Still Life with Game Fowl

Juan Sánchez Cotán · c. 1600–3

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

67.8 × 88.7 cm (26 11/16 × 34 15/16 in.); Framed: 86.4 × 108 × 7 cm (34 × 42 1/2 × 2 3/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Mannerism

Still Life with Game Fowl stands as one of the most quietly commanding still lifes of the Spanish Golden Age, its suspended birds and stark geometry radiating a strange, meditative intensity. Juan Sánchez Cotán worked in Toledo at a moment when Spanish painters were beginning to treat humble objects with the same seriousness as religious subjects. His signature device — arranging food and game within a stone window opening against an absolute black void — gives each object an almost sculptural presence. The light rakes across feathers and skin with forensic precision, yet the overall effect is far from cold; there is something devotional in the attention he brings to these ordinary things. Cotán entered the Carthusian monastery of El Paular in 1603, shortly after completing the works that would secure his reputation, and scholars have long noted the austere, contemplative quality of his still lifes seems to anticipate that withdrawal from the world. This hand-painted oil reproduction is made to the same scale as the original, working directly from high-resolution reference material so that the tonal relationships — particularly the subtle gradations of shadow that give the composition its depth — are preserved as closely as the medium allows.