PRECEDENTS (text page)
Still life was depicted as an autonomous genre in the practice of painters, in the taste of collectors, and in the awareness of writers of treatises, towards the end of the Renaissance. The precise critical definition came much later, as confirmed by the clear-cut separation in terms and significance between Mediterranean and Catholic Europe (where the words "dead nature" were adopted, translated into the various languages) and the Northern, Protestant area, which preferred to use the various derivations of "still life". Its figurative origins are even more ancient: from the beginning and entire duration of the 17th century, the better-educated artists willingly re-evoked archaeological precedents, which were well known through surviving examples of Roman mosaics and painted murals or else through literary testimonies. Indeed, the authority of the "classics" was invoked in order to emphasise the dignity of a genre which, ever since it originated, had continuously to clash with the prejudices and classification of being a "lesser" one. The role of Giotto and his disciples and of other Tuscan Masters of the 14th century for the spacious representation of scenes in which no human figures appeared having been emphasised, "modern" still life found a precise field of experimentation in 15th-century wood-inlay work. The favourite ambit for the astounding exercises of the pioneers of perspective was that of wooden panels that frequently simulated the doors of wardrobes and bookcases in which the most dissimilar objects were collected, thus anticipating solutions and subjects which were to be adopted during the 17th century.