Unexpected twists

As a teenager in Cambridge, I used to have tea with a blind philosopher. One afternoon, spotting the sugar lurking behind the milk, I told it — as one does — to come out from there. My friend was aghast. ‘Are you talking to the crockery?’ he asked. Ontologically speaking, of course, I was on shaky ground, but there was an empirical logic to my remark which was lost on him. A blind man can apprehend objects in space, but not the spatial relationships between them.

I’d forgotten this incident until the Estorick Collection’s new exhibition Still Life in 20th Century Italy brought it back, setting me thinking about the nature of ‘natura morta’. Traditionally, still-life painting works on two levels: the superficial level of surface illusion and the deeper level of symbolic meaning. In the early days of vanitas painting, the ‘deeper’ meaning was imposed by artists anxious to give the genre importance, but as the artists themselves grew in importance the imposition stopped being necessary.