What is still life? Encyclopaedias convey that "still life is principally a painting discipline termed nature morte (dead nature) in Romance languages, while the German and Anglo-Saxon environment refers to it as still-leven, stilleben, or still life. It is based on an artificially created microcosm. Still life consists of various objects that serve people as foodstuffs or accompany their everyday life". Although the still life genre has a long tradition, the Middle Ages, denying the human body and despising the beauty and values of earthly life, saw it employed only as attributes and symbols in religious paintings in order to emphasise and underline certain individual religious ideas and qualities. The onset of the burgher culture in the mid-14th century gave rise to steady progress of a more realistic mode of expression. This development culminated after 1500 in the arrival of the renaissance and humanism, when the possibilities of representing nature in its broad variety multiplied. Modern-era still life probably originated in Italy in the second half of the 16th century, in the milieu of humanist elite. A crucial factor in the birth of the Italian still life was the re-discovery of ancient literary sources and evidence of the developed material culture of antiquity. The reading and translation of ancient Greek and Roman authors inspired attempts to reconstruct the ancient cultures, especially in the shape of rural villas with their splendid painted decorations. Greek and Roman sources provided impressive depictions of famous works of ancient art and modern-era artists aspired to re-create them. One of the most inspirational works for these artists was Pliny's Naturalis historiae libri, with its stories of their ancient predecessors. A story that became particularly popular was that of the two acclaimed painters, Zeuxis of Heracleia and Parrhasios of Ephesus. The two artists held a competition as to which of them could paint a better picture. Zeuxis's grapes appeared so lifelike that birds flocked around them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasios to unveil his picture, realising too late that the veil was what had been painted. Zeuxis admitted his defeat: he had fooled the birds but his rival had deceived him. The feats of both these ancient artists found admirers among modern-age painters, who tried to imitate nature as closely as possible. Trompe-l'oeil paintings became sought after among art collectors, earning artists recognition and fame. Renaissance artists drew inspiration not only from literary sources but also from archaeology. Still lifes on the walls of ancient villas provided them with new subjects and models for capturing the refraction and reflection of light around inanimate objects, the transparency of glass goblets and vases, the shadows cast by standing objects, as well as the illusionary rendering of the space in which the objects occur. Renaissance painters processed and evolved the new subject matter and templates in their own manner, in the shape of various fruit, flower, kitchen and hunting still lifes. Giovanni da Udine (1487-1564) was the first artist to be referred to as a still life painter in art literature. His natural-science study of hazelnuts opens the walk through Armida's garden, the world of the Italian still life in the Moravian Gallery, Brno.
