Representation of the viewer in still life: from Baroque hidden symbolism of the seventeenth century to the phenomenology of perception in Claude Monet’s work

Abstract

Drawing on Norman Bryson’s analysis, this article examines the opposition between the seventeenth-century Baroque still life — overloaded with cultural codes, symbols, and meanings — and Impressionist still life, which addresses visual perception directly, capturing the fleeting impression of light, colour, and form rather than appealing to cultural memory. However, such a contrast obscures a key question: how is the viewer constituted within these traditions, and where exactly is the symbolic located — in the depicted object or in the act of perception itself?

Relying on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception, in which vision is understood as a bodily mode of engaging with the world rather than a passive decoding of information; on Heinrich Wölfflin’s concept of Sehform, where style is determined by how an epoch organises space, light, and line; and on David Freedberg’s account of the viewer, in which the impact of art occurs directly, bypassing reason and addressing the body and the senses, this article considers Dutch still life and the still lifes of Claude Monet as two fundamentally different models of representing the viewer’s experience. It thus advances the hypothesis of a radical shift in the “history of response”: from hidden symbolism encoded in the object to the capacity of vision itself to generate meaning, where light, colour, and brushstroke are not illustrations of a pre-existing content but the very site of the emergence of the symbol.

The article demonstrates a shift in scholarly focus from the description of motifs and styles to the analysis of the construction of the viewer’s position. The proposed theoretical synthesis expands the analytical toolkit for still life and is applicable to the study of later forms of visuality, including modernism and contemporary art.