“Still Life with Glass Bowl of Fruit and Vases”
If there’s one thing I can say about humanity, it’s that we really enjoy the indulgences of life, the horns of plenty, and abundance. That is evident from this Roman painting depicting fruit and drink which once adorned the walls of a home in Pompeii.
“Still Life with Glass Bowl of Fruit and Vases” is a fresco painting on the walls of the House of Julia Felix in Pompeii, Italy. Made sometime between 50 and 79 A.D., it is one of several still life frescos found within Julia Felix’s home. Others include a painting depicting eggs and game, and another depicting writing utensils, sketch pads, and coins.
The House of Julia Felix, located on Via dell’Abbondanza, was miraculously unscathed from the Pompeii eruption. After the event, Felix opened up her private bath house to the public and rented space within her home to people who needed places to sleep or a location to run their shops.
In this painting, a glass bowl holds an overflowing amount of fruit, including pomegranate, apples, and grapes. A terracotta jar holds candied fruits, likely raisins, with its top resting precariously against its side. An amphora, perhaps filled with wine, rests against the jar. The shelves the fruit sits on are stepped, with the artist cleverly depicting the perspective using an optical illusion, a term known as Trompe-l’œil.
Still a favorite subject matter for many people today due to the ease in controlling composition, still life art has been found in sites dating back as early as ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptians would often paint still life pieces of fruit on the walls of tombs with the belief that the images would be able to be consumed as real food in the afterlife. The Netherlandish artists from the Northern Renaissance were the first to formally specialize in still life paintings during the 1500s and 1600s. Today, the techniques and methods of creating these pieces of art may have changed, but the idea is still the same.
“Still Life with Glass Bowl of Fruit and Vases” is located at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli in Naples, Italy. Similar fresco paintings from Herculaneum are also located within this museum.
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