Topic 3: "Still-life"

Citations:

1)The height of pleasure that, according to Aristotle the art of knowing and imitating nature offers the observer is associated with the height of meditative melancholy occasioned by the imitation, which proffers itself as vain, training the observer's spirit on the falsehood of senses, the nothingness of all things, the transience of earthly life, and the nullity of sciences and art, first and foremost painting.

2)Vanitas paintings, salvific bitter cups of the soul that are drunk nevertheless to quench the thirst for the deceptive still life delights that they display, concentrate the full power of illusion and all the effects of disillusion in the effective essentially and immediacy of emblems.
Marc Fumaroli, Still-life, Natura Morta, Vanitas and Trompe L'oeil. The modern adventures of ancient mimesis, Art and Illusions. Masterpieces of Trompe L'oeil from Antiquity to the Present Day, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, 2009

Annamaria Giusti et al, Art and Illusions. Masterpieces of Trompe L'oeil from Antiquity to the Present Day, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, 2009
A great source on illusion, realism and the representational in painting through the ages with essays by different scholars. Obviously the conceptual in art date way before conceptual art started. The problem of representation and realism has been as relevant (within different contexts) in the past 3 millenia as it is today.

Significance: This is in relation to my interest in ideas of physical beauty and its transient nature. As the philosophers say, pleasure of the senses does not last long which makes our desire for it insatiable. People have been pondering on that fact for millenia but what makes today different is scale - many more people needing more to live.
I don't know if I will stick to the vanitas idea but feel that I need a reference. It is as a starting point.

Image by Maija Astikainen, 2008