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Frans SNYDERS (Antwerp, 1579 - Antwerp, 1657)
Two Monkeys Stealing Fruit from a Basket
Seventeenth century
© Musée du Louvre/A. Dequier - M. Bard |
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Richelieu
2nd Floor
Flanders, 17th century
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Two Monkeys Stealing Fruit from a Basket |
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| Still-life paintings express a specific worldview. Their visually appealing, anecdotal compositions of vegetables and tables set with food – ostensibly their chief subject, painted with great zest and realism – mask a powerful, moralizing purpose. This strategy (if indeed it can be described as such), is generally organized around a small, entirely fabricated fable. The resulting pictorial message draws on traditional still-life motifs, for less obvious, more specifically high-minded ends. Through the inclusion of animals, and particularly monkeys, Snyders's still-life advertises its status as a vanitas painting in the broadest sense of the term – a pictorial sermon on the evils of disorder, itself the antithesis of morality. The painting can no longer be seen as a straighforward still-life. Instead, it is clearly associated with themes relating to the moral ambiguity and inanity of human activity, expressed through a collection of symbolic motifs with a significance far beyond the straightforward representation of inanimate foodstuffs. Living creatures (the monkeys) are clearly presented as harbingers of disorder. Their presence "lifts" the picture to a new level of meaning. The painting should doubtless be seen as a resounding critique of human failings, and a clear exhortation to more moral behaviour, through its careful pictorial catalog of a range of faults, such as gluttony, excess, frivolity and above all, disorderliness, the fear of change. |
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Galleries of 17th-century Flemish painting, room 26.
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