A still life is a painting whose subject is objects that cannot move: cut flowers, fruit, fish, game, bread, glasses and dishes. No person appears in it.
The painter chooses these things, arranges them on a table or a ledge, and builds the whole picture around them. A famous example is Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit, from the late 1590s, kept at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, a library and picture gallery in Milan.
The English name came late. From about 1650, Dutch painters and collectors called these pictures stilleven, motionless nature, and English writers later borrowed the word and turned it into still life.
Italian chose a darker image, natura morta, dead nature, and French took up the same idea as nature morte. One name stresses that nothing moves, the other that nothing is alive.
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Caravaggio's basket shows what these names mean in practice. A wicker basket of fruit rests on the edge of a narrow ledge, seen at eye level, against a bare, pale wall. Grapes and figs spill from it, and leaves curl over the rim.
That is what separates a still life from a painting that merely has fruit in it. A vase on a windowsill behind a portrait, or a loaf on the table of a religious scene, is a detail in a picture about something else. Here the fruit is the subject.
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Pictures of food are much older than any of these words…
What You'll Discover
Caravaggio's view of flowers, reported by a collector.
How Dutch painters built their flower bouquets.
The face hidden in a pewter lid.
How a fish opened the Academy's doors.
What Cézanne did to a table.
Why the vanitas is one kind among many.