"Tell me what you eat," said the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "and I will tell you who you are." This is strikingly true of the way still life-the depiction of inanimate things, mainly food, drink and the vessels used to serve them-developed in Spain from the 16th century on. You might almost say that independent still life, painting that had no other purpose than to confront us with objects for their own sake, was a Hispanic reinvention. It was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans but then lost, and it did not come back in force until the end of the 16th century in northern Italy, Holland and Spain, all of which were under the sway of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty.
Still life is to eating what the nude is to sex, not a simple image but a complicated knot of cultural ideas about materialism and transcendence, illusion and reality, pleasure and denial, life and death. Not until recently, however, has it been given deep museum treatment, and the exhibition that has done so is on view through May 21 at London's National Gallery. Spanish Still Life from Velazquez to Goya, curated by the art historians William Jordan and Peter Cherry, puts together some 70 paintings, some well known and others entirely fresh. It is a brilliant show.
It begins with one extraordinary icon-an odd word for a painting of a cabbage, a quince, a cut melon and a cucumber, but no other will quite do. It is by Juan Sanchez Cotan (1560-1627), a painter from Toledo who is known by only a few works, all of which are remarkable for their careful, precise, yet unpedantic construction. This is one of the finest. No still life was ever so still. The black space behind the framing window looks infinitely deep; two of the objects (the slice of melon and the yellow tip of the cucumber) stick out a little into our space. Everything is painted with self-abnegating care, warts and all, becoming a tiny sample of the world as a marvel: not through weirdness or preciousness (as in the curio cabinets of the great) but through its ordinary, even blemished, but always singular character.
Cotan's work oscillates between desire and denial. Its fruit and fish and vegetables are more sacramental than gastronomic, emblems of the variety of God's creation (one of Cotan's still lifes contains a chayote from Mexico, an exotic rarity in 16th century Spain). Your eye can't wallow in such spareness, as it can in the abundance of Flemish still life. It sees the vegetable as Idea, a reading promoted by the fact that Cotan deliberately arranged the objects on strings and shelf to form a hyperbolic curve. The melon opens its delicious interior to you, but its geometric frame cancels the idea of eating it. It's food for thought.
This peculiar character was shared by other still-life artists in Spain, who turned their tables into arrays of symmetrical dishes and vases that have the liturgical solemnity of altars. Such abstraction persists even in the more materialistic work of Juan van der Hamen y Leon (1596-1631), whose "aristocratic" still lifes are arranged on different levels like an architectural stage, glittering with invitation. Each detail--the sheen of silver, the frosting of sugar and spice (real luxuries then) on a macaroon or a doughnut, the translucency of candied fruit--speaks of privilege.