Finally, in the category of the microscopic taste for displaying multiple surfaces, we should consider the common Dutch practice of opening, in order to reveal to our sight, the makings of the objects in their still lifes.
Willem Claesz. Heda, Still Life, 1634. Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
Whether it is edibles such as cheese, a pie, herring, fruit, and nuts, or collectibles such as shells, vessels, and watches, we are offered the inside, or underside, as well as the outer view. Cheeses are cut into, pies spill out their fillings beneath the shelter of crust, herring are cut to reveal flesh as well as gleaming skin. Shells and vessels of precious metal or glasses topple on their sides (occasionally we even see the jagged edge of a broken goblet), and watches are inevitably opened to reveal their works. Objects are exposed to the probing eye not only by the technique of flaying them, but also by reflection: the play of light on the surface distinguishes glass from metal, from cloth, from pastry, and also serves to multiply surfaces. The underside of a vessel's foot is doubled by its reflection in the adjacent pewter plate. Each thing exposes multiple surfaces in order to be more fully present to the eye.
Consider the lemon, one of the favored objects of Dutch vision. Its representation characteristically maximizes surface: the peel is sliced and unwound to reveal a glistening interior from which a seed or two is frequently discarded to one side. In the hands of Willem Kalf, particularly, the lemon offers a splendid instance of what I have termed division.
Willem Kalf, Still Life with a Nautilus Goblet. Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano.
The representation of the wrinkled gold of its mottled surface, with the peel here pitted, there swelling, loosened from the flesh and sinuously extended, totally transforms the fruit. We have never seen a lemon in this way before. Modern interpretations notwithstanding, Kalf's lemons are subject not to the ravages of time but to the probings of the eye. Compare the lemons of Kalf to the lemons of Zurbarán.
Francisco de Zurbarán, Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose. The Norton Simon Foundation, Pasadena.
Here is the familiar significant shame: bumpy ovals slightly drawn in at one end and pulled out to a pointed protuberance on the other, the entire form a steady yellow. What is more, Zurbarán's lemon is a solid object. It would fit in the hand, is graspable, and is piled with others of its kind to confirm its solid nature.
Whatever other aspects there are to such works, it is clear that they are devised as a feast for the attentive eye. "But to resolve nature into abstractions is less to our purpose than to dissect her into parts," writes Bacon in the Novum Organum. The motto applies to Dutch still lifes. It suggests further what they are willing to sacrifice––the selection of a single, prime, or privileged view ("abstraction," in Bacon's terms) that is empowered to summarize knowledge.
from svetlana alpers, the art of describing: dutch art in the seventeenth century, 1983
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