its tail rises and curves, we see it first in profile, then from beneath. Indubitably cooked and immobile, the huge crustacean has assumed the contrapposto . . . associated with living creatures.13

Because of its remarkable pose, Kalf’s lobster appears less listless and slow-moving than its fellows in other still lifes and less inactive than it should, given its state of being (i.e., dead). Most painted lobsters are standoffish and reserved. This befits the pronk monster that functions more or less as the Renaissance elbow of still life.

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Nature Mourant: Bosschaert’s Leaves, Merian’s Caterpillars The caterpillar of the blue butterfly is “adopted” by the red ant which takes the butterfly larva back to its nest where it treats it like one of its own brood feeding it until it is old enough to turn into an adult butterfly. The caterpillar, however, repays the ant’s generous hospitality by greedily eating as much food as it can and gobbling up the ant’s offspring as a tasty side dish. All five species of large blue butterflies in Europe engage in this form of parasitism on red ants and now scientists have worked out the trick that allows them to do it—the caterpillars cover themselves in a chemical that makes them smell like orphaned baby ants. —STEVEN CONNOR, “The Butterfly, the Ant, and Other Natural Mimics”

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ature in the Raw is Seldom Mild. So argued the American Tobacco Company in the 1930s on behalf of such refinements of Culture as Lucky Strike Cigarettes (“raw tobaccos have no place in cigarettes”). It may be counterintuitive to direct this wise saying toward the representations of nature in still life. They seem on the surface to be paragons of mildness. As Roland Barthes famously put it, still life’s “universe of fabrication . . . excludes terror, as it excludes style.” It delivers only a “sheen,” an “assemblage” of “easy surfaces” that “lubricate man’s gaze” and “facilitate his daily business among objects whose riddle is dissolved.”1 Schama objects to this dismissive, happy talk on the grounds indicated by the titular theme of The Embarrassment of Riches: “so far from Barthes’s ‘universe of fabrication’ displaying ‘an absence of terror,’ this particular commercial culture seems almost excessively anxious about both the propriety and durability of wealth. Death’s-heads appear . . . with extraordinary frequency.”2 A skull is a predictable signifier of anxiety, but it isn’t the only one. Depictions of nature in the raw abound in still life. They tend to be less sensational and more mischievous than death’s-heads, and they take different forms. Since some flowers were no less costly than works of art, for example, they were treated as such in paintings. “The flower was presented as if it were a museum exhibit, an exquisite silver goblet or gold chased figure.”3 This may have been particularly true for tulips—“each petal of a tulip might be worth over 50 guilders”—but Paul Taylor is discussing flowers in general. He drily suggests that the “hyper-realism” characterizing Ambrosius Bosschaert’s bouquets probably reflected “an attempt to give the viewers their money’s worth.”4 Bosschaert painted several bouquets in closed stone niches and several in open window niches. Both types—the closed niches more obviously than the windows—gesture toward the religious connotation of the niche as an aedicula, a container that sanctifies. The bouquets conspicuously replace, for example, crucified figures or biblical scenes. But even as he makes this gesture, he stresses its sheer theatricality. The effect is to convert the aedicule into a mock niche that parodies and hyperbolizes the religious motif in representing it. Formally, the Bosschaert niche is a series of frames within frames. The display space is thereby narrowed, squeezed, and then filled with large

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flowers. This intensifies the effects of crowdedness and competition. Furthermore, in the five paintings of bouquets majestically posed before aerial views (one on a ledge, four framed in stone window niches), Bosschaert inflicts caterpillage on rose leaves.5 Three of them include likely suspects: a fat caterpillar on the ledge (London), a snail on the ledge (Amsterdam), two small caterpillars foraging in the foliage (The Hague). In four of the five, the windows open up on landscapes. These are studies in precarious poise and impending disorder. In three (Cologne, Amsterdam, London), the composition is triply compromised. Too many large blossoms are crammed into small containers; the top of the picture cuts off the top of the arch; the base of the glass container isn’t securely centered but projects over the inner edge of the window frame. The resultant threat of destabilization is intensified by large flowers that droop forward toward the observer. The London version, which shows only cloudy skies, is compositionally the most dynamic.6 Although the niche is centered, its symmetricality is challenged by the dramatic alternation of light and shade. With light falling from the left, the left side of the niche interior collapses into a flat band of black, while the right side, mottled by flower shadows, opens up and arcs forward. The rotational effect is reinforced by the deep, thin shadow of the right casement, which cuts into the wall and drives it back. This pattern exerts its torque on the arrangement of roses. Although the central vertical bisects the roemer, the bouquet sits closer to the left arch than to the right, where it is subject to competing pressures. On the one hand, the three upright stalks all bend toward the left, as if seeking the shade. On the other hand, a diagonal vector following the shoots of the fallen daffodil curves up through the damaged leaf toward the topmost leaves at upper right. The sum of these pressures discloses itself in a kind of helical force that slowly pushes the bouquet toward the left. The drama continues on the ledge: the shoots of the daffodil flail as the corpulent caterpillar marches menacingly toward it. In the more famous Mauritshuis version (Plate 5), the vase and flowers are proportionally smaller and farther away from the observer, for whose attention they compete with a relatively busy landscape in the background. A larger number of relatively smaller blooms fling themselves out of the roemer like dancers.

plate 1. William Blake, “The Sick Rose.”

plate 2. Floris van Dijck, Laid Table with Cheese and Fruit, c. 1615. plate 3. Balthasar van der Ast, Still Life with Fruits and Flowers, 1620–22.

plate 4. Hans Boulenger, Tulips in Vase, 1639.

plate 5. Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Vase with Flowers in a Window.

plate 6. Maria Sybilla Merian, caterpillars at work. Hand-colored engraving, from Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (Amsterdam, 1705), pl. 19.

plate 7. Abraham Mignon, Still Life with Fruit, Oysters, and a Porcelain Bowl.

plate 8. Abraham Mignon, Game, Fish, and a Nest on a Forest Floor, 1670s.

plate 9. Jan van Huysum, Fruit Piece, 1722.

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Ben Broos notes the contrast between the finely detailed blossoms and the misty landscape, romanticized by two church spires on raised ground surrounded by roadways, waterways, woods, and populated areas. That sense of distance is given concrete form in “the two shells from tropical shores” on the ledge: “a Nerita from the Indian Ocean and a Hexaplex from the Moluccas or Philippines.”7 Because the shape of the Hexaplex replicates that of the hill in the lower left background, and because the amazing variations of blue within the Hexaplex echo the hues expressing distance beyond the window, the exotic spaces reappear in parvo on the window ledge. In relief at the bottom of the vase are two faces that resemble tragic masks. This little touch of high classical culture makes no sense at all except as a histrionic response to the symbols of vanity, the shells and the fallen carnation, at which the faces stare—one could almost say—disapprovingly, as if to reaffirm Hochstrasser’s critique of Dutch colonialism. Even though the base of the roemer sits well within the archway, the warm hue of the yellow iris on top brings it forward. Is the iris under the arch or in front of it? If under, it’s the climax point of a bouquet that arcs slightly away from the viewer as the eye moves upward. But if it is in front of the arch and closer to us, then the whole bouquet seems to incline forward and compete for our attention with the airy if less intense vista behind it. The top of the bouquet seems closer to the viewer than the top of the darkly shaded niche. This combines with several other features— the brilliant flowers, the muddy green of the roemer, the dancing tulips in the middle, the two hangdog roses at the bottom, and their attendant worm-eaten leaves—to threaten the stability of the composition. Despite the lofty spiring of the tulips, the bouquet seems on the verge of tipping forward. Given the preciosity of Bosschaert’s flowers, there is something perverse about his insistence on depicting damaged leaves. The message it flags conflicts with the sense conveyed by hyper-realist artifice. Even though the bouquets he invented clearly could never preexist his painting of them, Bosschaert presents his imaginary flowers as assailable creatures exposed to the perils of the soil. Leaf holes are picturesque: they let the sky show through. They are realistic: they dramatize the still-life painter’s unwillingness to idealize. But

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they also extend the reach of the vanitas. The co-presence of damaged leaves and curious critters elicits the standard response, illustrated in this comment on Bosschaert’s 1614 Flowers in a Glass Vase: “Bosschaert wants us to know that the earthly loveliness of the flowers is transient. A sense of passing beauty and decay are conveyed by the fly in the foreground, and by the caterpillar, which marches up the stalk of the red and yellow tulip, ready to devour it.”8 “Bosschaert wants us to know”: the rhetoric of intentionality guarantees the truth of the statement by transferring iconographic agency from commentator to artist. I have no quarrel with this move. “Bosschaert wants us to know” anything we say Bosschaert wants us to know. What bothers me is the asserted content of what he wants us to know. “The earthly loveliness of the flowers is transient.” This is so true. It speaks to our mortality. I’m just not sure it’s the message conveyed by the image of the caterpillar marching “up the stalk of the . . . tulip, ready to devour it.”9 The collocation of chewed leaf and militant caterpillar doesn’t attest merely to “Goldengrove unleaving” or to “the blight man was born for.” It attests to the rapacity of nature green in tooth and claw. “The rapacity of nature”: a heavy phrase to load onto Bosschaert’s pintsized predators. Observers tend to find them “cute” rather than crapulent. Yet for anyone who takes the vanitas seriously, it would be foolish to overlook their figural force. They represent the pillagers of plant life, and their prowess has been most energetically paraded in the work of the great Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1718).10 In almost every plate of her caterpillar book, Merian illustrates insect metamorphosis, from egg to caterpillar to pupa to butterfly.11 With few exceptions, the different phases are depicted in the setting of a plant or flower, and the scenes are frequently cluttered with creepers and crawlers around and above and under and on the poor plant. Of the 154 plates in Erucarum Ortus, 74 depict plants with holes in the leaves or with parts of leaves bitten off. In one plate (26), only the midribs, veins, and outlines of the leaves are left. In several plates the butterfly-wing patterns have circles that resemble leaf holes.12 And in several plates the butterflies—which Merian depicts as fat caterpillars with wings—hizz down like angry divebombers aiming at hapless plants.13

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Merian designed three title-page garlands for the original volumes collected in Erucarum Ortus. In all three, the author’s mischievous and curious spirit is displaced to the assortment of insects that explore the garlands (ten in the first, sixteen in the second, eleven in the third). The first garland (Figure 3) is the strangest of the three. It consists of two branches bent to form the standard oval shape of garlands and wreaths. But the

figure 3. Maria Sybilla Merian, ragged garland. From Flowers, Butterflies, and Insects: All 154 Engravings from “Erucarum Ortus,” plate vi.

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branches are roughly cut, knobby, and studded with galls. Rather than bearing blossoms, like all Merian’s other wreaths, they’re festooned with a scatter of fourteen ragged leaves, six of them seriously damaged, two bearing large deposits of butterfly eggs with emergent larvae. At play in the field of the ragged wreath are a housefly (or bee), a beetle, two moths, and six segmented caterpillars—eight really, since the moths are only winged caterpillars. In Erucarum Ortus, Merian unapologetically promotes the priorities expressed in her title: of caterpillars, their metamorphosis, and their plant food. This is a book about caterpillars, not about flowers (Figure 4 and Plate 6). But insect predation is not ignored in the exquisite images of The New Book of Flowers.14 Although only two caterpillars appear in the thirty-six plates, the flowers in eight of them suffer leaf damage. This is all the more noticeable because the individual flower portraits are so stylized, so simply and gracefully choreographed. Even in Merian’s paradise of flowers, the worm does its work. One of the great observers, collectors, and artists of her time, Merian has been enlisted in the ranks of vanitas producers: “she kept her subjects alive and painted them at each stage of their development. She often pictured them feeding, the decayed or partly eaten foliage perhaps acting as a reference to the ‘vanity’ theme in Dutch art, by which viewers were reminded of the impermanence of the material world.”15 But for viewers who didn’t and don’t and won’t need this reminder, the “reference” may work the other way round: not from feeding to impermanence but from the “partly eaten” (the impermanent) to the eater. When I observe Merian’s caterpillars at work or at play or in repose, I don’t think of the vanitas. I’m struck chiefly by their insistent and threatening animal presence—by their otherness. Hairy, banded, and bristly, huge in comparison to the eggs from which they would have recently emerged, stretched taut to reach a leaf, curling around foliage that barely sustains their weight, studiously attentive to the next bite, they are the monsters of the manor. I don’t blame these reflections on Merian. Her books make three things clear: that she was primarily interested in studying and demonstrating how insects live and eat and change; that she loved her work—the work of col-

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figure 4. Maria Sybilla Merian, fat caterpillar. From Flowers, Butterflies, and Insects: All 154 Engravings from “Erucarum Ortus,” plate 21.

lecting, raising, observing, and depicting insects; and that she treated the techne¯ of depiction itself as a magical form of metamorphosis from life to art. Nevertheless, just as her caterpillars cast shadows on the page, her attentiveness to the small signs of damage darkens her vision.

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Kim Todd’s excellent account of Merian’s procedures and their effects sharply brings out both her wit and her fascination with violence: The reader encounters not merely an object to be examined, but a drama of miniature proportions. In each picture, a caterpillar appears on the plant it eats, along with its pupa, its cocoon, if it makes one, and the resultant moth or butterfly. Sometimes the butterfly is laying eggs on a leaf or along the stem. Often the caterpillar’s predator, a fly that will emerge from the cocoon after killing its host, appears also, with many of its life stages. . . . . The pink flower [in one watercolor] seems, from a distance, flawless. Then the reader notices the tiny black head sticking out of the lower bud, as if leaning out of an upper-story window. . . . A black-headed green caterpillar inches across the top petal of the other bud. The centerpiece bloom has its petals marred by a tiny banded larva. Two yellow moths hover nearby. Life has taken over. The rose is a whole neighborhood.16

The conclusion is too optimistic. It doesn’t do justice to the force that dominates Merian’s world. There, death has taken over. But her version of it, like the dans macabre, is lively.

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“Small-scale Violence” “Where is there anything weaker than the most beautiful flowers? A mole, a mouse, a cat, a worm, a mite, a frost” will destroy the best tulip in an instant. —ANNE GOLDGAR, Tulipmania, quoting from De Pamfletten van den Tulpenwindhadel, 1636–1637

Paintings in which fruit rots, flowers wither, insects nibble at leaves, and expensively set tables lie asunder served as a memento mori or “reminder of death,” intended to underscore life’s transience and the greater weight of moral considerations. —NGA: http://www.nga.gov/kids/DTP6stillife.pdf

Quite apart from the emblematic or symbolic potential of . . . reptiles and amphibians, . . . these tiny painted creatures challenge the stasis, formal order, quiet, and peace evoked by the flowers, adding more than a hint of violence and change. —RICHARD LEPPERT, Art and the Committed Eye

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conography makes trifles of terrors when it deploys what I would call a non-agentive allegory; when it dissociates what snails and caterpillars stand for from what they do: “The snail means that time appears to proceed slowly but irrevocably creeps forward. The snail is bound by the earth, i.e., the material realm. This pertains also to the caterpillar.”1 But the English language annexes a long tradition that shows respect for the caterpillar’s natural agency by building into its name a reminder of the damage it does with its powerful jaws.2 The OED cites several early instances (from 1475 to 1631) in which the term signifies “a rapacious person; an extortioner; one who preys upon society. In early times distinctly transferred, and used synonymously with the earlier piller, but afterwards only fig. with conscious reference to the literal sense.” William Blake used the term this way: the “‘catterpiller’ (always spelt thus by Blake)” is “for him, as for the Bible and the Elizabethan poets, the symbol of the ‘pillager’ or ‘despoiler.’”3 The active and exploratory postures of still life’s critters prompt the viewer to imagine them not just standing for ideas but crawling, creeping, flying about, getting into small places, probing the darkness behind and within things, having their will of their world, some of them quietly at work damaging flowers. Taylor describes these predatory episodes as acts of “small-scale violence.”4 But Alan Chong argues that painted insects should be dissociated from their predatory referents—that although bugs were treated as vanitas symbols because they were “destructive creatures that consume flowers and fruit,” their painted equivalents were admired as “perfection in miniature” and studied “as marvels of nature.” He goes on to suggest that they “seem to act as observers and onlookers. In environments usually devoid of human participants, they are surrogates for viewers, exploring the interstices of bouquets, feeling the surfaces of various materials, and examining objects from different viewpoints.”5 This is an interesting and suggestive if bizarre line of interpretation (critters as connoisseurs), but it doesn’t support the idea that these insects are marvels of nature. Chong’s emphasis is actually on marvels of illustration and visual art. Also, the surrogate-observer thesis fails to account for the many images in which snails and caterpillars don’t simply look on and observe but munch and nibble. There is nevertheless an important insight in Chong’s proposal. Depicting

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bugs in microscopic detail momentarily diverts the eye from their hosts. Occasionally the extravagant colors of shells and butterflies vie with those of the blossoms. Perhaps bugs threaten flowers less as predators than as performers competing for attention with their floral superiors. And maybe predation is just a hyperbolic or catachrestic way to represent this competition. In spite of Chong’s proposal, small-scale violence happens. Behind the counterfactual idyll of still life’s peaceable kingdom there lurks a fantasy of danger and uncontrol: the specter of the insatiable worm at the heart of the rose. An emphasis on artistic virtuosity together with a conspicuous suspension of predatory reference thus invites a complex response. It asks the observer both to admire the display and to wonder about the suspension. The straitened appeal to the observer’s viewing pleasure becomes suspect. The image arouses suspicion whenever the painting drops clues to what it too obviously leaves out—whenever the suspension, the exclusion, of darker meanings and forces is rendered conspicuous. These clues are not always subtle. At the fauna-littered base of Roelant Saverij’s 1624 Flower Piece in Utrecht, an episode of “small-scale violence” occurs in which a cockatoo studiously dismembers a frog while another frog looks on.6 In another Saverij still life, a rose petal and ladybug occupy the center of a table, while two large crickets converge from left and right.7 The posture of the cricket on the left suggests that it’s stalking the ladybug, which prudently heads toward the viewer. The other, more upright cricket hides behind or peers over the fallen petal as if preparing to pounce. If there’s a suggestion of conflict or drama in this scene, it surely doesn’t accord with our entomological knowledge. Saverij’s crickets are decorative and harmless—unless, of course, they’re grasshoppers, which are related to locusts and have less benign connotations.8 But if they are merely crickets, they serve here as visual displacements of other sources of aggression. The painting mischievously makes them appear to be up to mischief, while the sense of drama hinted at in this tiny but amplified arena is sharpened by the presence of what seems to be an interested observer, the bee looking down at the action from its perch on the rose. In Balthasar van der Ast’s Still Life with Fruits and Flowers (Plate 3), a Wan-li vase is posed near the front edge of the table like a captain or ensign in a

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civic guard banquet piece. To the left of the vase, a Wan-li dish filled with fruit sits respectfully further back on the table. Although the dish, with its fruit leaves and branches sprawling lengthwise, takes up three-quarters of the table, it nevertheless remains subordinate to the vase. Subordination is guaranteed by the tipped-up ground plane, which makes the dish appear to incline toward the vase as if in obeisance. The fruit leaves sharpen this effect. They extend toward and point presentationally at the vase, their dullness only intensifying the brilliance of its flowers. Van der Ast playfully appeals to the taste for levels-of-reality effects: depicted on the rounded vase surface are not only the shadow flower of the “real” flower protruding from the vase but also leaves that resemble those reaching toward the vase from the dish. The overall organization asserts itself in the terraced scheme of tonal contrasts: the table cloth stretches like a blue-gray step between two dark risers. Its variable hues, soft and cool, are condensed, brightened, hardened, in the Wan-li vase patterns. This scheme is uniformly skewed toward the right foreground. Because the picture edge cuts off the table, no corners show and, as a result, the perspective view of its surface flexes and warps to accommodate local anecdotal pressures. Recession is more gradual on the left, subdued by the beetle and its shadow, and by the fruit dish, which pushes down on the table and retreats with it into the shadows. But on the extreme right a cascade of tiny ants upends the table surface, so that its steeper backdrop threatens to destabilize the vase and flowers. The oversized, broken-flame tulip reaches up as if grasping for air, but its warm tones, projecting toward the observer, make the bouquet lean more precariously forward.9 Whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, van der Ast’s still-life groups are coherently integrated and thematically organized.10 Group order is nevertheless challenged from another source. Dispersed along the length of the panel and the front edge of the table is an array—less a parade than a straggle—of colorful objects (caterpillar, lemon, three shells, butterfly, bee, tulip, carnation, two grasshoppers), some heading one way, some another. All are “depicted as intricately as possible, like small, individual still lifes,” and the insects are “painted with an almost zoological accuracy.”11 A spider, its filament barely visible, appears to be descending from a rose leaf

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in the vase, and the column of ants to its right pulls the viewer in for a closer look. These miniatures activate the observer shuttle.12 They tempt the eye to abandon the distance point most congenial for a viewing of the image as a whole. Drops of condensation on the grapes, blemishes on the apple, and small insects on the fruits and flowers separately clamor for attention: “Look at me! Look at me!” But, as the authors of the catalogue entry in Still Life: Techniques and Style note, the insects aren’t stationary. They crawl and fly. “The effect of suspended animation adds greatly to the liveliness of the painting.”13 Although their comments nicely capture the tension between the signifiers of artifice and those of action, they don’t do full justice to the darker episodes of “liveliness.” To the left of the vase, two ants probe a dead fly. A ghostly spider lurks in the shadows behind the fringe of grape leaves and the blemished apple. The representation of the monstrous mouths and tongues of butterflies is oddly detailed. Finally, desaturated autumnal hues touch the grape leaves with imminent decay.14 In Bergström’s words, van der Ast “shunned neither deformed fruit and leaves nor those damaged by insects.”15 Saverij, van der Ast, Jan Davidsz. de Heem, and Abraham Mignon are among the painters who play up the acts and agency of natural mischief. De Heem, who was van der Ast’s student, fills his Flowers in a Vase (SLP plate 33) with several aggressive snails, ants, earwigs, and caterpillars. Some lurk suspiciously in the neighborhood of a branch with seriously chomped leaves. In de Heem’s Festoon of Fruits and Flowers (Figure 5), space-defining and display functions around the festoon are assigned to a bright butterfly decal in the lower left and an oversized fly in the upper right.16 The shadowy fly’s dimensions suggest it is stationed closer than the festoon to the observer. There, no doubt, it patiently and darkly resigns itself to its symbolic job of serving as “a reminder of the corruption that mortal flesh is heir to.”17 This hint of vanitas is carried into the upper center and left of the festoon itself, where sites of ongoing mischief abound: spoiled grapes, ants on the hollyhock and rose, a caterpillar perched on a pomegranate reaching for a hollyhock petal, a snail at work on a peach just below a nibbled leaf. Black markings on the wings of the white moth to the left of the leaf resemble the latter’s chomp-holes.

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figure 5. Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Festoon of Fruits and Flowers.

The representational temper of de Heem’s student, Abraham Mignon, has been well characterized by Kim Todd: “for him insects had a darker spirit. He portrayed them as emblems of death and decay. In his later paintings, they emerged from overripe fruit: larvae feasting on plum flesh, ants toiling on the skin of a peach, a beetle lingering near a hole-ridden

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cherry.”18 These are emblems not merely of decay but of rapacity. And they are not emblems merely; they are representations. Frequently, however, the objects Mignon depicts—oysters, flowers, leaves—are not under attack (Plate 7). They’re just going bad by themselves; only time and rot assault them. Flagging the vanitas is always a possible motive. But another is equally possible, if less probable: representing what has happened to the object since the leisurely painter, whose brush moves like a snail, began to copy it.19 In Mignon’s forest scenes, denizens of the sous-bois setting are depicted as if under water, not merely under woods. They are also under the gun: the woodland setting in Plate 8 arranges itself around a steadily aimed gun barrel held by a hidden hunter. A mother finch perches on the barrel to feed a nestful of open-mouthed fledglings, while the father guards from above.20 And well he might. All around this sylvan household are the spoils of hunting and the menace of contending serpents. Directly beneath the open-mouthed birds in the nest hang three dead fish from a keg. Their mouths are also open, but what they ate were hooks. Living creatures eye dead ones, and their gaze is returned. One dead fish gawks intently at a squirrel, another at a frog. Sous-bois in Mignon’s world, the marks of human intervention are predatory. But their strange convergences pick out a new and bizarre version of a familiar genre: the wilderness as Wunderkammer. Dead rabbits (or squirrels) and fish, looming spiders, capsized lizards, and inquisitive ornamental snails (but no caterpillars) are all on display as woodland collectibles. Mignon’s darkness can be mischievous. He explores what happens to baskets or heaps of fruits and flowers when, like Little Red Riding Hood, they get lost or left in the woods. In his bloemstilleven adventures, he experiments with quirky indoor action narratives that feature excited animals— cat and squirrel—overturning vases of flowers. His cat figure, repeated in two paintings (in Amsterdam and Lyon), looks positively feral. It frightens the flowers. Cat and squirrel are intruders from the wilder world of Mignon’s woodland scenes. They upset not only the flower vases but also the viewer’s expectations. Todd writes that Mignon worked in a tradition in which plants and animals were used “to represent elements of Christianity and morality.”21 Yet

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her descriptive flair reverses the iconographic skew. “Elements of Christianity” may be the message that first greets observers in a culture attuned to vanitas displays. But these elements provide a framework that excuses and enables the portrayal of the “darker spirit.” It isn’t necessarily the case that voracity gets sanitized and vanitized. It may be that, in a kind of reverse iconography, the appeal to vanitas opens the door to the darker pleasures of portraying rapacitas. In other words, vanitas is the McGuffin of still life.

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The Darker Spirit: Van Huysum’s Heaps

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he darker spirit lingers on in eighteenth-century still life, more openly in some examples, more reticently in others. More openly in the work of the great visionary of caterpillage, Maria Sibylla Merian, discussed in Chapter 9 above; more reticently in the work of her younger contemporary, Jan van Huysum (1682–1749), to which I now turn. Taylor includes van Huysum among painters who, from “the third quarter of the seventeenth century onward, . . . placed their bouquets in a parkland setting.” More recently, Van Huysum’s work has been illuminated by Sam Segal and his colleagues in an impressive (and beautifully produced) book, The Temptations of Flora.1 The catalogue features forty still lifes, in most of which bouquets fill vases, urns, or baskets resting on marble ledges or slabs. In five, fruits and flowers sit directly on the ledge without a container.2 Five bouquets in vases are posed before niches.3 The niche bouquets abound in cornucopian bluster. Too many animated flowers, leaves, vines, and “buoyant stems” struggle for visibility in overloaded containers.4 Crowdedness is a programmatic strategy by which painters make their subjects appear to compete for attention. Like his predecessors in this genre, van Huysum exfoliates a parabolic wilderness of arcs and curves and curlicues: the geometry of floral melodrama. Flowers explode out of darkness into bloom or withdraw seductively into the halflight of chiaroscuro or (if they are opium poppies) sleepily show the observer their backs. Sometimes they sway and bend like wind-blown dancers, but sometimes they grow heavy-headed and droop.5 63

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Sixteen of Segal’s examples are set outdoors, most of them in landscapes with trees, statues, and built structures.6 These landscapes qualify for membership in the category Taylor calls “parkland setting.” He emphasizes the “associations of peaceful classical affluence” in this genre and illustrates it with van Huysum’s 1722 fruit and flower piece in the Getty Museum, “a cascade of garden offerings lying on a balustrade surrounded by the woodland of an estate.”7 Behind it on the left is an elegant classical urn, and in the distance on the right a fountain and a classical statue. “Horticulture, viniculture and arboriculture are soaked in an atmosphere of wealthy Georgian contentment.”8 That may all be true as far as it goes, but “peaceful” and “contentment” don’t do justice to what we see in this work or in the many other van Huysum still lifes it resembles. Within majestic, estate-based vistas, crowded and disorderly “offerings” that swarm with insects are troubled by occasional episodes of leaf damage, virus spots, and wounded fruit. Taylor’s “cascade” is a euphemistic way to describe what looks more like a heap.9 “Parkland heaps” is an oxymoron, but there is enough mischief in van Huysum’s visual rhetoric to activate the irony in that figure. Van Huysum painted a series of such heaps. Thirteen are included in The Temptations of Flora.10 They depict tangles of garden flowers, edible fruit, assorted plants, leaves, and branches, piled together near containers—vases, urns, baskets. In all but one of the heaps, open containers are filled with plants and flowers. The heaps overflow their containers and spill across a marble ledge. Taylor’s example, F 17 in Segal’s catalogue, is the exception (Plate 9). Behind the tangle, the urn looms and lurks in coppery shadow, broken only where light reflected from the heap picks out putti that play around the urn in mild relief. But this container, unlike all the others, is covered by a lid. Segal emphasizes the anomaly in his descriptive title: “Fruit with Hollyhock and Other Flowers in Front of a Closed Garden Vase.”11 The urn is reduced to a background ornament. But its presence underscores the gratuitousness of heaping. Van Huysum’s heaps may be formally beautiful and colorful, but they still confront the viewer as arbitrary messes waiting to be sorted out. Our sense of the messiness and garishness of the heap is increased by the modesty of a mottled grayish-green background. The woodland that

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obscures the sky is scumbled as if seen through a light mist. Between the fountain and statue in the background, “a man and woman in Roman dress survey the scene.”12 “The man is pointing to the statue, and the woman is holding onto a pot” that rests on a stone fence.13 Draped in monochromatic bleariness, the two figures and the statue look pale and ghostly, like visitants from another world. By visually marginalizing this episode, van Huysum sends his viewers a message: he is less interested in human drama than in heaps. Reversing the priorities of portraiture, Genre, and history painting, he demotes episodes of human interaction, along with the statuary art that commemorates it, to the level of staffage. Nevertheless, he lets the visitants enjoy their own obscure anecdotal moment. As the man gestures energetically toward the statue, both the woman and the statue appear to recoil from his pointing arm. The marginalization of this melodramatic fragment is itself oddly intrusive. It diverts our attention and then frustrates the curiosity it arouses. It has the force of conspicuous exclusion, the trope that makes us attend to what has been left out. As I note above, what is conspicuously excluded is not merely missing but present-as-missing.14 It is one thing for artists merely to omit, exclude, forget, or ignore something. But it is another thing to make a point of the omission and direct our attention toward it. Conspicuous exclusion is a technique especially useful to the objectives of the sophisticated pastoral art that identifies conventional pastoral with the impulse to escape from life. It produces this effect by purging its world of darker shadows and making us take note of their absence. It represents a world that seems excessively ordered and idyllic but, at the same time, a world that displays incongruities—tokens of what has been purged.15 Van Huysum defamiliarizes the heap in the foreground by framing it in this context. The heap itself is structured by four branches. Two end in diagonal cuts. The shorter one, with damaged harebell leaves, sits horizontally at lower right behind a peach and above a partly peeled pomegranate. The longer branch, bearing muscat grapes and leaves, curves up toward the left, where it intersects a vertical grapevine that also bends leftward. Finally, a branch with creamy, double pink hollyhocks slants up behind the vertical grapevine. It arcs into space and inclines toward the statue, which executes

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a contrapposto that sends the viewer back to the strangely echoing form composed of harebell and pomegranate. Leaves redden and wilt on the two visibly cut branches. Because the diagonal cuts are clean and sharply delineated, they contribute to the sense of a deliberately assembled heap. Things didn’t just get there by chance. Although van Huysum’s heap is hardly a Wunderkammer, it has all the earmarks of a collection. Yet why is it lying on a balustrade? Was the heap arranged and disposed as a subject of art? Its hues and shades are elegiac. From the upper left corner, two leaves appear to be floating down toward the right. This introduces an effect of aerial stir that passes diagonally through the heap and into the lower right corner.16 Another diagonal is energized by the three leaves aflame with autumnal fire in the topmost bough. They transmit their death throes in the form of a rust that burns the grapes. The shape of the lovely dying heap strangely resembles that of a midden. But it also resembles a seascape. If the high trees in the background bend down toward the left, the heap is swept in the opposite direction. Van Huysum’s brush, with its characteristic surges of energy, sends windblown gusts that shape the heap into a C and blow it like a ship in a storm.17 The hollyhock crossed with vine branches forms its twisted mast.18 Tempestuous vectors drive the ship toward the right, where the twiglike arm of the pointing man in the background sustains their force, while the statue gracefully flinches away. Once again, a ghostly human melodrama briefly lights up the heap. In another of the painting’s many possible patterns of unifying motion, disparate forms release bursts of similar color that make the Maltese cross and marigolds at center right speak to the poppies on the left, to the leaves above, and to the pomegranate and currants on the ledge. In still another pattern, a circular dynamic drives a loop from burning grape leaves past the background statue toward the harebell, through the swag of black grapes, to the shadowy urn, which tilts up and away from the heap and thereby depresses the viewer’s gaze to the worm’s-eye position. But the downslant of the parapet challenges this perspectival cue. It returns the gaze to the level of the hollyhock cluster. Again, why is the heap there? Is it gathered, like trash, for disposal? Is it

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waiting to be sorted out? Is it the result of harvesting, as well as of clearing and pruning? Is it there to be painted? Is this the painting of a “collection” specifically assembled so that the painter could copy it? That may make van Huysum’s project sound too modern in its reflexivity (another painting about painting?). But it’s a possible narrative, and it raises a question about the painter’s investment in heaps. His glorious heap is basically a pile of trimmings. Was the intention to paint the real cause of otherwise gratuitous acts of pruning and harvesting that pose as contributions to estate maintenance? Do van Huysum’s heaps celebrate parkland ideology or do they critique it? The heap is invaded by the usual suspects. The introduction of bugs introduces a new range of gestures and effects: locomotive action, search and patrol, predation, damage. Among the many species of critters identified by Segal throughout the The Temptations of Flora catalogue, butterflies abound, and tiny meadow ants far outnumber the more picturesque snails and caterpillars. Only nine snails and two caterpillars inhabit the catalogue’s forty still lifes. If van Huysum included relatively few caterpillars in his still lifes, it may be because he knew the market in caterpillars had been cornered by Merian. His are all minor presences, modest in size and relegated to the sidelines. Most of the snails extend halfway out of their ornamental spirals and sit up straight, as if watchfully surveying—and appreciating? preparing to prey on?—their flowery neighbors. No snails or caterpillars inhabit F 17, but van Huysum disperses flies, butterflies, bees, a moth, and a small battalion of ants over the panel.19 Six or seven ants work their will on a wounded damson plum near the lower right corner. Behind the plum, the pomegranate lies partially skinned and gouged out under the sick harebell leaves. The presence of formican swarmers is justified by the fact that this is an outdoor scene. It can’t be said that van Huysum treats these tiny creatures as terrors. They’re having a picnic. The painter’s genial attitude toward them is expressed in a brilliant comic detail: on the ledge in front of the damson, he places an ant that sits up on its hind legs and watches its fellows finish off the plum. It behaves just like van Huysum’s snails. The strangest detail appears near the painting’s geometric center. Something projects from the heart of the hollyhock cluster. It may be an anther.

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But it resembles the segment of a large, caterpillarlike creature. Enormous in comparison to the tiny insects crawling near it, it seems to burrow into the hollyhock heart. Finally, van Huysum scatters several waterdrops over the painting, most noticeably on harebell and mallow leaves. As Segal notes in another context, waterdrops generally “add to the impression of freshness.”20 But there’s a touch of irony in this idea if we seriously consider what van Huysum’s waterdrops freshen. The heaps on his balustrades consist of trimmings and cuttings. But so do the bouquets in his vases. And so do those in every other painter’s vases. They have been severed from their life source. They have, in a word, been cut. Flowers may have a short afterlife once they’ve lost their roots, but they’re technically dead. All they can do is wilt—more or less slowly, depending on conditions. In that respect, floral still life is a genre devoted to moribund organisms, a genre literally devoted to nature mourant. If such dying bouquets had ever occupied vases in well-kept bourgeois interiors (they probably hadn’t), they could be expected to play host to flies, spiders, ants, ladybugs, and possibly bees. But could they, even in screenless seventeenth-century interiors, have attracted the butterflies, damselflies, dragonflies, caterpillars, and snails whose brilliant forms compete with those of painted flowers? And never more so than when they’re shown inflicting damage. In this fantasy genre, their function as predators coalesces with, reinforces, their function as performers. They compete with their prey for the viewer’s attention. But the painter has the last word. His entomological and molluscan inventions are full of mischief. The story they tell is of art, not of ethics or ecology. The message they formally transmit is that they were copied from sketches or folios or collection drawers rather than from life.21

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Posies: The Bouquet as Pretext of Occasion

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he SLP entry for van den Berghe’s Vase of Flowers in a Stone Niche registers the obligatory caveat: “not all of the flowers could have been in bloom at the same time: despite its apparent naturalism . . . [it] is a horticultural fantasy” (124). Bryson gives the caveat interpretive force when he emphases the salience of that effect. Painters “conspicuously yoke together varieties that flourish at different times of the year” and in different parts of the world.1 Floral still lifes thus present themselves not as copies of bouquets but as imaginary collections or gatherings of collectibles in an expressly counterfactual mimesis.2 Bryson discerns a modern impulse, a hint of “Faustian ambition,” in Bosschaert’s transformation into a single image of separate studies of varieties that flourish at different times of year. . . . One detects here a certain refusal of natural time and seasonality. . . . All the flowers in the Bosschaert exist at precisely the same moment in their life-cycle, when their bloom becomes perfect. The simultaneous perfection of so many flowers from different seasons banishes the dimension of time and breaks the bond between man and the cycles of nature. Which is exactly the point: what is being explored is the power of technique (first of horticulture, then of painting) to outstrip the limitations of the natural world.3

He goes on to massage this insight into an account of the interrelated scientific, economic, and political manifestations of nascent capitalism in the affluent commercial culture of the Dutch Republic—a culture sustained by 69

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a colonial empire, directed by market forces, and oriented toward the production, acquisition, and exchange of luxury goods. These goods came to include not only rare and exotic objects from afar, not only those—like tulips—that had been domesticated, but also the paintings in which they are reproduced. Students of the genre generally insist that it is anachronistic to view such fantastic bouquets as documents in the history of realism rather than as illusionistic visual tropes imbued with latent or manifest symbolic content. Considered from this perspective, painted bouquets have much in common with catalogues of flowers in the expressly idyllic and counterfactual representations of pastoral poetry. Imaginary bouquets that express the poetry of flowers may indeed have more in common with imaginative collections of the flowers of poetry than the fact that both can be called posies and anthologies.4 In British English, posy is a collective noun; like nosegay and bouquet, it designates a bunch of flowers. Etymologically, it is a syncopated form of “poesy,” and was also used in early modern English to designate an emblematic device (OED, senses 1a and 1b)—for example, a vanitas figure. The American Heritage Dictionary (3rd ed.) extends the range of denotation to an individual flower and, more interestingly, notes that the “central meaning shared” by the three nouns (bouquet, nosegay, posy) is “a bunch of cut flowers” (my italics). I’ve discussed the implications of the italicized qualifier, but, for the moment, let the violence of cutting be bookmarked. The lexical kinship of posy with poesy and its semantic association with mottoes and inscriptions situate it in a network of rhetorical and performative meanings. With only a little pressure, the word can mutate through ideas of presentation and self-presentation to the idea of posing. The fictiveness of bouquets in Dutch still life has often been discussed, but so also has the emphasis on the reality effect promoted in the humanist art theory taken up by Dutch writers on art from Karel van Mander (1604) to Gerard de Lairesse (1707). Their texts reflect the traditional conflict of the Italo-classical discourse of mimetic idealism, the conflict between “the desire to idealize” and the claim to truthiness—the doctrine that “the aim of art was to deceive the eye and produce an illusion of reality.”5 Van Mander, for example, promotes an ideal of beauty but roots it in sense perception

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and praises Caravaggio because “he does not paint a stroke which is not copied whilst sitting directly before the life.”6 The problem is that the cognoscenti considered flower painting inferior to other genres precisely “because it was painted nae ‘t leven, from the life, or from the motif, without idealizing its subject matter.”7 Some painters responded by trying in various ways to counter this denigration. “Throughout Dutch flower painting one finds, for the most part, that the choicest cultivars were painted at or near their peak of perfection,” and especially from “the 1660s onward, flower paintings display trappings which are resonant of the ‘refined taste’ . . . classicism attempted to cultivate.”8 Many of these later flower pieces were set outdoors in what seem to be country estates. The shift of taste Taylor mentions may correspond with the elevation of the regent class to aristocracy hypothesized by many historians. “The conflict between realism and idealism”: this traditional formula distorts a superficially similar but structurally different conflict between two representational messages. On the one hand, painters depict the image as if it had been “painted nae ‘t leven, from life.” On the other hand, they make it clear to the observer that this reality effect is factitious, that the depicted bouquet is a fabrication of art, and that “realism” is the ultimate “horticultural fantasy.”9 About the nae t’leven claim, several questions may be asked. When “Van Mander states that the . . . flower paintings of Cornelis van Haarlem and de Gheyn were all painted ‘nae t’leven,’ ” does he mean that the painters had the depicted flower arrangement before them?10 Furthermore, what about Jan Brueghel’s assertion “that he painted directly from real flowers without the aid of drawing or sketches, and that he needed to travel to Brussels in order to see rare blossoms”?11 If he copied flowers in Brussels, did he also make sketches of individual specimens and bring them back home to his studio? Did he place flowers in a vase and paint them nae t’leven along with rare blossoms copied from his sketchbook? Finally, if the nae t’leven claim applies to bouquets, does it also apply to the truthiness of their attendant bees, butterflies, dragonflies, flies, spiders, snails, and caterpillars? Questions and considerations of this sort suggest that the nae t’leven claim may have been intended less as a truth about practice and more as a boast, a boast the message of which is not “from life” but “as if from life.”

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For the painting to convey the emphasis “only as if,” it would have to indicate that it is emphatically “not from life.” The effectiveness of the indication is attested to by the standard opinion that “flower still lifes were not portraits of existing bouquets or formations of flowers.”12 This is nevertheless too simple a response to a complex performative game. The ambiguity of provenance is built into the genre as a conventional effect. Thus when Bergström compares flower pieces by Jacques de Gheyn, he observes that certain tulips, roses, and lilies recur exactly in two or more paintings. . . . This fact, together with the inclusion of plants that bloom at different seasons, discloses that the bouquets were never arranged together as models for the artists. They were put together like a jig-saw puzzle, the pieces of which were individual studies of flowers. It is also difficult to believe that the flowers in his painting of 1615 . . . could possibly have stood in so small a vase without upsetting it.13

A similar effect of topheaviness is produced by van den Berghe’s and very many other flower pieces, an effect that sometimes—but not always— triggers the anxiety Bergström expresses. The effect challenges credibility and, like that of the vertige encouraged by teetering pewter plates, indexes the limits of the pretext of occasion. Bergström elsewhere dismissively sidetracks this effect as an ornamental tendency toward symmetry that briefly troubled the naturalistic development of the Netherlandish flower piece. He ascribes it to the influence of a classicizing convention common to the decorative arts from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century.14 This explanation ignores the structural richness of an effect that informs still life’s basic scenario, the pretext of occasion. It reinforces the viewer’s suspicion that the painter fabricated the outlines of his composition and then plunked down individual stencils on the prearranged schema. In a more persuasive account, Lee Hendrix attends to this effect and traces its transformations from printed ornaments and illuminated manuscripts through Hoefnagel’s watercolor flower pieces to the seventeenthcentury flower painters who worked in oils. She describes Hoefnagel’s “fantasy vases” as “textureless” objects with “two-dimensional handles”

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that “taper sharply at their bases, and thus stand by virtue of miraculous artifice.” Because Hoefnagel was a manuscript illuminator sensitive to the material presence as well as the visual values of ornamental design, he conspicuously posed a riddling challenge to the nae t’leven effect “by incorporating obvious fantasy into the ostensibly real world of the trompe l’oeil piece.” In this manner, he invites the “viewer’s awareness that artifice upholds the pictorial world.”15 Hendrix goes on carefully and astutely to distinguish the conditions of the illuminator/watercolorist’s nae t’leven claim from those of the oil painter. Hoefnagel’s interest in illusionism was divided between the realistic evocation of three-dimensional forms and the realistic evocation—or quotation—of the two-dimensional materials of his medium, for example, the relation of thinly and brilliantly painted images to the vellum.16 When the flower painters, who worked in oils and pursued three-dimensional illusionism, appropriated his ornamental detail into their paintings, they also built his ambivalent treatment of the pretext of occasion into the structure of their genre. This is the procedure most scholars direct attention to when they explain why paintings of bouquets are necessarily fantastic. Some of the practical reasons for this procedure have been spelled out by Brenninkmeijer–de Rooij in her authoritative study of Jan Brueghel’s method: Brueghel had always been a master in the depiction of individual flowers and remained one. . . . Arranging flowers into a bouquet—the ‘inventio”— was an intellectual exercise in the absence of “real” bouquets and quite a different task. There were few compositional guidelines for this, and Brueghel undoubtedly worked hard to transform his material—the flowers—into a satisfactory, natural-looking painting. It must have been quite a problem to depict those rare and fashionable flowers, whose appearance changed from day to day and which were liable to wither quickly, “from life.” [Brueghel may have copied individual] flowers from life, although never the bouquets of his paintings. As he himself remarked, he arranged the flowers as he painted. . . . The combination of . . . spring and summer flowers [in his

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Caterpillage paintings] is now understandable. . . . [Some pictures of bouquets took him] about four months to paint.17

Thus in flower painting the bouquet itself is the signifier of trompe l-oeil illusionism. The richness of the pretext is obscured by overemphasizing the obviousness of artifice. It is true, as Segal remarks, that “‘nature’ as such does not play much of a part in flower still lifes. . . . a basic condition of art is that it is not a facsimile of visual reality but that it adds, changes or removes something in order to communicate with the mind.”18 Yet the “basic condition” can only be met by registering a conspicuous feint toward the status of “a facsimile.” The feint toward truthiness is an essential stylistic moment of the genre, the necessary precondition for the moment in which it is demystified or negated by features that signify its impossibility. Bosschaert was one of the most influential flower painters active during the first two decades of the seventeenth century—well before the tulip mania of the 1630s but well after the tulip’s appearance in Europe in the 1550s.19 His hyper-realism, which set a standard for many pupils and successors, was manifested by the ways in which he signaled his disavowal of the nae t’leven effect: No real-life bouquet could possibly defy gravity with the insouciance of Bosschaert. [In the famous Mauritshuis Flower Piece] Bosschaert’s flowers end in a line so clear it stands proud of the background, as if painted on porcelain or enamel. . . . [His] modelling is implausibly delicate, and as a result the bouquet has a slightly flattened appearance. The flowers and fruit in paintings by Balthasar van der Ast and Ambrosius Bosschaert . . . reveal typical signs of having been copied from model sheets and model books in the studio.20

Was this revelation conspicuous? Or was it a trope reserved for “those who know,” those who would appreciate the brilliance of an art that openly dissimulated its origin in nature? Laurens Bol notes that “the relative sizes” of the flowers in Bosschaert’s bouquets “are not always in proportion,” and that “the same flowers appear

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in congruent repetition in different flower pieces.”21 The group dynamics depicted in flower painting signifies the ambivalent pretext of its occasion. On the one hand, it offers the fantasy of a natural bouquet—an arrangement of freshly picked flowers—and conveys through the overall realism of its depiction the message that the bouquet has been directly copied from life. It claims to imitate a pre-text. On the other hand, the claim to truthiness is ostensively flagged as a misrepresentation by stylistic and other cues that invite a skeptical response to it. The pre-text is a pretext. “The pretext of occasion” expresses a problematic relation between image and model—or painted sign and “natural” referent—that lies at the heart of Dutch flower painting. But it isn’t exclusive to that genre. The gorgeously decked out (often exotic) flowers recall the sashes, fancy dress, and (often archaic) weapons of sitters who are no more likely to be real soldiers than Bosschaert’s bouquets are real bouquets. The picture of a glass full of fresh posies shares certain features with the picture of a room full of fat poseurs. This resemblance was picked out and parodied avant la lettre by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–93) in his hilarious constructions of portraiture out of what would soon become the referential materials of still life. I’ve defined a group portrait problematically as the representation of a prior event in which many—sometimes very many—sitters posed together at the same time in the same place while the artist reproduced the scene. I say “problematically” because we can’t assume that artists were able to assemble all their sitters for not merely one but probably several sessions. A more likely definition of the group portrait is that it’s a picture in which sitters pretending to pose together probably posed separately. An Arcimboldo portrait may be defined along these lines as the representation of a prior event in which many—sometimes very many—fruits and vegetables pretend to pose together as the parts of a face.22 His versions of “Fruit Face,” as Claudia Strand calls them, are halfway between a garland and a garner. The analogy between portraiture and still life has been sharply drawn by Laurens Bol: Bosschaert’s careful depiction of individual flowers resembles the way individual portraits in

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Caterpillage the “Regent” and “Militia” pieces . . . [are] placed beside and above each other, each being given its full pound of recognizability. No single one is subordinated, or sacrificed for the sake of composition, lighting, atmosphere or tonality. The only difference made is the salient position given to the leading figure, in casu a flower of importance. . . . All subjects appear simultaneously in the foreground, in a unity of time, place and “action” enforced by the painter: a successful tour de force.23

Bol understates the emulative aspects of a political problem in group portraiture that may also affect still life. A militia piece represents a group of sitters as if they posed together at the same time in the same place, and as if the artist simply reproduced their act of collective self-portrayal. Yet it’s likely that the project demanded sessions in which the painter worked with individual sitters (or their likenesses). In deference to this likelihood, I’ve defined a group portrait as a picture in which sitters who pretend to pose together probably posed separately.24 Portrait painters seem to have enjoyed depicting not only the togetherness of a unified group but also the competitiveness of individual sitters who aspire to monopolize the viewer’s attention. The image of a harmonious aggregate of co-performers is always shadowed by a counter-image of competitive posing that imperils groupness with the threat of disaggregation. Floral still lifes resemble militia pieces in that the image of a group of flowers simultaneously posing together is exposed as an illusion and a tease. Both genres toy with viewers’ expectations and solicit their interpretations. The portrayal of an aggregate harmoniously fused into a group hints at its counterfactuality by alluding to the désagrégation (to the “many separate studies”25) on which it is founded and which it only pretends to conceal.

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Joris Hoefnagel and the Roots of Dutch Flower Painting

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till lifes resemble group portraits in their tendency to emphasize rather than minimize the conflicting demands made on the observer by the group and its individuals. Viewers of still life in public collections are often tempted to get too close for the museum guards’ comfort, and readers of books with reproductions of the same pictures are likely to attack them with a magnifying glass. They are pulled in by the anecdotal minutiae Sam Segal calls “by-work”: “butterflies or dragonflies may sit still, or they may hover and flit around; a bumble bee alights; caterpillars crawl along; a spider dangles from its web; a grasshopper is posed ready for a leap, or jumps over a flower and a shell; a snail creeps over the edge of a plinth; an ant drags along a dead fly; a dead wasp lies on its back.”1 By-work is a useful term because it indicates the subordinate function or role such images are supposed to have. But another term better suggests the special quality that distinguishes the imitations of bugs and beastlings in still life. At once graphically depicted and toylike, their forms index the literal, etymological, sense of the term detail. A detail is something cut out, stenciled, tailored, isolated, like specimens in a display case. Still-life insects are often reduced to appliqués—to exemplary details that would remind contemporaries of their provenance in the graphic space of illustration and that might well remind modern viewers of the space of decalcomania. The details are often insistent enough to pose the threat of désagrégation. But the threat is posed only if the sense of 77

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groupness—the harmony and agrégation of the composition as a whole— has already been conveyed. The straggle or parade of details that brilliantly animate Balthasar van der Ast’s still life (Plate 3)2 reminded Bergström of the manuscript illustrations added by Joris Hoefnagel in the borders of Mira calligraphiae monumenta, Georg Bocskay’s model calligraphy book.3 But, as Lee Hendrix notes, the array corresponds even more closely to the specimens grouped on each page of Hoefnagel’s 1592 Archtypa, certain images from which van der Ast directly quotes.4 Hoefnagel’s illustrations for Mira calligraphiae monumenta and Archetypa are presumed to have served—along with herbals and illuminated prayerbooks—as pattern books for van der Ast and many other still life painters.5 Hoefnagel’s specimens in Archetypa don’t compete for attention because they aren’t depicted in a manner that encourages viewers to see them interacting in the same space. Unlike the bouquets, insects, and snails in flower pieces, they are for the most part immobilized by their isolated display positions. Of the figures in Mira calligraphiae’s illuminations, Hendrix notes that, instead of “constituting a ‘natural whole,’ they maintain a sense of separateness from one another,” and she attributes this to Hoefnagel’s playful paragone with Bocskay’s script, the discreteness of the visual forms “pointing up the additive character of words and sentences.”6 There is an obvious but important difference between Archetypa and the more traditional format of the illuminated manuscripts to which Hoefnagel contributed. On the one hand, his illustrations for the latter are added in the margins of someone else’s preexisting text. On the other hand, the images in Archetypa resemble those in herbals because they have inscriptions but no prior text to compete with. As Hendrix shows, the format of Archetypa was mediated by that of Hoefnagel’s Four Elements, especially its first volume, Ignis, which consists mainly of insect miniatures. Ignis supplied him with many of the images and inscriptions he used in Archetypa.7 In Four Elements, the watercolor illustrations are often accompanied by identifying (and occasionally moralizing) inscriptions, but these are safely relegated to an area outside the oval that circumscribes each image. Such a positional strategy allows each inscription to refer to or comment on—but not to subordinate—the whole image.

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A different organizational strategy informs the forty-eight plates of Archetypa, which are divided into four sets of twelve and which feature square rather than oval borderlines. Each square is crammed with many more images than fill the ovals in Four Elements, and this produces the impression of a more heterogeneous and less unified space. The flat page space is occasionally, and locally, hollowed out by shading that gives individual objects volume and by shadows that suggest isolated patches of solid ground or else a wall beneath or behind the objects.8 In addition, objects are at times juxtaposed in “natural” relations—a bug hovering over a bud, a snail probing a stem. But these are isolated proto– still-life episodes. They lack the narrative support provided by the pretext of occasion in an integrated illusionistic setting. Their primary function is to enhance the overall design of a shallow, text-bearing page space that resembles the cabinet drawer of a collection.9 Hendrix claims that “while it is difficult to determine whether Archetypa is meant to represent the contents of a Kunstkammer, the objects depicted are naturalia, gathered together to display nature’s variety and the intricacy of her creations.”10 They also interact, albeit uncertainly, with texts. All but two of Archetypa’s plates are inscribed at the top and the bottom.11 However, unlike Four Elements, the inscriptions aren’t isolated from the images but mingle promiscuously with them inside the square framelines. The relation of inscription to illustration is at times portentous, at times wry and comical, at times enigmatic, and at times predictably moralistic. But the range of application isn’t always clear. Although the mottoes tend to connect with image clusters grouped in or near the center of the page, the heterogeneous and episodic format encourages iconographic uncertainty, flexibility, and irony. Archetypa’s nonillusionistic orientation may be compared with an independent cabinet miniature by Hoefnagel, the 1598 Amor Lethaeos, a memento mori all the more sinister for its air of sweetness. Tyrus Miller has observed that the oval image of a putto in a landscape appears attached to the hinges of what is otherwise a transparent square of glass serving as the lid of the container. From this observation, he concludes that the page may be designed as the image of a drawer or box filled with collectibles and viewed through a pane of glass.12

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Within the box, the specimens all contribute to the single “theme of life and death,” symbolized not only by the putto holding a skull but also by “the contrast between living and dead insects and animals and between the budding and wilting of flowers.”13 Such totalizing and unifying thematic control isn’t demonstrable in Archetypa. Its characteristic page is not obviously designed to look like a transparent window on an imaginary spatial container. With few exceptions (one of which is discussed below), Archetypa’s plates don’t encourage the viewer to read them as interactive collections competing for attention in the common space of still life. Since Hoefnagel was one of Dutch still life’s most important precursors, the best way to convey a sense of the novelty and wit that made his work influential is to glance at his relation to his precursors. Reviewing the evidence of his familiarity with and participation in the “Ghent-Bruges” tradition of manuscript illumination, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has incisively demonstrated that Hoefnagel’s illusionistic images are not mere derivatives of his experience as an illuminator in that tradition. They are parodic responses to it. Kaufmann singles out Hoefnagel’s wry treatment of the trompe-l’oeil conventions of books of hours containing mementos of pilgrimages that “could presumably stimulate devotion.”14 Those mementos included not only actual pilgrim badges sewn in the pages but also illusionistic illustrations of the badges; not only actual flowers and insects (brought back from holy sites) pressed between the pages but also trompe l’oeil depictions of them in manuscript borders. Kaufmann speculates that, in addition to letting artists “display their virtuosity,” the depictions “may have been presented as copies of actual specimens collected while on pilgrimage.”15 Although Hoefnagel’s style of illustration seems to continue these practices, Kaufmann identifies several devices that distinguish it from—and indeed turn the tables on—the Ghent-Bruges tradition. It isn’t merely that the images in his miniatures from the 1590s are “freed from any connection with a written text,” or that the “depiction of nature . . . seems to exist as an independent form of representation.”16 More important is his mischievous play with illusion. If, like his predecessors, he provides “evidence of natural objects being attached to illuminated manuscripts,” he does so by conspicuously illusion-

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istic means. In Mira calligraphia, for example, not only does he show “a plant with its stalk piercing the page,” disappearing and reappearing as if it had been threaded through the paper. He also depicts the missing section of the stalk on the verso of that page.17 In his additions to the Hours of Philip of Cleves, “he showed flowers and insects as if they had been pressed into the book.”18 This seems identical with the practice described by Claudia Swan when she writes that “images of plants with cut, bent, and folded stems” in Clutius’s botanical watercolors “mimic the pages of herbaria,” which differed from illustrated herbals in being collections of “pressed and dried specimens . . . preserved [between pages] for study.”19 But as Swan shows, this formal device serves the purely practical end of enabling the Clutius painter(s) to fit all parts of the plant on the same page. None of the examples she selects from Clutius has the conspicuously playful and allusive features that qualify as mimicry and characterize Hoefnagel’s mischievous simulations. On one of the pages of Hoefnagel’s Ignis, “the actual wings of the creatures represented have been glued onto the page next to” illustrations of their bodies. The “elision of painted and substantial form, of the fictive and the real, indicates that this is a further step in the history of naturalistic illumination in which the use of illusionistic devices might be regarded as a display of wit.”20 Indeed (judging from Kaufmann’s reproduction of this page), because the painted bodies of the insects are modeled and cast shadows, they appear more “substantial” than the gauzelike and shadowless wings, which betray the wear and tear of having been pressed. Decaying nature is thus salvaged, mastered, and resurrected by art. Although the wings are “real” found objects, their tenuity gives them the flat graphic look of elementary artwork, while the solid imaginary bodies seem alive. Nature thus mirrors art and art mirrors nature, each reversing the functions of the other vis-à-vis representation.21 By this reversal, Hoefnagel surpasses not only nature but also his predecessors, ostensively alluding to and troping on the realist conventions of the books of hours.22 Kaufman’s account of Hoefnagel is a case study aimed in part at showing “how motivations related to religious beliefs and practices may have contributed to the creation of illusionistic imitations of the natural world.”23 He concludes that in Hoefnagel’s manuscripts the “world of nature is beginning

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to be desanctified.” We are “on the way to the development of still life that is independent of sacred associations, to the investigation of . . . the processes of the natural world considered as ends in themselves.”24 Mastery of Nature trenchantly demonstrates the close interaction, the inseparable relation, between Hoefnagel’s project of creating an illusion and his evident concern to make the illusoriness of the illusion conspicuous. It is also, of course, a study of Hoefnagel’s emulative attempt to surpass the illusionism of his predecessors in the practice of manuscript illumination. Kaufmann devotes a chapter to Hoefnagel’s emulation of Dürer as a practice that involves surpassing not only the strong precursor but also nature—the latter by imitating prior artistic rather than natural models. To describe Hoefnagel’s achievement in this manner is to raise two questions about his influence on still-life flower painting. First, just what are the “processes of the natural world” Hoefnagel investigates, and how are they reflected in his illustrations? Second, to what extent are his depictions of those processes reflected in the flower pieces of painters who may have made use of his work? Delineated in Mira calligraphia and Archetypa are many kinds of plants and flowers, along with many kinds of insects, with snails and slugs, and—less frequently—with small animals and birds. In some cases, the flora merely share the same page space with these creatures, but in others they interact with them. Insects hover over or perch on the plants; snails and caterpillars approach, probe, and occasionally climb or drape themselves about them. These interactions are often but not always indeterminate. The determinate instances take two forms that are recognizable as “processes of the natural world”: one appears “symbiotic” and the other predatory.25 Bees and butterflies are positioned so as to suggest they may be attracted to the blossoms and gathering pollen or nectar. Other insects, along with snails and caterpillars, are occasionally depicted in the vicinity of damaged leaves, blossoms, and fruits. According to Hendrix, the message beamed from several plates in Hoefnagel’s Ignis is that flowers are victims not only of “normal aging processes” but also of “voracious insects.” On one page, for example, “a morning glory, surrounded by threatening grasshoppers, is being consumed by a ravenous caterpillar, while another is simultaneously ravaged by a flying grasshopper

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and a caterpillar.”26 This is battlefield rhetoric. Elsewhere, she mentions Hoefnagel’s “ample treatment” of “grotesque and frightening members of the insect kingdom”—the rhinoceros beetle, the stag beetle, and the tarantula. Such “examples of creative nature’s transgressing her own bounds” may have moved Hoefnagel’s “audience to feel the highest admiration for a subject generally deemed repugnant and lowly.”27 Hendrix’s theme is his reflexive interest in presenting nature’s “wondrous artifice” as a figure of his own art. She goes on to examine Hoefnagel’s in parvo representations of decay, death, and violence in terms of the religio-scientifico-alchemical bricolage of his era. Like other commentators, she assimilates such motifs to themes of both the transiency and the regeneration of life, and the transcendence of death in the natural cycle. But there are episodes in Archetypa during which Hoefnagel’s effects fly too close to the ground to be detected by the radar screen of intellectual history. One of these occurs in the second plate of Part II of Archetypa and has been discussed above (see Figure 1 and Chapter 4). There, as we saw, a rose opens ecstatically to embrace the source of its life, the sunlight of the Erasmian adage lettered just above it, “Aeternum florida virtus.” This flourish doesn’t go unchallenged. At the bottom of the page is another inscription, “Mirabar, celerem fugitiva aetate rapinam et dum nascuntur, consenuisse Rosas,” which the editor of the volume translates as: “I wondered at the speed of decay in this fleeting life, and that while roses are blooming they are also fading.” This is the standard elegiac message that the plate as a whole delivers. But however “wise” this timeworn elegiac motto may be, it has little to do with what goes on at the center of the illustration, where the rose’s eagerness to soak up the sun is matched by the snail’s eagerness to strangle the rose. Partly this is the fault of the translation: the editor muffles the force of the original by using “decay” to English the word rapinam, which means “plunder” or “pillage” (as in caterpillage). In the rough translation given on the Internet a couple of years ago by a gallery that advertised the sale of the original hand-colored engraving, the first clause was rendered a tad lyrically as “however quickly life flees plunder.” The writer astutely connects the phrase to “the presence of the snail

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wrapped around the rose” and of “the caterpillars and other insects that eat plants.” He or she then goes on to blunt the connection with a politically correct example of truthiness: their presence is “a poignant reminder of the impermanent nature of existence, even as it continues its eternal cycle of renewal or decay.”28 Though the sentiment isn’t wrong, it reduces something scary to something obvious and boring. The difference between the ethics of the image and its technics, between what Hoefnagel’s inscription says and what the image shows, breaches the otherwise redundant circulation of meaning that captures roses, caterpillars, and snails in the predictability of the vanitas. “The more powerful the allegory,” Teskey writes, “the more openly violent the moments in which the materials of narrative are shown being actively subdued for the purpose of raising a structure of meaning.”29 But Hoefnagel’s print shows how one touch of counter-violence can upset— or at least diminish—allegory’s assault. By acting out the violence Teskey associates with allegory, the snail and the rose prevent allegory from capturing their substantiality or from raising it to (that is, dissolving it into) “the conceptual plane.”30 “The Archetypa was aimed both at lovers of plants and smaller animals and at artists. For the fine arts . . . the book served to provide a wealth of models, and copies were in fact frequently made from it.”31 Early still-life artists may have been attracted by Hoefnagel’s formal as well as mimetic innovations, but they seem especially to have been taken with the visual archive of insects and other small creatures assembled in both Ignis and Archetypa. In particular, many seem to have responded, for whatever reasons (moral, religious, naturalistic, “philosophical,” or merely graphic), to a motif repeated throughout the book: the linkage of a caterpillar and a plant. Hoefnagel introduces the motif on the very first plate in Part I of Archetypa and signals its parasitic import by placing a well-chewed leaf adjacent to the one the caterpillar rests on. The snail, as we just saw, is another Hoefnagelian perpetrator of violence against plants. Segal refers several times to the occurrence of nibbled leaves in flower pieces by Bosschaert, van der Ast, van Huysum, and others. Nibbled leaves, he notes, “underscore the sense of transiency” and enhance “the impression of naturalness.”32

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These comments may seem obvious, but a closer look at the contexts of leaf damage will give them a weird and profound resonance. Vignau-Wilberg describes as a novelty in Archetypa “the repeated presentation of the symbiosis between plants and insects.”33 This is an obvious reference to the many instances in which insects are depicted hovering over or resting on a blossom or a leaf. But “symbiosis” can at best be a euphemism when applied to such interactions as the one in II.2 described above, and it may also be an anachonism if it is intended to reflect an interpretation made by Hoefnagel’s contemporaries. Her comment only reminds the modern reader that Hoefnagel’s parasites and predators are easier to identify than his symbionts because, so far as we know, insect pollination wasn’t part of seventeenth-century Netherlandish ethnobotany or ethnoentomology.34 How much did Hoefnagel and his contemporaries understand about the insect role in plant sex—beyond the perception that butterflies seemed to sip nectar and that bees carried pollen home and made honey? Yet even this hypothetical folk perception is rendered inappropriate or beside the point as soon as we take into account a recurrent and strange motif in Archetypa. To consider its recurrence before turning to its strangeness, we find that on almost every page the illustrations are parenthesized by two plants, one at each end, whose stems curve decoratively down the side of the page (Figure 6). With few exceptions, each of these stems is encircled by a sconcelike bracket that seems attached to or cut off by the border of the page— a device that occasionally converts the border to the stenographic signifier of a supporting wall. In most cases, the head of a screw or nail appears on the bracket, suggesting that the stalk is pinned.35 Above the bracket, the upper part of each plant—stem, leaves, and blossom—curves gracefully inward toward the center of the page; some plants with larger blossoms droop downward.36 In several examples, the opposing blossoms are turned toward the observer in such a way as to flash their pistils and stamens. The florid equivalents of Renaissance elbows in group portraits, they anticipate the competitive self-display of the blossoms crowded into a Bosschaert or van den Berghe roemer.37 Their incipient performative gestures are especially prominent where large blossoms are joined to short stems, an imbalance that renders the need for bracket supports conspicuous.

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figure 6. Joris Hoefnagel, “Flos Cinis.” From Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592), Part I, pl. 8.

The brackets perform a theatrical function: they support the plants and enable them to put their blossoms on display. But they may also serve another purpose, and it’s here that the element of strangeness enters in. Although the stems on a few pages extend down “below” the bottom of the page, most of them stop short or are cut off before reaching the bottom. Some images depict the whole stem with its root; the plant appears to have been pulled out of the ground.38 In other images, what seems to be cut off is not the plant but the drawing; the bottom of the stem is left open or neatly terminated by a line that designates the graphic closure of the illustration and thus contributes a visual et cetera to the page design.39 In still other cases, it seems to be the plant rather than its image that has been cut, as if sliced or broken off from its roots.40 If the plants in the first and third categories were not supported by brackets, they would fall on their faces. This may be witty, but why is it strange? It’s strange to us because Hoefnagel couples putatively nectarseeking insects with plants that appear to have been cut or pulled up.41

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How can images of insects flirting with flora in a literal state of nature morte represent symbiotic activity? But who among the artist’s contemporaries would have been puzzled by this or even have noticed it? At least one group seems to have noticed it: the flower painters, whose representations of cut flowers in vases in domestic interiors include swarms of attendant insects acting comme chez eux—as if they were out of doors disporting themselves in nature vive. I’ve remarked that the bouquets in still life are presented to the observer as if nae t’leven. The mimetic pretext of occasion consists of a scenario in which flowers freshly cut and in their prime have been placed in a vase and copied by the painter. To vary the thought Schama attributes to Claudel, they appear to have been cut as well as “caught . . . at their toppunt: the zenith before the fall; the moment of perfect ripeness before decay.”42 Perhaps one reason insects abound in flower paintings—apart from their sheer decorative function—is to perpetuate “the moment of perfect ripeness” and make viewers forget the flowers have been severed from life. Perhaps, that is, flower pieces conventionally suggest the continuing life, freshness, fragrance, and attractiveness of their dead bouquets by the obvious metaphoric device of depicting bees, butterflies, and other insects hanging about as they do in fields and gardens. The leaves still have enough life and juice in them to attract both thirsty gatherers and hungry hunters. This is one way to signal likeness to “nature”: it is as if the flowers were still alive and growing in their native soil. But how unnatural, how counterfactual and antimimetic, how very strange, this convention is, especially when the still-life setting is indoors. Hoefnagel’s frequent delineation of cut and uprooted flowers reminds us that violence has been imposed in the interest of separating the flowers from “nature” and posing them as art. One image in particular may serve as a comment on their predicament in Archetypa (Figure 7). At the top and center of the fourth plate in Part II hangs a large tarantula, its rear legs shackled by brackets on either side of the plate’s printed title, which (not surprisingly) is Tarantula, its other legs folded about its body in a delicate dancerly pattern. The brackets are identical to those that support the plants and have a similar display function: they serve as props for the arachnoid trapeze artist

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figure 7. Joris Hoefnagel, “Tarantula.” From Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592), Part II, pl. 4.

to swing from as he performs his aerial routine. They also serve as restraints that keep the monster securely confined. Yet perhaps the spider isn’t swinging but hanging; perhaps it isn’t displaying itself but being displayed; perhaps, that is, the spider—like the plants—is dead. Dead spiders and flowers are shackled into their poses and made to perform. The tarantula presents an iconographic tease. How are its image and superscribed name related to the inscription at the bottom of the page? “Virtutem terribilium tuorum dicent generationes.” This syncopates three verses of Psalm 145: in the Geneva Bible, “generations shall declare thy fearful acts,” or “terrible powers.” But it oddly leaves out the more positive middle verse: “I wil meditate of the beautie of thy glorious maiestie, & thy wonderful workes.” Are we being invited to substitute the titular tarantula for the wrathful Old Testament God? Such a demonic contestation might induce generationes to invoke God’s wrath with ever more fervor. The image of a dead monster hanging on display may then be the answer to their prayer. These possibil-

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ities are crossed by another more fleeting phantasm: the spider’s position and form vaguely echo those of the terrifying Christ in the Last Judgment. Hoefnagel’s message, then, is that the posing is imposed, and I take the logic of this lexical quibble seriously enough to extract a general observation from the message: posing is always imposed by acts of subtle violence that attend the transformation of life into the truthiness of art. Flowers don’t come willingly to their pose. They don’t have agency, and they wouldn’t come running to their final (re)pose even if their roots would let them. Although still-life painters may conceal the effects of this violence within the opacity or translucency (or muddy transparency) of containers, Hoefnagel’s images conceal nothing. They show us what still life will have repressed in order to attain to the Nachleben—the afterlife in art—of its generic scenario, the pretext of floral occasion.

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Conclusion: Allegorical Capture and Interpretive Release

My argument in the preceding pages began with the proposition that the vanitas, with its claim to truthiness, is the McGuffin of still life. Although it initially seems central to the meaning of the image, it may turn out to be either less important or else a target of critique. To repeat and vary the Eliot formulation I began with, the vanitas is like “a bit of nice meat” thrown by a burglar to distract “the house-dog” of the mind while the picture “does its work upon him.” If still life artists throw observers the bone of iconography by representing their subjects as the victims of allegorical capture, they often seem to do so in order to stage the observer’s release from the vanitas. Under the cover of vanitas they send messages about rapacitas. From Hoefnagel to the still-life traditions his work influenced, there is a discernible if understated discourse of aggressive predation that is, at least to me, more uncanny and strange than you find in the consolations of iconography. As I’ve been suggesting, I think it possible for still life to be vanitized without being sanitized. Its minute mischief makers remind me of the fairytale world in which wooden soldiers, nutcrackers, and other small, inanimate objects come alive after dark, take over the premises, and sometimes behave appallingly while their young owners—their weak masters—sleep. In pop culture, which makes terrors of trifles, this has coarsened into such phenomena as the Chucky nightmare. But before Chucky took it over the top, fantasies of things that go bump in the night were always recognizable diminutions and displacements of more troubling terrors: fear of mortality, of vulnerability and powerlessness; fear of the breakdown of order, 90

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the loss of control, the transgression of boundaries, the inversion of hierarchy; fear of the desire for what is forbidden; fear of the desire for release from the vanitas into the terror of the real. These overlapping fears fuzzily converge in the traditional vanitas reading. But their resonance is damped down. ALL the flowers of the spring Meet to perfume our burying; These have but their growing prime, And man does flourish but his time: Survey our progress from our birth— We are set, we grow, we turn to earth. Courts adieu, and all delights, All bewitching appetites! Sweetest breath and clearest eye Like perfumes go out and die; And consequently this is done As shadows wait upon the sun.1

Iconographers claim to reproduce the express intentions of a past era by switching from the literal to the symbolic track. But they often fall asleep at the switch and fail to illuminate the darker corners of still life. These corners are already dimly aglow with the radiance of tiny terrorists who call attention to themselves as predatory performers. They compete with “all the flowers of the spring” by slowly chewing them to bits. “And consequently,” as they silently chomp away under allegory’s protective cover, they throw large shadows against the wall of sleep. “All the flowers of the spring / Meet to perfume our burying.” A predictable dash of truthiness. Confined by allegory, the beautiful changes into the stink of death—into a congregation of moribund flowers whose captive fragrance withers into grief. But with the repetition of “perfumes” in line 10, flowers and fragrance put up resistance. They briefly revive in a simile attendant on “sweetest breath and clearest eye,” and here it isn’t the shortness of life they celebrate but its precious sweetness and beauty. “Like perfumes”: the simile resists the assault of iconography and fights to liberate the breath and eye to be themselves. “And consequently” they “go out and

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die.” Their sweetness vanishes into the gloom cast by the apocalyptic play on “shadows” that “wait upon the sun.” The shadows serve the sun. They dutifully attend its rising. They patiently wait for it, and for its galaxy, and for all moribund galaxies, to wilt and die. This essay has been about such moments of allegorical capture and interpretive release, about such moments of sweetness and assault and resistance and surrender, and about such moments of terror.

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Epigraph Sources

1. Hyperreality and Truthiness Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 51. 2. Reading Blake’s “The SICK ROSE” William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, 1789–1794, introduction and commentary by Geoffrey Keynes (New York: Orion Press, 1967), plate 39. 4. Vanitas: The McGuffin of Still Life John Webster, The Devil’s Law Case, 5.4.128–29. Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1957), 10. 5. Still Life, Trade, and Truthiness Julie Berger Hochstrasser, “Feasting the Eye: Painting and Reality in the Seventeenth-century ‘Bancketje,’ ” in Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands, 1550-1720, ed. Alan Chong, Wouter Kloek, et al. (Zwolle: Waanders, 1999), 77. 6. The Pretext of Occasion: Floris van Dijck’s “Laid Table with Cheese and Fruit,” c.1615 Celeste Brusati, “Natural Artifice and Material Values in Dutch Still Life,” in Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, ed. Wayne Franits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 144. 93

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Epigraph Sources

7. Nature Mourant: The Fictiveness of Dutch Realism Gillian Riley, The Dutch Table: Gastronomy in the Golden Age of the Netherlands (San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1994), 14. 8. The Embarrassment of Niches: Christoffel van den Berghe’s “Vase of Flowers in a Stone Niche,” 1617 Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 195. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 104. 9. Nature Mourant: Bosschaert’s Leaves, Merian’s Caterpillars Steven Connor, “The Butterfly, the Ant, and Other Natural Mimics,” The Independent (London), January 4, 2008, p.3. 10. “Small-scale Violence” Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 265, quoting from De Pamfletten van den Tulpenwindhadel 1636–1637, ed. E. H. Krelage (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1942). NGA: http://www.nga.gov/kids/DTP6stillife.pdf. Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 53.

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Notes

Prologue 1. See the online Encyclopedia Britannica: http://www.britannica.com/eb/ article-9041997/iconography. 2. See ibid. at http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9074816/vanitas. 3. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). 4. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958). 5. For a concise but more detailed profile of the Weber thesis, see Roger Tawney’s introduction, ibid., 2–3. 6. In French, this is l’embarras de richesse or l’embarras de choix, having more wealth or choices than you know what to do with. Embarrasser is literally “to bar, to put up a barrier,” to block or impede. The predicament of riches is having too much and feeling bad or guilty about it. And in the Netherlands Schama writes about, the sense of the predicament is exacerbated by the constant warnings of the church predikants. 7. See esp. Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, 334–38, 343, and 370–71. Schama’s thesis and book have been sharply criticized by Jonathan Israel in “Driven to Greatness,” Times Literary Supplement, November 5, 1999, pp. 3–4, and by J. L. Price in “The Dangers of Unscientific History: Schama and the Dutch Seventeenth-Century,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 104 (1989): 39–42. See also the objections raised in David Freedberg’s less savage review, “The Bosom of History,” in The New Republic, December 6, 1999, pp. 44–46, 48–51.

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Notes to Pages 2–9

8. Simon Schama, “Perishable Commodities: Dutch Still-Life Painting and the ‘Empire of Things,’” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 478–88. 9. Ken Mogg, http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin/faqs_c.html 10. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England (1933; rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 151.

1. Hyperreality and Truthiness 1. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 7. 2. Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 45. 3. Philips Angel, Praise of Painting, trans. Michael Hoyle, Simiolus 24, no. 2–3 (1996): 227–58, esp. 243–48. 4. Angel’s sense of realism is complex in its articulate, critical awareness of what it takes to produce the effect of the real. See, e.g., Paul Taylor’s illuminating remarks on Angel in “The Concept of Houding in Dutch Art Theory,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 219–20. 5. Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, television program, October 17, 2005. 6. Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, 2.3.1–6. On this general theme, see my Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare, introd. Peter Erickson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 11, 126, 288–90.

2. Reading Blake’s “The SICK ROSE” 1. Compare “thou art ill,” “you are ill,” “you are sick,” and the contemporary idiom “you’re sick.” 2. David V. Erdman, ed., The Illuminated Blake (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1974), 81. 3. See, e.g., ibid., and Geoffrey Keynes’s comment on plate 39 in his edition, William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, 1789–1794 (New York: Orion Press, 1967). Resurrection is traditionally figured by the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into a butterfly. Blake’s three female figures represent the stages of metamorphosis in descending order: the caterpillar at top, the cocoon on the middle branch, the butterfly emerging from the fallen rose. But of course this sequence is easy to read in reverse, since the butterfly figure is dominated or blocked by the worm, and the compositional vectors drive the eye up the stalk and around to the caterpillar/woman.

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Notes to Pages 9–11

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For seventeenth-century studies of the metamorphosis of caterpillars and other insects, see Maria Sibylla Merian, Flowers, Butterflies and Insects: All 154 Engravings from “Erucarum Ortus” (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1991); and Johannes Goedaert, Metamorphosis et historia naturalis insectorum (Middleburg, 1662?). See also Sam Segal, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries, trans. Ruth Koenig (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1990), 33 and 23–40 passim. 4. For a trenchant critique of iconography, see Hubert Damisch, “Six Notes in the Margin of Meyer Schapiro’s Words and Pictures,” trans. Frances Keene, Social Research 45, no. 1 (1978): 15–35. 5. William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, II.8, in Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1948), 222. 6. In my view, Urizen is also Milton’s version of Milton’s God. See my “Paradise Lost Evolving, Books I–VI: Toward a New View of the Poem as the Speaker’s Experience,” Centennial Review 11 (1967): 483–531; rpt. in Berger, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. and introd. John P. Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 324–69.

3. Ethics Versus Technics in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life 1. John Keats, Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 1817. 2. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964). The quote in the next sentence is from p. 2 of

Fletcher’s book. 3. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 8, 18, 19, 23. 4. Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Mythologies, selected and translated by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 114. 5. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 13. 6. Christopher Wood, “ ‘Curious Pictures’ and the Art of Description,” Word & Image 11, no. 4 (October-December 1995): 350–51. Ernst Gombrich expressed a similar insight: “Every painted still life has the vanitas motif ‘built in’ as it were, for those who want to look for it. The pleasures it stimulates are not real, they are mere illusion. Try and grasp the luscious fruit or the tempting beaker and you will hit against a hard cold panel” (“Tradition and Expression in Western Still-life,” Burlington Magazine 103 [1961]: 180).

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Notes to Pages 13–16

7. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (1977; rpt. London: Verso Books, 1985), 175.

4. Vanitas: The McGuffin of Still Life 1. See Charles Sterling, Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, trans. James Emmons, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 63–64. 2. Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996). 3. Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592): Natur, Dichtung und Wissenschaft in der Kunst um 1600 (Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 1994). pt. 2, pl. 2, p.127. 4. Erasmus, Adagia (1559), p. 1058, 5.1.83. 5. Vignau-Wilberg, Archetypa, 66. “Mirabar, celerem fugitiva aetate rapinam et dum nascuntur, consenuisse Rosas” (attributed to Ausonius). 6. Sam Segal, A Prosperous Past : The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands, 1600–1700, ed. William B. Jordan. trans. P. M. van Tongeren (The Hague : SDU Publishers, 1988), 108; Sam Segal, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries, trans. Ruth Koenig (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1990), 55. See also p. 104 in the former and pp. 53 and 190 in the latter. Segal notes the connection of nibbled leaves with roses and cites dramatic examples in Bosschaert’s three paintings of bouquets in arched windows. 7. Sam Segal, in A Selection of Dutch and Flemish Seventeenth-Century Paintings (New York: Hoogsteder-Naumann, 1983), 91. For a set of more cautious and strategically concessive iconographic readings, see the essays prefixed to the catalogue Eddy de Jongh et al. eds., Still-Life in the Age of Rembrandt (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1982). 8. See http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/butterfly/anatomy/Caterpillar.shtml. 9. See ‘The Parable of the Caterpillar” on the website http:// www.caterpillar.org.uk. 10. Eddy de Jongh, “The Interpretation of Still-Life Paintings: Possibilities and Limits,” Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting, trans. Michael Hoyle (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 1995), 143 and 130–48 passim. 11. Ibid., 132–34. The question raised by the translated term, deeper, in this context is whether the statement is to be taken as descriptive or as evaluative. By “deeper,” does the author simply mean “hidden beneath the surface” or does he mean “better, more profound”?

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Notes to Pages 16–21

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12. Ibid., 19. 13. Ibid., 132, 137. 14. Ibid., 143. 15. Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 43–76. 16. Ibid., 47, 37–38, 76. The flowers are rose, lily, tulip, sunflower, violet, peony, corn, passionflower, carnation, columbine, poppy, and crown imperial. The insects are flies, butterflies, and ants. Curiously, Taylor doesn’t mention the hollyhock, which is often portrayed in still life and which, according to a small industry devoted to flower symbolism on Google (66,100 hits at my last visit), has been invested with such meanings as fecundity and ambition. 17. Ibid., 52. 18. Ibid., 27. 19. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2002), 89–90. 20. Goldgar, Tulipmania, 92–93, 254–56, 260. Goldgar’s inquiry focuses on Amsterdam, Enkhuizen, and Haarlem. 21. Ibid., 286. 22. Ibid., 293, 304. 23. Ibid., 266–67. 24. Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 262.

5. Still Life, Trade, and Truthiness 1. Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1-3. 2. Ibid., 9, 274. 3. Ibid., 9. 4. Ibid., 271. 5. Ibid., 191–93. For a study of the disruptive practices of the Dutch in the New World, see Donna Merwick, The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch-Amerindian Encounters in New Netherland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 6. Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 105. 7. Maurice Bloch, “Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation; or, Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?” European Journal of Sociology 15 (1974): 71. 8. “The Disconnection Between Power and Rank as a Process: An outline of the Development of Kingdoms in Central Madagascar,” Archives européennes de sociologie 18 (1977): 128, 138–39.

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Notes to Pages 21–27

9. Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 258–60. See Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen 24, no. 6 (1983) : 18–36. 10. Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 255. 11. Ibid., 270. 12. T. S. Eliot mentions “the difficulty caused by the author’s having left out something which the reader is used to finding; so that the reader, bewildered, gropes about for what is absent, and puzzles his head for a kind of ‘meaning’ which is not there, and is not meant to be there” (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England [1933; rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1948], 151). Eliot could be ascribing an intentional strategy of exclusion to the author: “the author leaves something out so that the reader will notice the exclusion”—that is, leaves it out in a way that cues the reader to notice it. I think that would be a misconstrual of Eliot’s syntax. But it is a correct reading of what I mean by conspicuous exclusion. For me, it was originally a spin-off from the trope of praeteritio, or occupatio, “bringing up something by saying you won’t bring it up.” On conspicuous exclusion in Vermeer, see my Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. and introd. John P. Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 441–509. See also the passages indexed in my The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) and Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

6. The Pretext of Occasion: Floris van Dijck’s Laid Table with Cheese and Fruit, c. 1615 1. For a lively and lyrical description of this exhibit, see Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemons (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 51–52. 2. I noticed also that the plinth supporting the vase was carefully positioned behind the security line inscribed on the floor, to keep viewers from getting too close to the precious artifacts. The real bouquet was accorded the sanctity and safety of a work of art. 3. Alan Chong, Wouter Kloek, et al., eds. Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands, 1550–1720 (Zwolle: Waanders, 1999), 42. Abbreviated SLP in future references. 4. Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 28–29. Hochstrasser is describing a different painting, but the tablecloth is similar in quality if not identical in pattern.

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Notes to Pages 27–34

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5. I resist giving any credence to the rumors bruited about the Internet that cheese was (is?) a Christological symbol. See, e.g., the following sites: http://halokitty7.blogspot.com/2007/09/cheeseus-christ.html and http://members.aol.com/Kkfryer/jesus.htm. 6. Catalogue entry, SLP, 131. For other examples of objects on the edge, see catalogue numbers 9, 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 42, 46, 50, 59, 62, and 67. 7. Wouter Kloek, “The Magic of Still Life,” SLP, 42. 8. Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemons, 40. 9. Kloek, “The Magic of Still Life,” SLP, 44, my italics. 10. On the elevated viewpoint, see Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 23. 11. SLP, 131. 12. On the right: from the grapes through the roemer and knife. On the left: from the pear through the roll to the melon. A third vector arcs up from the black plate through the dish of olives. 13. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 10–11. 14. “The crisp square creases of the neatly pressed tablecloth, aligned fastidiously to the picture’s lower edge, contribute to the sense of order and visually stabilize the layout, even as the fabric itself constitutes another local commodity, celebrating the thriving textile industry in Haarlem” (Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 24). 15. Among the many shrewd and interesting observations made by the authors of the catalogue entry in SLP is the following comment on the representation of vanitas through temporal indications: “The apple peel . . . does not come from the missing half of the fruit. Van Dijck has cleverly used the apple and the peel to indicate time: the peel is already turning brown while the apple has obviously just been cut in half since no sign of discoloration appears on the cut surface” (SLP, 131). 16. Alan Chong, “Contained under the Name of Still Life: The Associations of Still-Life Painting,” SLP, 26. 17. Sam Segal, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries, trans. Ruth Koenig (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1990), 65. 18. In many pronkstilleven by de Heem, de Ring, and others, compositional vectors produce purely formal impressions of tilting and sliding avalanches of food. 19. Charles Sterling, Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, trans. James Emmons, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 63. 20. Ibid., 63–64. 21. Ibid, 72. The clause “it is something that has fallen prey to duration” must have been added for emphasis. It is not in Claudel’s text.

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Notes to Pages 36–40

7. Nature Mourant: The Fictiveness of Dutch Realism 1. Wouter Kloek, “The Magic of Still Life,” SLP, 42. 2. It may also be motivated by an interest in celebrating the means, economy, wealth, abundance, domestic comfort, and order that are productive of and culminate in the table scene. 3. Hal Foster, “The Art of Fetishism: Notes on Dutch Still Life,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 260, 258, my italics. 4. For a much more complex and satisfactory analysis of pronk still life, see Hochstrasser’s commentary on de Heem’s 1641 Grand Still Life with Moor and Parrots in her Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 271–75. 5. Mariët Westermann, “‘Costly and Curious, Full of pleasure and home contentment’: Making Home in the Dutch Republic,” in Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt, ed. Mariët Westermann (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000), 17. 6. Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 52–53. 7. Reindert Falkenberg, “Matters of Taste: Pieter Aertsen’s Market Scenes, Eating Habits, and Pictorial Rhetoric in the Sixteenth Century,” in The Object as Subject: Studies in the Interpretation of Still Life, ed. Anne W. Lowenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 23. 8. Richard Wilbur, “Cigales,” in The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1947), 1. 9. Julie Hochstrasser, “Feasting the Eye ,” SLP, 81.

8. The Embarrassment of Niches: Christoffel van den Berghe’s Vase of Flowers in a Stone Niche, 1617 1. Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 96. 2. Richard Leppert, Art and the Committed Eye (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 51. See, more generally, his excellent comments on Ruysch, 50–52. 3. Beatrijs Brenninkmeijer–de Rooij, Roots of Seventeenth-century Flower Painting: Miniatures, Plant Books, Paintings, ed. Rudi Ekkart (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 1996), 50–51. Segal finds little evidence and therefore expresses doubt “that people actually placed vases of flowers in their houses” (Sam Segal, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries, trans. Ruth Koenig [The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1990], 65).

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Notes to Pages 40–45

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4. Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 116–18. 5. Elizabeth Alice Honig, “Making Sense of Things: On the Motives of Dutch Still Life,” Res 34 (Autumn 1998): 167–83. I’m deeply indebted to this brilliant essay for guiding me toward the basic concepts underlying the present study. 6. Ibid., 180. 7. Goldgar, Tulipmania, 96–97. On the idea of still life as the portrayal of collections or collectibles, Goldgar cites not only Honig, “Making Sense of Things,” 176ff., but also Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 107–8, 128–29, and Celeste Brusati, “Natural Artifice and Material Values in Dutch Still Life,” in Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, ed. Wayne Franits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 151. 8. SLP, 124. 9. See http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/aria/aria_assets/SK-A799?lang=en&context_space=&context_id=. 10. SLP, 124. 11. As the SLP catalogue entry suggests (SLP, 124), the large size of the butterfly hovering darkly at lower left gives it a repoussoir function that has the effect of diminishing the relative size of the roemer in a manner that contributes to the effect of off-balance tilt. The butterfly’s metamorphic partner, the caterpillar, creeps up on the roemer. Although the three leaves at the rim of the roemer are touched by a brownish hue, the bouquet as a whole is undamaged. Its very iconicity renders questionable the attribute applied to it by the catalogue entry: “vulnerable.” 12. On a lemon in Willem Kalf’s 1653 Drinking Horn with a Lobster on a Table (SLP , plate 48), and on a crab in Adriaen van Utrecht’s A Festive Meal (SLP, plate 42). Judging from the number of pronk still-life plates containing lobsters in Sam Segal, A Prosperous Past : The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands, 1600–1700, ed. William B. Jordan. trans. P. M. van Tongeren (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1988), lobsters seem associated with more aristocratic pretexts of occasion: see the plates on pp.142, 143, 146, 150, 151, 155, 158, 159, 162, 170, 175. 13. Erika Langmuir, Pocket Guides: Still Life (London: National Gallery Company, 2001), 46–48. This elegantly written essay is crammed with passages of sharp observation and cogent conceptualization.

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Notes to Pages 47–50

9. Nature Mourant: Bosschaert’s Leaves, Merian’s Caterpillars 1. Roland Barthes, “The World as Object,” in Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France, ed. Norman Bryson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 107–8, 106–15. 2. Simon Schama, “Perishable Commodities: Dutch Still-Life Painting and the ‘Empire of Things,’” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 482. 3. Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 16. 4. Ibid. “Hyper-realism” (ibid., 137) was first applied to Bosschaert by Laurens J. Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty, trans. A. M. Bruin-Cousins (Leighon-Sea: F. Lewis, 1960), 20. Although Umberto Eco’s use of the term is motivated by an entirely different set of concerns and objects (see his Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver [San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986], 7 ), his sense of the term would accommodate Bol’s and Taylor’s deployment of it. 5. The paintings are in London (private collection), Amsterdam, The Hague, and Cologne. 6. Ambroius Bosschaert, Vase of Roses, copper, 27.5 x 23 cm, signed in monogram. Private Collection, USA. Formerly with Johnny Van Haeften, London. 7. Beatrijs Brenninkmeijer–de Rooij, Ben Broos, Fred G. Meijer, and Peter van der Ploeg, Boeketten uit de Gouden Eeuw: Mauritshuis in Bloei / Bouquets from the Golden Age: The Mauritshuis in Bloom, 2nd ed. (Zwolle: Waanders, 1992), 66. The Eyewitness Amsterdam guidebook claims that “the flies buzzing around remind us of mortality,” but the flies remind me chiefly of flies, of which there is no more than one in this painting (Robin Lascoe, Christopher Catling, et al., Eyewitness Travel: Amsterdam [London: Dorling Kindersley, 2007], 188). The only other insect, in addition to the two caterpillars, is a damselfly or dragonfly at the upper right. 8. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/paintingflowers/paintings/ flowers_glass_bosschaert.shtml. 9. Ibid. 10. On Merian, see the excellent recent study by Kim Todd, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2007). For a stimulating appreciation of Merian and her importance, see David Freedberg, “Science, Commerce, and Art: Neglected Topics at the Junction of History and Art History,” Art in History / History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture,

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Notes to Pages 50–56

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ed. Freedberg and Jan de Vries (Santa Monica, Calif.: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1991), 377–427, esp. 377–87. 11. Maria Sibylla Merian, Flowers, Butterflies and Insects: All 154 Engravings from “Erucarum Ortus” (New York: Dover Publications, 1991). Black-and-white plates without text from Erucarum ortus: alimentum et paradosa metamorphosi (1717), the Latin translation of the Dutch version, Der rupsen begin, voedgel en wonderbaare vorandering (Amsterdam, 1683–1717), which in turn was expanded from the original two-volume German book, Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumen-nahrung, 2 vols. (Nuremberg, 1679–1683)—“Of caterpillars the wonderful transformation and strange plant food.” The full title of the Latin edition is” “Erucarum ortus, alimentum et paradoxa metamorphosis:  In qua origo, pabulum, transformatio . . . tempus, locus et proprietates erucarum, vermium, papilionum, phalaenarum, muscarum, aliorumque hujusmodi exsanguium animalculorum exhibentur” (Amsteldami :  apud Joannem Oosterwyk,  1717). 12. See Erucarum Ortus, plates 9, 10, 35, 66, 67, 147, and 149. 13. See ibid., plates 77, 96, 121, 122, 128, 132, 134, 138, and 139. 14. Maria Sibylla Merian, New Book of Flowers, introd. Melanie Klier (Munich: Prestel, 2003). See Neues Blumen-Buch, allen kunstverständigen Liebhabern zu Lust, Nutz und Dienst, mit Fleiss verfertiget (Nürnberg: J. A. Graffen, 1680; rpt. Berlin,  F. A. Herbig,  1968). 15. See http://au.encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_781540862/Merian_ Maria_Sibylla.html 16. Todd, Chrysalis, 74–75.

10. “Small-scale Violence” 1. Sam Segal, in A Selection of Dutch and Flemish Seventeenth-Century Paintings (New York: Hoogsteder-Naumann, 1983), 91. For a set of more cautious and strategically concessive iconographic readings, see the essays prefixed to Eddy de Jongh et al., eds., Still-Life in the Age of Rembrandt (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1982). 2. See caterpillar in the OED, sense 2. 3. Geoffrey Keynes, commentary in William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, 1789–1794 (New York: Orion Press, 1967), following plate 39. Keynes’s comment seems to have been borrowed from S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (1965; rpt. Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 1979), 74–75. 4. Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 146.

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Notes to Pages 56–59

5. Alan Chong, “Contained under the Name of Still Life,” SLP, 26–28. 6. The quoted phrase is from Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 146. 7. SLP, plate 6, 121. 8. Segal notes that cricket and grasshopper were often confused and warns that, although the latter is also associated with the voracious locust, it isn’t always interpreted in malo (Sam Segal, A Prosperous Past : The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands, 1600–1700, ed. William B. Jordan. trans. P. M. van Tongeren [The Hague : SDU Publishers, 1988], 101). Saverij’s examples resemble the grasshoppers in Hoefnagel’s Archetypa more closely than the crickets. Compare the grasshoppers in Archetypa (Part I, plate 4; Part II, plate 10; Part IV, plate 10) with the crickets (Part I, plate 12; Part II, plate 12). 9. The authors of the entry in the excellent volume Still Lifes: Techniques and Style, ed. Arie Wallert (Zwolle: Waanders, 1999), attribute the flatness to mistakes in painting combined with effects of aging, but their concern with “convincing spatial illusion” isn’t tempered by attention to the organizing schema (54–55). 10. For a thorough analysis and description of van der Ast’s compositions, see Segal’s commentary in Sam Segal, Masters of Middelburg: Exhibition in the Honor of Laurens J. Bol, ed. Noortje Bakker, Ingvar Bergström, Guido Jansen, Simon H. Levie and Sam Segal (Amsterdam: K. & V. Waterman, 1984), 48–60. See also Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 146–49. 11. From catalogue entry 4 in Wallert, ed., Still Lifes: Techniques and Style, 53. 12. On the observer shuttle, see Berger, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 51, 57. 13. Wallert, ed., Still Lifes: Techniques and Style, 53, 55. 14. In van der Ast’s Flowers and Shells, plate 23 in the SLP catalogue, a spider crawls along the edge of the table toward a dead bee, and a caterpillar with its hairs standing on end cranes up toward the flowers in the horn-shaped shell. See also the aggressive posture of the butterfly attacking a cut rose in the same painter’s Fruit in a Basket with Two Wan-Li Dishes, plate 35 in Sam Segal, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries, trans. Ruth Koenig (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1990), 87 and 190–91. A similar spider in the foreground of van der Ast’s 1623 flower piece in the Ashmolean is described by Taylor as “rather macabre” (Dutch Flower Painting, 148). 15. Ingvar Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Christina Hedström and Gerald Taylor (1956; rpt. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1983), 73 16. See plate 6 in Wallert, ed., Still Lifes: Techniques and Style. 17. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 107.

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Notes to Pages 61–65

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18. Kim Todd, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2007), 35. 19. This effect resembles the one produced by Rembrandt when he makes his sitters look as if they have been holding the pose for a long period of time. 20. In the Louvre, this is descriptively entitled: “Le nid de pinsons, poissons, reptiles et ecureuil mort au milieu de plantes et d’arbres” (“The nest of finches, fish, reptiles, and dead squirrels amid plants and trees”). 21. Todd, Chrysalis, 35.

11. The Darker Spirit: Van Huysum’s Heaps 1. Sam Segal, with Mariël Evans and Joris Dik, The Temptations of Flora: Jan van Huysum, 1682–1749, trans. Beverley Jackson, David McKay, Lynne Richards, and John Rudge (Zwolle: Waanders, 2007). Careful analyses and helpful inventories of each painting’s contents make this beautifully produced volume invaluable. 2. Ibid., F 7, 21, 22, 24, 25. 3. Ibid., F 1, 2, 4, 32, 33. 4. “Buoyant stems”: this fine descriptor is borrowed from ibid., 145. 5. For other examples of wind-blown dancers in ibid., see F 4, 5, 10–17, 23, 28, 29. 30, 33, 37, 38. 6. Ibid., F.7, 8, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36. 7. Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 22. This is F 17 in Segal et al., The Temptations of Flora; see the discussion on pp. 202–5. For a note on the source of van Huysum’s aristocratic and arcadian settings, see Arie Wallert, ed., Still Lifes: Techniques and Style (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1999), 108–9. 8. Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 24. 9. This particular heap has the shape described in the OED definition of heap: “A collection of things lying one upon another so as to form an elevated mass often roughly conical in form.” 10. Segal et al., The Temptations of Flora, F 7, 8, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 34, 35, 36, 40. 11. Ibid., 202, my emphasis. 12. Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 22–24. 13. Segal et al., The Temptations of Flora, 202. 14. On conspicuous exclusion, see above Chapter 5 and footnote 12. 15. Quoted, with some changes, from my Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, introd. John P. Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 142.

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Notes to Pages 66–71

16. Van Huysum’s older contemporary Willem van Aelst produced similar effects of force (kracht) with animated diagonal bursts of color (sometimes brilliant, sometimes subdued) that struggle against a backdraft pulling them into the semi-darkness behind them. 17. Van Huysum’s attachment to formal patterns shaped like the letters C, S, and Z is well documented by Segal et al. in the catalogue entries of The Temptations of Flora. See 202–3 for comments on F 17. 18. For a seascape with a similar structural organization, see Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 1633, in the Gardner Museum in Boston. 19. See Segal et al.’s inventory of insects in The Temptations of Flora, 205. 20. Ibid., 145. 21. By this I mean that they have been painted to give this impression: they conspicuously display the “copied-from-books” effect.

12. Posies: The Bouquet as Pretext of Occasion 1. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 104—5, my italics. 2. On this topic, see Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 95–96. 3. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked. For a critique of Bryson, see Elizabeth Alice Honig, “Making Sense of Things: On the Motives of Dutch Still Life,” Res 34 (Autumn 1998): 167–83. See also the more extensive and detailed comments in her review of Looking at the Overlooked, “Re-Viewing Still Life with Norman Bryson,” Theoretische Geschiedenis 20 (1993): 41–48. 4. An example of the latter is: “Bosschaert’s large flower vase of 1609 . . . might be entitled an anthology, a florilegium in oils” (Laurens J. Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty, trans. A.M. Bruin-Cousins [Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis, 1960], 19). 5. Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 1600–1720 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 82. On mimetic idealism, see Berger, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 11. 6. Quoted in Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 83. Taylor translates from the 1604 Haarlem edition of van Mander’s Het Schilder-Boeck, fol. 191r. 7. Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting, 83. 8. Ibid., 84. 9. SLP, 129. 10. Alan Chong, “Contained under the Name of Still Life,” SLP , 26. 11. Ibid. In Jan Brueghel’s letter to his patron, Cardinal Borromeo, from which Chong quotes, the painter adds that the bouquet he is painting for him will contain “more than a hundred flowers in natural size of which the great

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part are rare and choice. The ordinary flowers are lilies, roses, violets and carnations; the others are unusual and have never yet been seen in this country” (quoted by Ingvar Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Christina Hedström and Gerald Taylor [1956; rpt. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1983], 50). That is a big bouquet. For a balanced view of the evidence that has led scholars to question the veracity of Brueghel’s comments on his method, see Beatrijs Brenninkmeyer–De Rooij, “Zeldzame bloemen ‘Fatta tutti del naturel’ door Jan Brueghel I,” Oud Holland 104 (1990): 218–55, translated in Beatrijs Brenninkmeijer–de Rooij, Roots of Seventeenth-century Flower Painting: Miniatures, Plant Books, Paintings, ed. Rudi Ekkart (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 1996), 47–83. Claudia Swan nicely characterizes the situation in describing Brueghel’s 1608 Large Flower Pot as “a wildly unrealistic but highly naturalistic assemblage. These flowers could never be found together in life as they are in paint . . . ; moreover it would take a more-thangifted florist to pack so many tender stems into a single vessel” (Swan, The Clutius Botanical Watercolors: Paints and Flowers of the Renaissance [New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998], 14). 12. Sam Segal, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries, trans. Ruth Koenig (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1990), 65. 13. Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting, 50, my italics. Of a 1609 flower piece by Bosschaert in Vienna, Bergström remarks that the “whole picture leaves one with the strong impression that it is made up of juxtaposed single studies of individual flowers; the effect of the composition is purely additive” (58). For a more detailed account of Bosschaert’s additive method, see Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty, 20–24. 14. Ingvar Bergström “Flower Pieces of Radial Composition in European Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Art,” in Album Amicorum J. G. van Gelder (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 22–26. 15. Marjorie Lee Hendrix, Joris Hoefnagel and the “Four Elements”: A Study in Sixteenth Century Nature Painting (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1984), 179–80. 16. Ibid., 181–82. See also Hendrix’s interesting observations on the representation of the page, 239–40. 17. Brenninkmeyer–De Rooij, Roots of Seventeenth-century Flower Painting, 73, 49, 61. Inventio is probably not what the author meant, for, as a division of rhetoric, the term refers not to the creative power of fiction making but to the finding or collecting of materials from which the fiction will be constructed. Inventio in this case would consist of the collecting of sketches or prints of individual flowers to be copied in painting the imaginary bouquet. 18. Segal, Flowers and Nature, 18.

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19. Ambrosius Bosschaert (1573–1621) and another early—and authoritative—painter, Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568–1625), emphasized different sides of the conflict, the former tending to hide and the latter to flaunt the signs and sources of artifice. Bosschaert’s was the dominant influence through the first half of the seventeenth century and beyond. Taylor notes: “Few flower painters used loose brushwork,” citing only Brueghel, van Beyeren, and Jacques de Claeuw as “the main exceptions.” He goes on to compare details in which Brueghel’s painterly interventions are contrasted to van Huysum’s erasive and graphic version of the mainstream style still in force a century after Brueghel (Dutch Flower Painting, 99). For a similar opinion, differently nuanced, see Segal, Flowers and Nature, 50. See also his excellent account of van Beyeren’s broad-brush technique in Sam Segal, A Prosperous Past : The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands, 1600–1700, ed. William B. Jordan. trans. P. M. van Tongeren (The Hague : SDU Publishers, 1988), 165–77. 20. Arie Wallert, ed., Still Lifes: Techniques and Style (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1999), 26. 21. Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty, 20. 22. For two very differently pitched accounts of Arcimboldo, see Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Arcimboldo: 1526–1593 (Milan: Skira, 2008), and Claudia Strand, Hello, Fruit Face!: The Paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Munich: Prestel, 1999). 23. Bol, The Bosschaert Dynasty, 20. 24. See Berger, Fictions of the Pose, 329–48. See also Harry Berger, Jr., Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ and Other Dutch Group Portraits (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). 25. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 105.

13. Joris Hoefnagel and the Roots of Dutch Flower Painting 1. Sam Segal, Masters of Middelburg: Exhibition in the Honor of Laurens J. Bol, ed. Noortje Bakker, Ingvar Bergström, Guido Jansen, Simon H. Levie and Sam Segal (Amsterdam: K. & .Waterman, 1984), 46. Segal notes that in Balthasar van der Ast’s earlier work insects “are usually shown resting or crawling,” whereas in the works of the 1630s they are “depicted in mid-air, . . . hovering in various positions” (48). 2. The schemes van der Ast uses to harmonize his variegated compositions have been thoroughly analyzed and described by Sam Segal. See, e.g., ibid., 48–60, and the van der Ast catalogue entries in Sam Segal, Flowers and Nature: Netherlandish Flower Painting of Four Centuries, trans. Ruth Koenig (The Hague: SDU Publishers, 1990).

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3. Ingvar Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting in the Seventeenth Century, trans. Christina Hedström and Gerald Taylor (1956; rpt. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1983), 71. Bocskay completed Mira calligraphia monumenta in 1562, but Hoefnagel didn’t provide illustrations for it until the 1590s. See the wonderful facsimile edited by Marjorie Lee Hendrix and Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Mira calligraphiae monumenta: A Sixteenth-Century Calligraphic Manuscript Inscribed by Georg Bocskay and Illuminated by Joris Hoefnagel (Malibu, Calif.: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992). Especially valuable in the introductory section is Hendrix’s stimulating essay on Hoefnagel’s contribution: “The Writing Model Book,” 31–54. 4. Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii (1592): Natur, Dichtung und Wissenschaft in der Kunst um 1600 (Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 1994). See Marjorie Lee Hendrix, Joris Hoefnagel and the “Four Elements”: A Study in Sixteenth Century Nature Painting (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1984), 177. In another comparison of van der Ast with Hoefnagel, Bergström observes that, far from shunning the depiction of deformed fruit and leaves damaged by insects, the former “seems, like Hoefnagel, rather to concentrate on such disfigurements” (Dutch Still-Life Painting, 73). Hoefnagel concentrates on predatory insects and their effects more expressly in Archetypa and Four Elements than in Mira calligraphia. Here is a partial list of the insects (and mollusks) in Archetypa, consisting only of those shown in contact with plants: butterflies, bees, moths, flies, dragonflies, damselflies, crane flies, May flies, gnats, spiders, crickets, leaf rollers, caterpillars, and snails. 5. Herbals and prayerbooks, which were aids to physical and spiritual well-being, provided two different kinds of visual sources for artists. The former consist of large prints of individual plants with identifying inscriptions, the latter of smaller and more playful marginal decorations (using flowers, plants, animals, etc.) surrounding blocks of text or central illustrations. Though Hoefnagel was an illuminator, his familiarity with the conventions of herbal illustration is obvious in both the Mira calligraphiae and the Archetypa, chiefly in his practice of depicting sectioned, broken, or uprooted plants—a practice that takes an odd turn in the Archetypa. 6. Hendrix and Vignau-Wilberg, Mira calligraphiae, 48. See also Hendrix’s more general comment on the depiction of flora and fauna in late medieval pattern books: individual figures “are often drawn in detail and carefully colored,” giving “the impression that creatures from nature were viewed as pictorial details. As such they were worked out in full in the pattern book and then plugged into any number of pictorial schemata. The finished quality of such drawings points not only to the nature detail’s lack of integral relationship to the central composition, but also to the draughtman’s very concrete

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conception of each object from nature” (Joris Hoefnagel and the “Four Elements,” 43–44). Hendrix’s analyses of these phenomena and their manifestations in Hoefnagel’s work speak directly to the central conundrum of group dynamics in portraiture and other genres: genetic misrepresentation, in which the nae t’leven claim is incompatibly stated at two levels, that of the individual figure and that of the group, produces the conflicted scenarios of the pretexts of occasion. 7. Hendrix, Joris Hoefnagel and the “Four Elements,” 176. 8. Some shadows are cast at an oblique angle that suggests a ground plane receding into imaginary space; others—usually the shadows of insects aligned toward the top or bottom of the page—are cast vertically, as if on a wall. 9. They may contribute to another kind of narrative, however: the vanitas iconography inscribed in the texts that accompany the illustrations. 10. Hendrix, Joris Hoefnagel and the “Four Elements,” 177. The collection layout as a principle of organization traverses and links many forms of display: flower paintings, botanical gardens, Kunstkammern. On the similarity between formal gardens and collection cabinets, see Sam Segal, A Prosperous Past : The Sumptuous Still Life in the Netherlands, 1600–1700, ed. William B. Jordan. trans. P. M. van Tongeren (The Hague : SDU Publishers, 1988), 93. 11. The inscriptions feature aphorisms by Hoefnagel, in addition to the texts cited from Erasmus, the Old Testament (Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah), classical authors (Ovid, Martial, Ausonius, Seneca), and St. Augustine. The two exceptions, III.12 and IV.12, are inscribed at the top and on cartouches (similar to those found in herbal illustrations) depicted across the center of the page. 12. Personal communication. This is a convincing interpretation of the top of the box, but again, the oblique direction of the shadows cast by some of the objects within the box interferes with the impression of a square threedimensional box whose lid and bottom are parallel. 13. Vignau-Wilberg, Archetypa, 34. 14. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 11–48. 15. Ibid., 36–44. 16. Ibid., 15. 17. See ibid., 13–15. See also Hendrix and Vignau-Wilberg, Mira calligraphia, 49. A similar trompe-l’oeil effect was attempted before Hoefnagel by the Master of Mary of Burgundy, who painted flower stalks as if they were inserted into the vellum page. See Bergström, Dutch Still-Life Painting, 31. Hoefnagel merely, so to speak, completed the illusion. 18. Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature, 45, my italics.

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19. Claudia Swan, The Clutius Botanical Watercolors: Paints and Flowers of the Renaissance (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 12. 20. Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature, 45–46. See plate 27, “Painted Dragonflies with Real Wings Attached,” a reproduction of folio 54 of Ignis: Animalia Rationalia et Insecta, the first of the four albums of Hoefnagel’s manuscript, The Four Elements (Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art, Inv. 1987.20.5.55, Gift of Mrs. Lessing J. Rosenwald). The authoritative study of this manuscript remains Hendrix, Joris Hoefnagel and the Four Elements. See esp. the discussion of Ignis and its insects, 217–51. 21. I thank Tyrus Miller for this formulation. 22. For a similarly motivated practice of emulative reversal, see Hendrix’s excellent comments on Hoefnagel’s efforts in the Mira calligraphia to “upstage” Bocskay’s script and overturn the traditional dominance of verbal over visual mimesis (Mira calligraphia, 47–50). 23. Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature, 9. I say “in part” because Kaufmann engages in a methodological critique as well as a historical inquiry: he is concerned to show how “a perspective informed by anthropology and history” can provide a more satisfactory explanation of emergent illusionism than an approach that derives from “formal and iconological premises” (ibid.). 24. Ibid., 48. 25. I put “symbiotic” in scare quotes for reasons given below. 26. Hendrix, Joris Hoefnagel and the “Four Elements,” 243. 27. Ibid., 221–22. 28. The George Glaser Gallery, http://www.georgeglazer.com/archives/ prints/botanical/hoefnagel.html.  29. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 23. 30. Ibid., 18. 31. Vignau-Wilberg, Archetypa, 11. 32. Segal, A Prosperous Past, 108; Flowers and Nature, 55. See also p. 104 in the former and pp. 53 and 190 in the latter. Segal notes the connection of nibbled leaves with roses and cites dramatic examples in Bosschaerts’s three paintings of bouquets in arched windows. 33. Vignau-Wilberg, Archetypa, 9. 34. It’s significant that in modern Dutch-English dictionaries there is an entry for parasite but not for symbiosis. The identifications of insects in VignauWilberg’s edition do not reflect sixteenth- or seventeenth-century nomenclature: they were made by her contemporaries at the Deutsches Entomologisches Institut Eberswalde.

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35. The brackets enclosing eleven pairs and nine additional individual plants lack screws. 36. There are variations in the arc of inclination, some plants being more upright than others. Those in III.3 and III.7 show the least curvature. 37. This is the exception to the norm of noncompetition I mentioned above. 38. Examples are: I.3, II. 1, 9–12. 39. Examples are: I.4, II.5, III.2, 3, 7. 40. Examples are: I.2, 5, II.2, III.1, 4, IV.4 (left plant), 7. This effect is clearest when there is the suggestion of a three-dimensional or cross-sectional view of the cut surface, as in I.9 (left), II.2 (right), III.1 (right), III.9, III.10 (right), IV.4 (left), IV.7 (right), IV.11 (left). In several plates it isn’t easy to tell whether the image shows a complete stem with its root or a stem roughly hacked (or broken) off from its source plant. In others, the mark of termination may ambiguously signify a graphic marker or the cut end of the stem. See, e.g., IV.1–3. In contrast to this practice in the Archetypa, many stems in Hoefnagel’s Mira calligraphiae monumenta cast horizontal shadows; these indicate that the cut plant is either standing on or pushing up through a smooth, pagelike ground— or, in Hendrix’s words, “growing from the blank page.” She claims that this effect “recurs on numerous occasions” in Archetypa and cites one instance, in II.2 (Joris Hoefnagel and the “Four Elements,” 174–75). But Archetypa contains relatively few examples of this device compared to those mentioned above. 41. For some examples, see I.3, 5, 6, and 11. 42. See Chapter 6 above and note 13.

Conclusion: Allegorical Capture and Interpretive Release 1. John Webster, The Devil’s Law Case, 5.4.128–43; anthologized in The Oxford Book of English Verse under the title “Vanitas Vanitatum.”

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Index of Names

Dijck, Floris van, 26–33, 36, 41 Dürer, Albrecht, 82

Angel, Philips, 5 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 75 Ast, Balthasar van der, 57–58, 59, 78, 84

Eco, Umberto, 2, 3 Eliot, T. S., v, 2, 90 Erasmus, 83 Erdmann, David, 8 Erickson, Peter, xiii

Bailly, David, 38 Barthes, Roland, 10, 47 Benjamin, Walter, 11 Berghe, Christoffel van den, 41–44, 69, 72, 85 Bergström, Ingmar, 72 Bhabha, Homi, 21 Blake, William, 6–9, 13, 56 Bloch, Maurice, 21 Bocskay, Georg, 78 Bol, Laurens, 74–76 Bosschaert, Ambrosius the elder, 47–50, 69, 74–75, 84, 85 Boulenger, Hans, 42 Brenninkmeijer-de Rooij, Beatrijs, 6, 73 Broos, Ben, 49 Brueghel, Jan, 38, 71, 73 Brusati, Celeste, 6, 24 Bryson, Norman, 6, 39–40, 69

Fletcher, Angus, 10 Foster, Hal, 37–38 Gheyn, Jacques de, 71–72 Goldgar, Anne, 6, 11, 13, 16–18, 20, 22, 23, 41, 55 Grootenboer, Hanneke, 6 Heem, Jan Davidsz. De, 59–60 Hendrix, Lee, 6, 72–73, 78–79, 82–83 Hill, Helen, xiv Hochstrasser, Julie Berger, 6, 11, 18, 19, 20–23, 38 Hoefnagel, Joris, 13–14, 72–73, 77–89 Hollander, Martha, 6 Honig, Elizabeth, xiii, 40–41 Huysum, Jan van, 63–68, 84

Chong, Alan, 56–57 Claudel, Paul, 31–32, 34, 87 Colbert, Stephen, 5 Connor, Steven, 46 Cornelis van Haarlem, 71

Jongh, Eddy de, 15–16

115

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Index

Kalf, Willem, 45 Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, 6, 80, 81–82 Kloek, Wouter, 29–30 Lairesse, Gerard de, 70 Langmuir, Erika, 45 Lay, Thomas, xiii Leppert, Richard, 5, 6, 11, 13, 38, 55 Luttichuys, Simon, 38 McGuffin, 2, 14, 20, 62, 90 Mander, Karel van, 70–71 Merian, Maria Sibylla, 50–54, 63, 67 Mignon, Abraham, 59, 60–62 Miller, Tyrus, xiii, 79 Pittenger, Beth, vii, xiv Plato, 22 Riley, Gillian, 35 Ruysch, Rachel, 40 Saverij, Roelant, 57 Schama, Simon, 1, 31, 47, 87 Segal, Sam, 14–15, 63–64, 67, 68, 74, 77, 84

Shemek, Deanna, xiii Sterling, Charles, 33–34 Strand, Claudia, 75 Swan, Claudia, 6, 81 Sweeney, Katie, xiv Tartar, Helen, xiii Taylor, Paul, 6, 10, 16–17, 39, 40, 47, 63, 71 Teskey, Gordon, 10–11, 84 Thomas, Dylan, 12 Thucydides, 22 Vanitas, 1–3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20–21, 22, 23, 27, 32, 34, 37, 41, 44, 50, 52, 56, 59, 62, 70, 84, 90, 91 Vignau-Wilberg, Thea, 85 Weber, Max, 1 Webster, John, 12, 91–92 Weschler, Lawrence, xiii Westermann, Mariët, xiii, 38 Whittier, Sarah Greenleaf, xiii Wilbur, Richard, v, 38 Wood, Christopher, 11