Caterpillage : Reflections on Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life Painting.

Intro -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- Hyperreality and Truthiness -- Reading Blake's "The SICK ROSE -- Ethics Versus Technics in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life -- Vanitas: The McGuffin of Still Life -- Still Life, Trade, and Truthiness -- The Pretext of Occasion: Floris van Dijck's Laid Table with Cheese and Fruit, c. 1615 -- Nature Mourant: The Fictiveness of Dutch Realism -- The Embarrassment of Niches: Christoffel van den Berghe's Vase of Flowers in a Stone Niche, 1617 -- Nature Mourant: Bosschaert's Leaves, Merian's Caterpillars -- Small-scale Violence -- The Darker Spirit: Van Huysum's Heaps -- Posies: The Bouquet as Pretext of Occasion -- Joris Hoefnagel and the Roots of Dutch Flower Painting -- Conclusion: Allegorical Capture and Interpretive Release -- Epigraph Sources -- Notes -- Index of Names.

Caterpillage is a study of seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting. It develops an interpretive approach based on the author's previous studies of portraiture, and its goal is to offer its readers a new way to think and talk about the genre of still life.The book begins with a critique of iconographic discourse and particularly of iconography's treatment of vanitas symbolism. It goes on to argue that this treatment tends to divert attention from still life's darker meanings and from the true character of its traffic with death. Interpretations of still life that focus on the vanity of human experience and the mutability of life minimize the impact made by the representation of such voracious pillagers of plant life as insects, snails, and caterpillars.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.