Abstract
Marie-José Baudinet : The body and the inanimate in still-life. It is now possible, in the light of recent studies, to analyse still-life painting in a new way. Faced with these tables and buffets, we must consider 18th-century life in the stillness of its digestions, but also death, present in the designation «nature morte ». The representation of food becomes a metaphor for the living body, fixed on a canvas, explicitly abstracted from life. The paintings of Jean Etienne Liotard (1702-1789) have been chosen for his exemplary use of food and skin, and because his Traité de la peinture expresses what is hidden in the painting : the pox. Thus still life is part of the history of the suffering, mortal and lustful body. It is not surprising that it should predominate on the eve of a bourgeois revolution which ushered in the industrial era.
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