Bodegón

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The term Bodega in Spanish can mean "pantry" or "tavern" or wine vault. Bodegón is a derivative term use in art, while describing a large bodega, may be thought as describing it in a derogatory fashion.

In Spanish art, it refers to still life paintings, depicting pantry items, such as victuals, game, and drink. Others have defined it as kitchen or shop pictures. Starting in the Baroque period, such paintings became popular in Spain. The tradition of still life painting appears to have started and was far more popular in the contemporary Northern Low Countries, today Belgium and Netherlands (then Flemish and Dutch artists), than it ever was in uniformly Catholic Italy. In Spain, however, the thematic became popular.

Still life painting in Spain, however, was austere; it differed from the Dutch still parallels, which often contain both rich banquets surrounded by ornate and luxurious items of fabric or glass. 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. Even while both Dutch and Spanish still lifes often had an embedded moral purpose, the austerity, which some find akin to a hair shirt fashion or the bleakness of some of the Spanish plateaus, appears to reject the sensual pleasures, plenitude, and luxury of Dutch still life paintings.

[edit] Bodegón painters

[edit] Note

Velazquez paintings of the The Waterseller of Seville , Old woman frying eggs, and The lunch are often described as a Bodegón due to its depiction of jars and foodstuff; however, technically they are a mixed "genre" of genre painting, bambochades and still life.

[edit] References

Nochlin, Linda' The Politics of Vision : Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society. New York: Harper & Row, (1989). Pae 30.
JC Robinson: The Bodegones and Early Works of Velazquez, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs,1906, page 172.