Charles Sterling, Still life painting

As far as we can tell from our limited knowledge of the past, the Greeks were the first people in the West to paint pictures which can properly be described as still lifes. These, together with several other forms of painting (household scenes, landscpae, animal pictures), were the most original creation of that Hellenistic civilization which reached its height in the third and second centuries B.C. Not a single still life has come down to us from this remote period. 

Paintings and mosaics have survived at Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, Rome, and in many parts of the Roman Empire from North Africa to the Rhine. They date from the first century B.C. to the fourth century A.D.

Pliny the Elder, who perished in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. (when Pompeii, Herculanum and Stabiae were buried under the ashes), tells us that the most famous Greek painter of still lifes was Pirakos (6). Exactly when he lived and worked is not known; the few scraps of evidence we have point to the late fourth or early third century B.C., i.e. to the early Alexandrian period. He painted interiors of barbers and bootmakers shops, donkeys, and -the important point here- foodstuffs. These were probably small easel pictures on wood, fitted with folding shutters, such as were later represented in trompe-l’oil in the wall paintings of Pompeii and Rome (…)

(…) Easel paintings seem to have made their appearance as early as the time of Alexander the great (second half of the fourth century). (…) These were neither funerary paintings (both religious in character) but genre pictures, often comic or humorous scenes, “slices of life”, painted on portable panels or tables which, being unconnected with the mural decorations of a room, could be moved about at will, placed on a ledge or cornice, for example, hooked to a nail on the wall or hung from a string. They were pictures similar in every respect to the panel paintings reinvented in Europe in the 15th century.

Inanimate objects made their appearance early in Greek painting in the decoration of vases. These objects, however, were only accessories and in spite of the increasingly skilled application of linear perspective, in spite of the exactitude of forms and the accuracy of foreshortening, they fail to convey any particular impression of visual intensity. 

Then suddenly, at the height of the classical period in the second half of the fifth century B.C., Greek paintings branched out in new colors, in the manner of Polygnotos, painters deliberately aimed now at illusionist realism. It has been suggested that they took this step under the influence of the theater, after being employed to paint stage scenery.

contained illusionist elements constituting an advance on the mere rudiments of perspective. Working for the theater naturally led painters to develop an art of imitative realism. A generation later, about 400 B.C., the famous anecdote recorded by Pliny about the birds that flew down to peck at the grapes which Zeuxis had painted on a curtain, proves that the technique of trompe-l’oil had secured a place for itself on the stage, even if the stage was not responsible for its development. Apolodoros received the name of skiagraphos (shadow painter) for inventing chiaroscuro, that interplay of light and shade combined with color made of blended tones which creates the illusion of relief (…)