Natura morta --- literally, dead nature. In our Anglophone culture we use a less graphic, although more colorless, term that is both familiar and popular to refer to the genre of painting known as still life. Although the term natura morta came into existence in the mid-18th century to describe a genre of painting that was already known as "still life" in northern Europe, the genre itself was not necessarily held in high regard at the time. It came in fifth, after history and religious painting, landscapes, and portraiture. Nevertheless, still-life painting was something that elites could indulge in collecting, even to the point of influencing the art market, as they began to decorate their country villas.

Natura Morta is also the title of the new exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery that brings together sumptuous paintings depicting a variety of forms of nature with the concept of collecting. Oftentimes the fruits, flowers, vegetables, and animals are cleverly and symbolically arranged with domestic "forms" such as stemmed glasses, vases, and musical instruments --- even exotica fauna. In this way, the act of collecting itself brings about a certain kind of "death" of the object in that, in the process of collecting, the collector removes an object from its original context and puts it on display in a manner that might not have anything to do with its intended use.

Collecting, of course, is all about the collector: what you know, where you've been, what you like. Anthropological writer James Clifford once referred to collecting as "a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity." Moreover, he said, was that "the self that must possess but cannot have it all learns to select, order, classify in hierarchies --- to make ‘good' collections."

Thus, even bizzarie, those specimens as subjects that are exceptional in size, shape, or some other aspect, become seen as beautiful, even decorative, such as Bartolomeo Bimbi's "Giant Carnation," in which two white flowers streaked with red are so big that they must be supported by canes; or his gigantic "Bunch of Grapes from Ponte alla Badia" that spill over the sides of a large silver platter as they are meant to majestically command our attention.

And there's the other side of the exceptional --- the monstrous and famous --- such as Bimbi's "Cauliflower and Wild Radish" that showcases a gigantic cauliflower and a wild radish in a shape of a human being, or his "Thicket of Wheat," where 180 ears were born from a single grain. Not least in this visual equation is the reminder that big or small, the wondrousness inherent in the natura morta is all due to the creative will of God. (In the case of the wheat there is a direct reference to the bread of the Eucharist.)

It also helps to be a Medici, in terms of access to such a diversity of botanical and zoological exemplars. The Medici was powerful Florentine family whose history goes back to the 14th century. This family of merchants, bankers, and rulers, which also included two popes, was in a position to have commissioned many of the well-known painters and sculptors of the time. For example, Michelangelo and Raphael, famous in their own time and still quite familiar names today, are but two artists employed by the Medici to picture their power and glory. Indeed, Medici patronage and collecting formed the core around which Florentine art developed from the 15th century onwards.

The documentation of things rare and beautiful can be sustained by its other narrative, the one that suggests that all earthly things are secondary to those spiritual in nature. These objects of nature in combination with the hand of man are things that are produced by the labor of working people to be consumed by those in power. The Medici could hire those artists who could find and represent the biggest, the strangest, the most numerous, the most what-have-you, and make it a thing of beauty and wonder (and, no doubt, even something worthy of envy).

In that sense the paintings themselves are such objects. The sensuous oils on canvas or, as in the case of two paintings by Jan van Kessel, oil on copper, are jewels themselves. Just like the exotic tulips, pomegranates, melons, frutti di mare (fish, oysters, crabs, et cetera), birds from the Americas, and expertly crafted musical instruments, these and the paintings depicting them were something only the upper-classes could afford.

It is now somewhat ironic that the taste developed by these elites has become our own: from taste of the ruling class to bourgeois taste to universal taste. It is also ironic how a means of documenting a dead and fleeting "thing" has become itself a thing that is documented and presented and represented through our cultural institutions that frame the rarities that we now call art, and in the end, perpetuate taste as something seemingly "natural" rather than as complicatedly connected to power and the labor of others.

Natura Morta: Still-Life Painting and the Medici Collections | Through May 27 | Memorial Art Gallery, 500 University Avenue | Wednesday-Sunday 11 a.m.-5 p.m., and Thursday until 9 p.m. | General admission is $7; college students with ID and senior citizens $5; children 6-18 $2; free to members, UR students, and children 5 and under. Reduced general admission Thursdays 5-9 p.m. | 473-7720, http://mag.rochester.edu/.