Still life with goblets

Among rooms full of Venetian saints and doges, this quiet arrangement of glass goblets is an outsider. It belongs to the Flemish school and dates from the early 17th century, when painters in the Low Countries were turning the still life into a subject in its own right. Until then a table of glass and food was background, something behind the main figures. Here it is the whole picture. The gallery lists it simply as a work of the Flemish school, without a name attached, which was common for these northern still lifes: they travelled south as desirable objects long before anyone tracked who had painted them. What it asks for is close looking, at the light caught and bent in the empty glasses.