This article considers the generic and temporal heterogeneity of a painting titled Holy Family, made by the Antwerp painter Joos van Cleve around 1515. Hans Belting has used Joos's hybrid painting, in which a still life appears before the Virgin and Child, to illustrate where 'the era before art' ends and the era of art proper begins, placing the genre of religious icon and the genre of still life on opposing sides of the line separating the medieval from the modern world. It is to Belting's compelling account of the painting that this article responds by asking what is lost in the drawing of such periodizing lines.

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