Seven Apples

Abstract The still lifes of Juan Sánchez Cotán have garnered admiration since the time of their production at the turn of the seventeenth century. Hailed among the first independent still-life paintings (or, bodegones ), the extant canvases have proven enchanting—and enigmatic. In this essay, I analyze one of the painter’s most famous works, the 1602 Bodegón de caza, hortalizas y frutas in light of a text he knew and employed: namely, Vignola and Danti’s 1583 The Two Rules of Practical Perspective (Le due regole della prospettiva pratica) . This essay presents a new discovery: the 1602 Bodegón duplicitously replicates Vignola and Danti’s central perspectival model, the “optical pyramid” or “cone,” in the form of seven suspended apples. Drawing from the breadth of Vignola and Danti’s text, I follow the contentious development of angular or Euclidean perspective in Spain to argue that Sánchez Cotán’s canvas manipulates the instabilities of perspective, and the ambivalences of vision, latent within the perspectival model and within the planar image. Thus the canvas may be said to open, like a doubled window, those very domains it superimposes: the mimetic objects of the painter’s vision and the theoretical objects, or models, of vision itself.