Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Guy Davenport was a writer, illustrator, teacher, and scholar. He is best known for his modernist-style short stories, but his range of works is wide, spanning poetry, translation, and criticism. He was a professor of English for three decades, having taught at Haverford College and the University of Kentucky.

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Objects on a Table

Counterpoint Press

Chapter One

A BASKET OF SUMMER FRUIT

    Between the gathering of food and its consumption there isan interval when it is on display. To this arrangement ofeggs on the sideboard, as may be, brought in from thehenhouse (in Tuscany in the time of Horace, in the South Carolina of mychildhood, in Yorkshire, in Normandy), apples and pears from the orchard,a string of fish from the river, a brace of partridges flecked withblood, a basket of squash and beans from the garden, the Dutch gave thename still life around the middle of the seventeenth century. A. P. A.Vorenkamp tells us in his history of Dutch still life that the word comesfrom the jargon of painters: leven, "alive," for drawings made from amodel. A vrouwenleven was a female model, and one who, from time totime, while posing, needed to move; a stillleven--fruit, flowers, orfish--remained still. This was a general term, used by painters and dealers.People who fancied still life for their walls, of whom there were more inRenaissance Netherlands than at any other time in history, used suchdesignations as ontbijt, breakfast or snack; banket, by whichthe Dutch mean not only our banquet but a copious array of pastries; or thesumptuous pronkstillleven, an ostentatious table such as Chaucer givesthe Franklin, who was "Epicurus owene sone":

His breed, his-ale, was alweys after oon;
A bettre envyned man was nowher noon.
Withoute bake mete was nevere his hous,
Of fissh and flessh, and that so plentevous,
It snewed in his hous of mete and drynke,
Of alle deyntees that men koude thynke.
After the sondry sesons of the yeer,
So chaunged he his mete and his soper.
Ful many a fat partrich hadde he in muwe,
And many a breem and many a luce in stewe.
Wo was his cook but if his sauce were
Poynaunt and sharp, and redy al his geere.
His table dormant in his halle alway
Stood redy covered al the longe day.

    The pronkstillleven, as we shall see, can be used to voluptuous ends,as by Keats in "The Eve of St. Agnes," or to joyous ones, as withDickens's Christmas feasts, or comic ones, as with the grand spreads laidout by Thomas Love Peacock's epicurean squires and eccentrics, or toelaborately symbolic ends, as with Joyce in "The Dead" or Edgar AllanPoe--with another kind of pronkstillleven, of philosophical and poeticemblems such as we find in Holbein's Ambassadors and Durer'sMelencolia. Epicurean, let us note, has its own history as a kind oftable fare. Historically it should mean the simple meal of a philosopher ofadmirable restraint: an actual meal of Epicurus comes down to us--goatcheese, plain bread, and a pitcher of cold spring water--equaled, perhaps,by Milton's heroic late-night refreshment of a pipe of tobacco anda glass of cold water. But "Epicurean" turned into the sense the Arabicword from which his name derives still has, bikouros (especially used byMoroccans of the Anglican clergy), high living and rich eating.

    Still life begins in history at two points, in Egypt and in Israel,establishing two themes that will persist in unbroken tradition until our time.

    Primitive peoples feed their dead. In the most ancient of graves wefind dishes and cruses. From the earliest times that we know of in Egypt,food was given by pious offspring to their deceased parents: the ka, orsoul, could eat. Its hieroglyph is that prehistoric and lasting gesture ofpraise, uplifted arms. And when, after a long time, there was no morefamily to feed actual food to an ancestor, there was a picture of a mealpainted on the tomb wall, and the ka could survive on that until thecoming forth by day of Osiris, when time will stop, and the righteousdwell forever in the eternal July of the redeemed Egypt.

    That, it seems to me, is the real root of still life--an utterly primitiveand archaic feeling that a picture of food has some sustenance. Somethingclose to this idea must have been behind the neolithic cave paintings,which almost invariably depict animals. All the theories makesense: that these animal images were drawn in the earth's womb toenhance fertility; that the image was identified magically with the animal,and that to slay the image would ensure slaying the animal; or amore engaging theory, that the images were restorations of slain animals,an offering to some god of a replacement of a part of his creation thatwe, to stay alive, have had to kill and eat.

    Whatever the truth of picturing food, the reasoning will have transmuted,culture by culture, over the millennia. Franz Kafka tells us thisparable:

Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what
was in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over
again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and becomes a
part of the ceremony.

    In the study of still life, we must be prepared for leopards that havebecome a part of the ceremony. Still life persists for four thousand years,and deserves study for that alone. The portrait arises and falls away, oris forbidden, or loses significance (as in our times). Landscape isintermittent--we rarely find it even in descriptions. Pausanias describedGreece without a single view of meadow or wood, riverbank or mountain.All the genres of painting except still life are discontinuous, andonly the lyric poem, or song, can claim so ancient a part of our cultureamong the expressive arts.

    The other beginning of still life, as a subject, is in the Book of Amos.A prophet of the eighth century B.C., Amos was a contemporary ofJeroboam the Second (783-741), after whose reign the kingdom of Israelfell into confusion and collapse. Amos, a dresser of sycamore trees anda shepherd, was given a vision by God. At Amos 8:1-2,

Thus hath the lord GOD shewed unto me, and beholde, a basket
of summer fruit. And he said, Amos, what seest thou?
And I sayde: a basket of summer fruit. Then said the LORD
unto me, The ende is come upon my people of Israel; I will
not again pass by them any more.

    The King James translators put as their rubric in the margin: "By abasket of summer fruit, it is shewed the propinquitie of Israel's end."

    Vanitas vanitatem and memento mori: a still life becomes asymbol of what we shall have taken from us, though at the moment it is a signof God's goodness and the bounty of nature.

    "Hear this," said Amos, "O ye that swallow up the needy, even tomake the poor of the land to fail, saying, When will the new Moone begone, that we may sell corne? and the Sabbath, that we may set forthwheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying thebalances by deceit? that we may buy the poor for silver, and the needyfor a pair of shoes ...?"

    To the vision of the basket of summer fruit the Lord adds one ofHimself upon a wall made by a plumb line, with a plumb line in Hishand.

And the LORD said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I
sayd, a plumbline....