FOOD FOR THOUGHT

By ROBERT HUGHES

"Tell me what you eat," said the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "and I will tell you who you are." This is strikingly true of the way still life-the depiction of inanimate things, mainly food, drink and the vessels used to serve them-developed in Spain from the 16th century on. You might almost say that independent still life, painting that had no other purpose than to confront us with objects for their own sake, was a Hispanic reinvention. It was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans but then lost, and it did not come back in force until the end of the 16th century in northern Italy, Holland and Spain, all of which were under the sway of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty.

Still life is to eating what the nude is to sex, not a simple image but a complicated knot of cultural ideas about materialism and transcendence, illusion and reality, pleasure and denial, life and death. Not until recently, however, has it been given deep museum treatment, and the exhibition that has done so is on view through May 21 at London's National Gallery. Spanish Still Life from Velazquez to Goya, curated by the art historians William Jordan and Peter Cherry, puts together some 70 paintings, some well known and others entirely fresh. It is a brilliant show.

It begins with one extraordinary icon-an odd word for a painting of a cabbage, a quince, a cut melon and a cucumber, but no other will quite do. It is by Juan Sanchez Cotan (1560-1627), a painter from Toledo who is known by only a few works, all of which are remarkable for their careful, precise, yet unpedantic construction. This is one of the finest. No still life was ever so still. The black space behind the framing window looks infinitely deep; two of the objects (the slice of melon and the yellow tip of the cucumber) stick out a little into our space. Everything is painted with self-abnegating care, warts and all, becoming a tiny sample of the world as a marvel: not through weirdness or preciousness (as in the curio cabinets of the great) but through its ordinary, even blemished, but always singular character.

Cotan's work oscillates between desire and denial. Its fruit and fish and vegetables are more sacramental than gastronomic, emblems of the variety of God's creation (one of Cotan's still lifes contains a chayote from Mexico, an exotic rarity in 16th century Spain). Your eye can't wallow in such spareness, as it can in the abundance of Flemish still life. It sees the vegetable as Idea, a reading promoted by the fact that Cotan deliberately arranged the objects on strings and shelf to form a hyperbolic curve. The melon opens its delicious interior to you, but its geometric frame cancels the idea of eating it. It's food for thought.

This peculiar character was shared by other still-life artists in Spain, who turned their tables into arrays of symmetrical dishes and vases that have the liturgical solemnity of altars. Such abstraction persists even in the more materialistic work of Juan van der Hamen y Leon (1596-1631), whose "aristocratic" still lifes are arranged on different levels like an architectural stage, glittering with invitation. Each detail--the sheen of silver, the frosting of sugar and spice (real luxuries then) on a macaroon or a doughnut, the translucency of candied fruit--speaks of privilege.

Seventeenth century Spain was notorious for the parsimony of its common diet: bread, beans, onions, a scrap of lamb or fish sometimes, and garlic, garlic, garlic. It was to French or Italian cooking what the crabby-looking servant girl grinding aioli in Diego Velazquez's Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary was to the sumptuous nudes of Titian or Veronese. A modern palate would recoil at the eggs slowly frying, or rather poaching, in oil on top of a clay stove in Velazquez's An Old Woman Cooking Eggs. But what an amazing act of skill the picture itself is, done in 1618 by a 19-year-old boy who wanted to display his total control over surface texture, form and light, from the transparency of the oil in which the eggs swim to the knife's curved shadow on a bowl to the marvelous fugue of circles and ellipses, melon and cooking vessels, that fills the lower third of the canvas.

The binding metaphor of 17th century still life was the vanitas, a term deriving from the text in Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." Such images were meant to show the fleeting nature of the world's goods, honors and sensual pleasures, setting them against the terrible perspective of death, time and judgment. They exemplified the desenga-o del mundo, "disillusionment of the world," that was one of the chief tropes of Spanish Baroque art and literature. They could be small and simple-three moldy skulls and a pocket watch-or fulsome in their cascade of lessons.

The near epic example of the latter is The Dream of the Knight, by the Madrid painter Antonio de Pereda (1611-78). The young Don sleeps, and an angel appears in his dream with a scroll bearing a diagram of death's arrow with the motto, "It pierces eternally, flies quickly and kills." Before the two figures is a tumbled mass of emblems of the world: armor and a wheel-lock gun (military glory), a bishop's miter and a papal tiara (religious authority), a laurel wreath (cultural fame), money, jewels, playing cards, sheet music-and a mirror that reflects only a skull.

Probably the best thing that can be said for the show's copious gallery of Madrid flowerpieces by Juan de Arellano and others from the late 17th century is that they are skilled exercises in a trivial genre; they descend from earlier Dutch conventions-those towering masses of tulips and roses, full of squishy virtuosity; but they lack the architectural grandeur of earlier Spanish works and promptly induce surfeit. After them, the Spanish still-life tradition nose-dived into academism and decor through the 18th century, with the single exception of the Madrid painter Luis Melendez (1716-80), whose massive arrays of boxes, wrinkled cheeses, copper cookware and glittering dorados or sea bream were disparaged as minor art by academic pooh-bahs and never won him the success he deserved. But other than France's Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, there was no finer still-life painter in 18th century Europe.

The climax of the show comes at the right place, its end, with four still lifes by Francisco de Goya. Because Goya was supremely a painter of the human clay in all its aspects, we don't associate him with still life. But his powers of empathy were so vast that he could endow almost anything with a shiver of mortality and the cold touch of otherness; and so it is with these paintings.

A dead turkey seems in mourning for itself, painted mostly in black, its pink head-the sole patch of bright color-propped up against a dark brown basket that is painted with utter virtuosity, one stroke for every crescent of wicker. To see such passages (others are the lacy scribbles of wet black paint that define the soft body feathers) is to realize why Goya's ability to summon up a single form with a single gesture, fusing the brush mark to the form depicted, was such an inspiration to Edouard Manet half a century later. The stiffness of death is recorded in the bird's splayed legs, thrust out as if in a last convulsion, and in its upcurving wing, like a final memory of flight.

Goya's picture of a butchered sheep is, if possible, more tragic still. The animal's flayed head seems to be witnessing its own death, in the form of two hunks of rib cage propped against one another, and the way Goya has rendered the structure of dark red meat and the spectral, yet dense and greasy white fat is both factual and haunting. These low mounds of form, bluntly placed against a background of no-space black, come out of the same sensibility that recorded the nameless piles of human bodies in The Disasters of War. This is the realization of the inevitability of death that the older vanitas paintings set out as metaphor, but here it is concrete and direct, inscribed in every molecule of sad flesh. One realizes that Goya could see and feel more death in some mutton than Rubens could put in a whole Crucifixion.