Sunday

This is Still Life With Cherries and Strawberries in China Bowls by Osias Beert, painted in oil on copper in 1608.

I am fascinated by the symbolism of Dutch and Flemish paintings (Beert was Belgian, by day a cork merchant from Antwerp). The earliest still lives were more linear and formal affairs, all about the interplay of light and dark on objects arranged in a manner that was pleasing to the eye. But as the genre evolved, the paintings became both more naturalistic and more allegorical.

Some of this is easy to read - so you might have an obvious memento mori (Latin: ‘remember you must die’) in the form of a skull or an hour-glass sitting among the lavishness to symbolise the frailty of man, the inexorable march of time and the inevitability of death. Where the painter is Dutch, this would also serve to remind good Protestants that all these beautiful and delicious things - the fine wines, the lustrous glass, the gleaming silverware and candlesticks, the opulent fabrics - were but vanitas or vanity, futile, transient fripperies that would not help anybody to get to heaven. Such vanities are also often represented by candle flame, which snuffs out, or broken timepieces; even the thin glass of the drinking vessels suggests fragility.

It doesn’t require an excess of imagination to fathom that e.g. oysters (which actually our painter, Osias Beert, was famously good at reproducing, especially the contrast between the pearlescent, creamy insides and the hard shell) symbolised either temptation or the pleasures - or sins - of the flesh. Figs too. Pomegranates, thanks to their many seeds, represented fertility and abundance. There are layers of meaning in these paintings - the aesthetically pleasing tabletop scenes are never only that.

So this particular painting, for example, is not simply a beautifully-composed arrangement of wildly expensive Chinese porcelain, exquisite Venetian glass and particularly appetising fruit. Strawberries and cherries are the fruits of Paradise, and represent men’s souls. The butterfly is a symbol of transformation, and thus of salvation and resurrection. The poor old dragonfly symbolises the devil - it was at the time thought to be a relative of normal flies, which we now know it isn’t (and note the fly in the oyster painting I linked to above. Blameless monkeys were also the devil).

The otherwise slightly incongruous piece of bread to the left is of course the body of Christ, or since there’s wine on the table too, the Eucharist.

(Same thing with those amazing 17th century Dutch flower paintings, by the way: the individual flowers are hyper-realistic and botanically accurate, but the compositions usually involve flowers that would never be in season at the same time — which again symbolises the transience of man’s time on earth. Often some are fresh and perky while others are at various stages of their life cycle. Roses were either the Virgin Mary or Venus, goddess of Love, lilies were purity, etc. Tulips, thanks to tulip mania, were symbols of wealth and prestige but also slightly oddly of virtue).

So what you have here is the pudding course of a lavish banquet - the end of a fun night - and the fight between good and evil and the promise of resurrection, all wrapped up in a lovely painting that any rich merchant would be delighted to have on his wall. Isn’t it interesting? If you want to look more closely, you can zoom in on the painting here.

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