explored in four very different chapters in Bryson's Looking at the Overlooked (henceforth LO); as a vehicle for discussing visual representation by Bann in The True Vine (TV) and as a premise upon which to secure Cezanne's greatness as one of the key proponents of modernism for Verdi. The links between them may be tenuous and Bryson begins provocatively by questioning the very existence of still life: can examples of xenia from Pompeii justifiably be placed alongside still lifes produced in the United Provinces in the seventeenth century or in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, and form any kind of coherent and meaningful category? Examples which appear to demonstrate no cultural, historical or even stylistic links exhibit a diversity which appears to render the so-called genre of still life so wide as to be virtually meaningless. The very term genre seems to depend upon essentialist assumptions when what holds the perceived category together is at best a set of family resemblances. Bryson suggests that a kind of coherence can be found in the category still life produced not only by '(a) the institution of criticism, from the seventeenth century to the present day, and (b) by the painters themselves, working within pre-established material series, but (c) as produced by the actual objects with which still life painting deals, and the level of material culture to which those objects belong'. Of course, the category gains continuity from other features too (and Bryson acknowledges these). The complete absence of human form is common across historical and cultural divides, and is manifested in still life's opposing 'the anthropocentrism of the higher genres, [for] it assaults the centrality, value and prestige of the human subject'. Bryson also suggests that still life is a type of painting which has been liberated from the tyranny of narrative.1 Despite very different and arresting beginnings (Bann's disquisition on the cultural resonances of the grape is as memorable a piece of writing on art as one is ever likely to encounter), the overlapping of examples both textual and visual between LO and TV threatens at times to descend to the formulaic. In their transhistorical analyses (Bryson's 'family resemblances' allows him to switch between relatives and ancestors with little respect for historical circumstances), any examination of the social practice of still-life painting is largely overlooked in favour of a common methodology which acknowledges that still lifes' 'meaning' can at best be interpreted as the product of certain shared systems of signification. Such proleptic sleights-of-hand are perhaps ultimately frustrating since the kind of metadiscourses in which both indulge betray the absence of much empirical work that still needs to be done on still-life painting (and sculpture).2 Both Bann and Bryson establish a new set of topoi for stilllife painting and in their apparent consensus in the choice of examples and methodology it would be all too easy to substitute one orthodoxy for another. And yet because they question and go beyond much of the empty formalist analysis of the modernist still life (Roger Fry's exegesis on Cezanne's work seems paradigmatic) or the unproblematic emblematic reading of seventeenth-century examples of the genre (against which Svetlana Alpers has railed), and introduce sophisticated and provocative analyses drawing on semiotics, psychoanalysis and, in Bryson's case, feminism, then they are to be applauded. The tendency is to read TV and LO in conjunction and in doing so one stumbles upon an intertextual morass. So much seems well-rehearsed and