EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

SILENT PAGES: THE SECRET LIFE OF BOOKS IN PAINTINGS

SEBALDINE REHM

June 23, 2025

Books are meant to be read, not just seen—so what happens when painters render them unreadable? From saints and scholars to vanitas still lifes and women lost in thought, this essay explores the strange lives of books in classical paintings. Neither fully symbolic nor fully real, they become metaphors of mind, tokens of vanished lives. A silent archaeology of reading, preserved in oil.

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Books are not meant to be simply looked at. They are meant to be held, opened, read, passed between hands, smudged, underlined, forgotten, rediscovered. The moment a book enters a painting, it becomes something else: stilled, sealed, unreadable, its words frozen in the silence of oil or acrylic. Its content is no longer textual, but visual, no longer discursive, but symbolic.

This is what makes books in paintings so strange, so haunting. We recognize them instantly, but we cannot read them. They are illegible by design. And yet we keep trying. We peer at their bindings, guess at their titles, wonder who placed them there and why. In the world of painting, the book becomes a cipher: a device for staging identity, piety, intellect, leisure, even death. It stands in for the act of reading without granting access to it.

Unlike portraits or landscapes, books in paintings are not meant to tell us what they themselves are about. They are there to tell us something about someone else—about the saint, the scholar, the noblewoman, the artist, the vanished hand that once turned their pages. They are artifacts of presence, but also of absence. You can see the book, but not what’s inside it. You can see the reader, but not what she’s reading.

In this sense, books in classical paintings operate not as objects, but as metaphors of the mind—external signs of something internal. They tell us what cannot be shown: a thought, a memory, a prayer, a moment of disappearance. And across centuries of devotional scenes, portraits, domestic interiors, and still lifes, books repeatedly perform this function. They mark a person’s inner life without revealing it. They become vessels of meaning without ever speaking a word.

What follows is not a history of books themselves, but a visual archaeology of how painters have used them—silently, persistently—to capture what cannot be painted: the act of reading.

In early religious art, the book is rarely just a book. It is a stand-in for scripture, revelation, divine order. When the Virgin Mary is shown reading, it is about not leisure or study, but spiritual readiness. The book becomes a theological symbol—chaste, obedient, full of grace.

Take, for instance, Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (1430s)—not the well-known fresco in the convent of San Marco in Florence, where the Virgin kneels empty-handed in austere contemplation, but one of the earlier panel paintings, such as the version now in the Prado in Madrid. The Virgin is interrupted mid-reading by the angel Gabriel. Her book, likely a Book of Hours, is open but not legible. The scene is hushed, the perspective flattened. The book marks her piety, her silent interiority. She reads, and in reading, she prepares herself for the Word made flesh.

Antonello da Messina, Saint Jerome in His Study, ca. 1475. Oil on wood, 46 x 36 cm

Compare this to Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study (ca. 1475), where the book multiplies—no longer one sacred volume, but a library of them. Jerome, the translator of the Bible into Latin, is shown in architectural isolation, surrounded by books arranged like relics. Here, the book is not just holy, but also human—subject to order, labor, study. Both paintings place the reader at the center, yet their atmospheres diverge. Fra Angelico gives us divine interruption; Antonello gives us intellectual devotion. In one, the book initiates the scene. In the other, it organizes the entire world.

As Europe moved into the Renaissance and literacy expanded, books shed some of their sacred aura and acquired new meanings. They became indicators of class, education, and taste. To be painted with a book was to say something about oneself, or to have the painter say it for you.

Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Erasmus, 1523. Oil on wood, 43 x 33 cm

Hans Holbein the Younger’s Portrait of Erasmus (1523) captures the Dutch humanist looking not outward, but downward, mid-writing, mid-thought. The book in his hand serves as a quiet monument to intellect. The world recedes. The scholar remains.

Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait with Book, 1554. Oil on canvas, 20 x 15 cm

Contrast this with Self-Portrait with Book (1554) by Sofonisba Anguissola. A young woman, calmly dignified, presents herself as someone who reads—and who writes. The gesture is political. In a time when women’s access to education was limited, the presence of the book is both a declaration and a defense.

Rembrandt, Philosopher in Meditation, 1632. Oil on wood, 28 x 34 cm

Later, Rembrandt’s Philosopher in Meditation (1632) roughens the image. Gone is the polish of Erasmus or the poise of Anguissola. The scholar is old. The room is dark, the desk cluttered. The books are used, not posed. What was once prestige has become persistence.

In these three portraits, the book shifts in tone: from authority (Holbein the Younger) to assertion (Anguissola), to intimacy (Rembrandt). The same object means something different each time, depending on who holds it.

By the seventeenth century, the book had moved into the domestic interior. No longer a public display of virtue or knowledge, it became a site of personal immersion. The act of reading itself—solitary, contemplative, absorbing—became a subject worth painting.

Johannes Vermeer, Woman Reading a Letter, ca. 1663. Oil on canvas, 47 x 39 cm

Johannes Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter (ca. 1663) does not show us a book, but still depicts the act of reading. A woman stands before a window. Her face is calm, her thoughts elsewhere. A map hangs behind her, suggesting the world; the letter tethers her to it. We are left to imagine what the letter says, who sent it, and whether she is about to smile or weep.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, A Young Girl Reading, ca. 1770. Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm

Compare this to Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s A Young Girl Reading (ca. 1770). Here, the woman is younger, seated, dressed in soft yellow. Her cheeks are flushed. She smiles faintly. The book is not sacred, not scholarly, but something delicious. Pleasure curls in the margins.

Mary Cassatt’s The Reader (1877) brings yet another shift. No longer decorative or flirtatious, her reader is serious, self-contained. The setting is private, but there is nothing ornamental in her concentration. The painting insists on the legitimacy of her absorption.

Mary Cassatt, The Reader, 1877. Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm

Together, these paintings chart a transition: from reading as message, to reading as mood, to reading as identity. The book disappears more and more into the reader, until the page itself becomes a kind of mirror.

There is one final category in which books appear: as reminders of futility. In vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century, books sit alongside skulls, extinguished candles, broken instruments. Their message is blunt: All knowledge ends in dust.

In Pieter Claesz’s Vanitas Still Life (1630), the book is barely distinguishable from the other items. It slouches. It ages. Its pages are yellowed, its leather cracked. The candle beside it has been snuffed. The clock ticks on.

Pieter Claesz, Vanitas Still Life, 1630. Oil on panel, 40 x 56 cm

Edvert Collier’s Still Life with a Volume of Wither’s “Emblemes” (1696) is more ornate, but no less fatal. The book’s title page gleams, but the surrounding scene is one of clutter, overreach, and decay. The more you know, it seems to say, the more you leave behind. Here, the book returns to its objecthood. Not sacred, not noble, not sensual, but terminal. The painted book becomes a kind of closed coffin. It once spoke, but now it rests.

Edvert Collier, Still Life with a Volume of Wither’s “Emblemes”, 1696. Oil on canvas, 84 x 108 cm

Why do artists continue to engage with books in their works?

Perhaps because they remind us of the act of thinking. Of privacy, of absorption, of reaching inward. The books in classical paintings do not speak, but they pulse with implication. They are silent pages that once echoed with thought. We do not read them; we read the figures who hold them, the spaces they inhabit, the gestures they preserve.

And yet there is something deeper, almost melancholy, in this recurring image of a book that cannot be read. Something that speaks not only to the nature of representation, but to the condition of both painting and literature today. Both are slow forms. Both are forms of attention. Both are built for lingering, not skimming. And both, in their own way, are about vanishing—about holding on to what disappears.

A book in a painting is a double anachronism. It is a painted image of a printed thing, neither of which belongs comfortably to the present. Both were once technologies of communication and preservation. Now they feel like emblems of loss. In a world saturated with images and flooded with words, the painted book has become a ghost of two eras: the age of reading and the age of looking.

There is something tender, even defiant, about that.

In the end, to paint a book is to believe in its endurance, not as an object or medium, but as a metaphor. A book in a painting does not need to be legible. Its power lies in being unread. It points to something just out of reach: a mind at work, a soul in contemplation, a past that continues to whisper, even as it fades.

And maybe that is what unites all these images, from the Virgin with her Book of Hours, to the scholar’s cluttered desk, to the woman lost in her yellow-paged novel: the sense that something essential is happening behind the surface. That within the silence of the painted page lies an entire world. Not lost, but held.

Sebaldine Rehm (b. May 1968 in Paris) is an independent historian of images and ideas. She writes about the afterlives of objects, especially those no longer used as intended. Her work drifts between art history, minor literature, and quiet forms of devotion. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Institut Supérieur d’Études sur la Rémanence des Textes in Avignon, France.

Cover image: Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, ca. 1430. Tempera on poplar panel, 192 x 190 cm