Changing Stillness: Notes on Rhetoric and Ontology in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Still Life

This essay examines the distinctive knot of ontology and rhetoric woven by sixteenthand seventeenth-century still life. Framed against a Foucauldian analysis of the Âge classique and its epistemic order, it seeks to illuminate the subtle shifts this minor genre introduced into the culture from which it emerged. The central argument is that, through its pictorial features—meticulous naturalism, the absence of a thematic centre, and indifference to the historia—still life made visible the onto-linguistic fabric that structured the classification of beings in its time. Moreover, these very features endowed the genre with a peculiar capacity to shift both the place and the “essence” of the things depicted. In doing so, still life stages a singular form of change that unfolds within the immobility of its representation.