Conférence "Saison 2 : Antquité gréco-romaine - Aux origines"

Still life is a more complex artistic genre than it might seem. In fact, the term "still life" is not really appropriate, and the expression "silent life", used in certain European countries, seems more appropriate, since the things represented are not always taken directly from nature and are often endowed with a silent but lively eloquence! A certain "official" history puts the genre at the beginning of the Renaissance, although it was well established two centuries earlier, even if the objects are not always depicted exclusively.

To understand the genesis of this genre, it is useful to consider it from Antiquity onwards, and then we realise that the representation of objects is a very old trend in the Mediterranean basin. The idea of bringing them together to integrate them into scenes populated by living beings, or of grouping them in compositions in which they alone occupy the space, became established as early as the 5th or 4th century BC.

Although no independent paintings have come down to us to bear witness to this, wall paintings, mosaics and sculpted reliefs abound, underlining the pronounced taste of the ancients for this theme.

But did this art - too often considered to be exclusively Western - disappear completely between the end of Antiquity and the end of the Middle Ages, between the 4th and 14th centuries? A look back at a thousand years of silence...