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| | Leo von Klenze's project envisaged the creation of several rooms in the museum where artists would be able to copy the works of great masters. Nicholas I, however, gave orders that landscapes and still lifes by 17th-century Dutch and Flemish artists be installed in this room. Here the viewer could enjoy the refined paintings of the Flemish artist Jan Fyt, the unsurpassed master of the "small-scale still life". It probably took a while for this first impression to give way to an understanding that, while extolling the beauty and variety of life, Fyt evokes thoughts of its transience in his viewers. The same vanitas theme is present in the still lifes of the Dutchman Jan Davidsz de Heem, whose compositions often included flowers, a symbol of transience suggested by their own brief lives. The still life by Christopher Paudiss comes across as a poetic novella about unprepossessing things, the silent witnesses of everyday human life. |
