Certain Problems of the Emergence and Development of European Still Life

Abstract

The article provides a characteristic of still life as a genre of fine art, a description, analysis and systematization of its various directions, and gives the names of outstanding still-life masters. The author justifies the relevance of studying still life as a genre of fine art. Still life, on the one hand, is a simple and routine genre, and on the other hand it is very interesting and multi-component. It is an independent genre of art, which in its own way reveals the eternal theme of art, i.e., the theme of human existence. The study of still life is relevant and interesting at any stage of the development of European art, because still life is something that surrounds human existence and creatively reflects the surrounding space. As a genre of painting, it has a unique feature to clearly convey the spirit of the time, the life of different social strata and the world around them.

Analyzing works of art, studying their details, we can move back in time to better feel and understand past eras, to see the everyday life of people through the eyes of artists of the past. Still life can tell a lot about the history of a particular nation, its culture, way of life, traditions, and even enlarge the notion of individual professions. The objects depicted on the canvases dating back to the 17^th – 18^th centuries help us to better understand the European history of that period.

The purpose of this work is to analyze and reveal the role of still life as a unique historical document of the epoch, which recorded and preserved the smallest details of people’s lifestyle in Western Europe in the 16^th – 17^th centuries.

The research is based on the root principles of the historical science, i.e., chronological, comparative, systematic as well as methods of analysis and synthesis of the material. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the generalization and attempt to systematize the process of the emergence of Western European still life and its individual directions. The author tried to trace the specifics of the development of the still life genre as such.