Antique Flemish painting with Still Life, oil on canvas

The seventeenth century is the golden century of still life, particularly in Northern Europe (but also in Italy and Spain). There was considerable demand for this type of paintings, mostly from a new audience of middle-class buyers. The large increase in demand favors a process of specialization, with the identification of 'subgenres' linked to the predominant content of the paintings and with specific names. The artists, therefore, specialize in the creation of still lifes whose theme is food, or flowers, or musical instruments and other objects which constitute a particular type of still life, called vanitas (a theme, moreover, to which they often allude still lifes in general).