Elegance and Refinement: The Still-Life Paintings of Willem van Aelst

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Through Oct. 14

Willem van Aelst’s still-life paintings beg for close readings, said Blake Gopnik in TheDailyBeast.com. Take Still Life With Ram’s Head, completed in 1652, when the Dutch artist was working as a court painter for the Medicis in Florence. “A severed ram’s head, a rope of liver and lungs above it, and to both sides some gorgeous fruits and vegetables.” Not only are the juxtapositions unconventional, they seem loaded with symbolism. The ram’s head conjures ancient sacrifices, while the organs suggest the Roman practice of divining the future from entrails. I see the image as enacting “some kind of confrontation” between the scientific, religious, and cultural interests of the Medici court. “Could Van Aelst’s picture be about science superseding or completing ancient ways of knowing?”

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He teases viewers that way, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. The 28 paintings in the National Gallery show can be appreciated just for their surface wonders. “Van Aelst was a showman, never stingy with the visual stunts—the glistening drops of water on a grape, the trompe l’oeil sheen on metal.” But he’s always hinting at deeper purposes, including many we can’t discern. Next to Ram’s Head hangs a similar still life, except that this image of dead game feels “strangely tragic, even Christian, in its undertones.” Elsewhere, he seems simply to be doing what a mischievous host will do: throwing together both the high and low to see “whether sparks fly.” He never painted a portrait or a landscape as far as anyone knows, but his canvases never lacked drama. Who left that knife on the table? Who paid for that golden pitcher? “Van Aelst’s limited world turns out to be microscopically panoramic.”