Rhetoric of the Image' (1964) Term Paper

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Only wealth and the existence of the complex commercial society that underpinned it was capable of bringing together this great diversity of objects and making them available for human pleasure - the pleasure of the eye as well as of the stomach. The partial peeling of the orange (an exotic fruit in seventeenth-century Holland), the slicing of the melon and the opening of other fruits, and of the oyster shells, underlines the point that all this wealth is available for consumption, both on the surface and within.

In comparison with the first painting, this image does not speak very forcefully of decay, death, and the subject of vanitas. These elements are present, in the mottling of some of the fruit, the insects feeding on the sliced peach, the mouse that scampers among the food. It is present, too, in the lobster so prominently displayed near the front of the picture plane; a rich item of food, but also a living creature that is now dead - a point emphasized by its juxtaposition with the living mouse; "when one sees a living animal near a dead one," observes Nathaniel Wolloch, "one is reminded of the fact that the latter was also alive only a short time ago and was not originally a still object" (Wolloch, 721). Such reminders of mortality, however, unlike the prominent dropped petals and decaying fruit of the van der ast painting, tend to be lost amid the richness elsewhere in the canvas.

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As critics have commented with reference to another Beyeren banquet painting, such elements "may be considered more of an intellectual conceit than a sober warning against the desire for material things like the objects depicted or the painting itself" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, web site).

Still life paintings immediately present the onlooker with two layers of potential meaning: the decorative, and the symbolic, the latter very often embodying religious messages. Such paintings are both aesthetic exercises and symbolic systems involving what one scholar has called "the spiritual interpretation of material objects" and reflecting "the Dutch bent for emblems and moralizing literature" (Kahr, 190). It can be argued that they therefore constitute ideal objects for the application of Barthes's system of reading signs.

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