Short answers, pulled from the story.
A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects that are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells) or human-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes). The term also includes the painting of dead animals, especially game.
Still life has roots in Ancient Greco-Roman art and the Middle Ages, appearing in Egyptian tomb paintings and Roman mosaics at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Villa Boscoreale. It emerged as a distinct genre and professional specialization in Western painting by the late 16th century, with Netherlandish painting of the 16th and 17th centuries establishing it as an independent category.
The English term still life derives from the Dutch word stilleven. Many Romance languages, as well as Greek, Polish, Russian, and Turkish, use terms meaning dead nature instead, which is also the source of the Italian term natura morta and the French nature morte.
A vanitas painting is a type of still life in which sumptuous arrangements of fruit, flowers, books, musical instruments, fine silver, and crystal are accompanied by symbolic reminders of life's impermanence, such as a skull, an hourglass, a burning candle, or fruit beginning to spoil. The genre was especially popular in the Netherlands and spread from Holland to Flanders, Germany, Spain, and France.
Several forces converged: religious images were forbidden in the Dutch Reformed Protestant Church, cutting off artists' traditional market; Dutch middle-class buyers replaced the Church and court as principal patrons; and there was widespread enthusiasm for horticulture, especially the tulip, recently imported from Turkey. Still life was generally sold in open markets or by dealers rather than commissioned, giving artists freedom to choose their own subjects.
Between 1910 and 1920, Cubist artists including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris painted many still-life compositions, often featuring musical instruments, bringing still life to the forefront of artistic innovation. Picasso's oval Still Life with Chair Caning from 1912 was among the first Synthetic Cubist collage works, in which objects overlap and merge into the background, losing individual surface texture in a manner nearly opposite to traditional still-life goals.