Stilife

Stilife is a term used for a genre of visual art that presents inanimate subject matter arranged in a deliberate composition. In many contexts, stilife is simply an alternate spelling of still life, though some sources use it to emphasize the arrangement and materiality of objects. The genre spans painting, photography, and digital media, and often focuses on making visible the qualities of light, color, texture, and form.

Origins and development: The still life tradition began in late medieval and early modern Europe and flourished most prominently in the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century. Dutch painters such as Willem Claesz. Heda, Jan Davidsz. de Heem, and Pieter Claesz produced elaborate table-top scenes of foods, utensils, flowers, and other objects, frequently with symbolic layers such as vanitas motifs that comment on mortality and abundance. The genre spread to other regions and later fed into broader artistic explorations in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as into contemporary practices.

Subjects and techniques: Stilife works commonly depict fruits, flowers, vessels, kitchenware, and other everyday items, arranged to explore form, color relationships, light, and surface texture. Techniques emphasize composition, tonal balance, and controlled lighting to render sheen, translucency, and reflection. In painting, oils on canvas were standard; in photography and digital media, staging, capture settings, and post-production shape the final appearance.

Contemporary relevance: Stilife remains active in traditional painting and in photographic and digital contexts, where artists use the genre to examine material culture, perception, and conceptual ideas, sometimes with irony or social commentary.