The term bodega in Spanish can mean “pantry”, “tavern”, or “wine cellar”. The derivative term bodegón is an augmentative that refers to a large bodega, usually in a derogatory fashion. In Spanish art, a bodegón is a still life painting depicting pantry items, such as victuals, game, and drink, often arranged on a simple stone slab, and also a painting with one or more figures, but with significant still life elements, typically set in a kitchen or tavern. It also refers to low-life or everyday objects, which can be painted with flowers, fruits, or other objects to display the painter’s mastery.
Bodegón was already used by the Spanish art writers Francisco Pacheco del Río (1564-1654) and Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco (1653-1726) on early images by Diego Velázquez, in which this, probably inspired by the Dutch so-called kitchen pieces rendered everyday scenes in which still life arranged dishes and food played a significant role. Joachim Beuckelaer and Pieter Aertsen were important representatives of this genre, which was cultivated in the southern Netherlands, which belonged to Spain at the time. Also on the detour via the (then also Spanish) Naples or works by Vincenzo Campi or Annibale Carracci these new ideas could have come to Spain. In terms of cultural history, this turn to simple things and everyday life in the public life is related to a departure from mannerist artificiality, a closer observation of reality, a realism that can also be observed in other genres of European painting. Soon after the beginning of the 17th century, these models are taken up in Spain. In the early Bodegones of Velázquez, the still-life elements are already pushed into the foreground, but still part of figurative situations or even use a biblical background scene to justify the “lower” theme choice, even after the Dutch model.
Bodegón is an still life genre, mainly pictorial, which represents inanimate elements (food, game, fruit, flowers, various objects …) organized in a certain way within the framework defined by the artist, but with not any symbolic intention. There is no artful coincidence in the composition of the objects, … which suggests the practical handling of things”. In a broader sense, the term bodegon is used as a synonym of still life.
An authentic still life is born the day a painter makes the fundamental decision to choose as a subject and to organize into a plastic entity a group of objects. That according to the time and the environment where he works, he loads them with all sorts of spiritual allusions, does not change his deep design of artist.
Starting in the Baroque period, such paintings became popular in Spain in the second quarter of the 17th century. The tradition of still life painting appears to have started and was far more popular in the contemporary Low Countries, today Belgium and Netherlands (then Flemish and Dutch artists), than it ever was in southern Europe. Northern still lifes had many subgenres; the breakfast piece was augmented by the trompe-l’œil, the flower bouquet, and the vanitas. In Spain, there were much fewer patrons for this sort of thing, but a type of breakfast piece did become popular, featuring a few objects of food and tableware laid on a table. Though now considered a Spanish invention, the classic trompe-l’œil presentation of fruit on a stone slab was common in ancient Rome.
History:
Bodegon appeared at the end of the XVI century. based on Italian samples. Three ‘bodegones de Italia’ were written in 1592. The earliest known examples of market scenes (Granada, Pal. Carlos V), signed by Juan Esteban, appeared in Ubeda in 1606; the first kitchen scene – approx. 1604 g, belongs to the hand of Vincenzo Campi and is an integral part of the decoration of the ceiling of the gallery of prelates in the palace of Arzobispal in Seville .
In Italy, the bodegones were spread under the influence of the realistic manner of the artist Michelangelo and Caravaggio. Appeal to the “low” genre was a reaction to the sophistication of Italian Mannerism . Later the word “Bodegon” was called the genre of still life as a whole.
At the same time, if not even a few years earlier, the first pure still lifes, that is, without staffage, emerge in Spain, which today are also counted among the bodegones. At the latest since 1602, Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627) from Toledo created painted arrangements of unprocessed natural products, which, seemingly artlessly placed side by side against a dark background, stand out in the sharp light. Although the individual painted objects presumably lack a direct emblematic (symbolic) sense, the simplicity and unpretentiousness of the way they are presented and the choice of subject is not to be understood without a religious-moral sense. Correspondingly, in 1603, Sánchez Cotán retired to a Carthusian Monastery, which led an extremely ascetic life. The most important representative of the following generation of still life painters is Juan van der Hamen y León (1596-1631), a child of Flemish parents. Although influenced by Sánchez Cotán, with van der Hamen (and his contemporaries) the palette becomes more colorful, the subjects more precious, the pictorial space deeper. With him the floral still life is added as a genre. He worked for the court and belonged to a circle of intellectuals. In the work of the only two years younger Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), the still lifes play a significant, but not central role. In their austere arrangement and barren appearance, they are more akin to the work of the older Cotan.
Still life painting in Baroque Spain was often austere; it differed from the Flemish Baroque still lifes, which often contain both rich banquets surrounded by ornate and luxurious items with fabric or glass. In bodegones, the game is often plain dead animals still waiting to be skinned. The fruits and vegetables are uncooked. The backgrounds are bleak or plain wood geometric blocks, often creating a surrealist air. Both Netherlandish and Spanish still lifes often had a moral vanitas element. Their austerity, akin to the bleakness of some of the Spanish plateaus, never copies the sensual pleasures, plenitude, and luxury of many Northern European still life paintings.
The Velázquez paintings The Waterseller of Seville, Old woman frying eggs, and The lunch are often described as bodegones due to the artist’s depiction of jars and foodstuff. Some people reject this use of the term, calling them instead a mixture of genre painting in Bamboccianti style and still life.
In the eighteenth century, bodegones continues to enjoy a boom among Spanish audiences. The paintings by Luis Eugenio Meléndez also show dark backgrounds, bringing the objects close to the eye of the beholder, but the light is more even and the image composition more composed, “academic”. In any case, all allegorical and metaphysical meanings have disappeared.
Significant peculiarities distinguish the court-ceremonial world of the Spanish bodegón in a remarkable way from the bourgeois-practical life of the citizen in the northerly still life: the Flemish and Dutch meal pictures offer lush and in a context of action (preparation, food) motives, while on the Spanish representations any indication of consumption is eliminated.
Types
Bodegones are divided into two main types:
Still lifes (usually ascetic, on a neutral background); the image of scenes in a tavern, on the street, in a shop, with the participation of a small number of characters (mostly commoners), combining elements of the everyday scene and still life .
Bodegones allowed the artist to combine a genre scene with a still-life .
Bodegón, in particular, was the favorite genre of Diego Velasquez during the first, “Seville” period of his work . To this genre repeatedly resorted to Zurbaran.
The genre of the bodegones had its traditional forms – scenes in a semi-dark room with a dim light source, in which the light stains are particularly contrasted, the volumes and outlines of the figures are singled out .
Bodegon was considered a “low” genre in the hierarchy of genres . The paintings were considered “insignificant” and even “discrediting” . They were openly ridiculed by rival Velasquez, Vincenzo Carducci in his Diálogos de la pintura (1633).