Gabriel Lewis (b. 1999)

Venetian Still-Life

Oil on canvas

Size: 34cm x 38cm (canvas)

Signed

There is an atmospheric eeriness to Gabriel Lewis’s Venetian Still-Life. The moon, shrouded in a veil of clouds and half-hidden by the blue curtain, provides a stark backlight for the famous dome of Venice’s Santa Maria della Saltute. The dark church peeking out from the curtain sits in sharp contrast to the brightly lit skull in the foreground; it is rather appropriate that Santa Maria della Salute was built as a votive offering of thanks to Our Lady of Health (Santa Maria della Salute) for the deliverance from a devastating outbreak of plague in the 1630s. The church, quietly sitting above the waters of the Grand Canal, parallels the skull as symbol of human fragility and transience. 

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But Santa Maria della Salute, with its curvaceous buttresses, bulging dome, and strange octagonal shape is equally a symbol of baroque excess and the decadence of the Venetian carnival. The festival was at its most raucous during the seventeenth century; the baroque carnival began to supersede Venice’s maritime, military, and economic reputation and became the new symbol of a city increasingly notorious for its extravagant festivities. Placing the carnival mask besides the skull in the painting links festive excess with the recognisable memento-mori. The mask, with its empty eyes, sits hollow on the table; human vivacity is undivorceable here with a looming, inescapable futility. The mask’s curved beak recalls the famous Venetian costume of Medico della Pesta (plague doctor) or the Zanni of the theatrical Commedia dell’Arte: the Zanni, with a low forehead, bulging eyebrows, and long nose is the ‘Fool’ character whose stupidity is a source of laughter for the other characters and the audience.

Gabriel’s Venetian Still-Life fuses the traditional themes of human transience, futility, and vanity with a distinctly Venetian atmosphere. The modelling of the various shapes with careful shading is masterfully executed: particularly impressive is the detailed wrinkles along the tablecloth, streaking down in small creases of shade and stark white paint. Hanging next to Cauchoi’s (1855-1910) Nature Morte à la Brioche, Gabriel’s Still-Life continues the themes of memento-mori so key to the genre of still-life whilst staking a claim for the continued prevalence of meticulous technique in the modern age. Still-life may deal with mortal transience, but after nearly two centuries, the classical style in paint is certainly not dead.