Still-Life with Books

In the late 1620s Leiden, a university town crowded with printers and booksellers, produced a small fashion in painting, still lifes made of books. Jan Davidsz de Heem, who lived there from about 1625, painted heaps of worn volumes, and Jan Lievens, then about 21, painted this panel around 1628. Thick folios, visibly well used, lie in an untidy pile on a table. On a shelf above them stand antique plaster casts and a bottle of ink. The museum reads the whole arrangement as a reminder that everything earthly passes, learning included, along with all that learning produces. The panel is of oak and almost a metre wide. It came to Munich from the old picture gallery of the Electors of Mainz, kept in their palace at Aschaffenburg.