Still life with sculpture

By the middle of the 17th century, still life had become a subject in its own right, and one of its branches liked to show the things a cultured household collected. This anonymous Venetian picture, painted around 1650, sets a piece of sculpture among the arranged objects, the kind of antique fragment a collector of the day would prize. Placing a carved figure inside a painting let the artist play one art against another, stone against paint, the fixed against the freshly observed. Works like this were made for the walls of private studies and galleries, where a guest would recognise the taste on display. The painter left no signature, and the canvas is catalogued simply by its subject.