The book is dedicated to an important and urgent problem that attracts the attention of not only specialists, but also all art lovers. These are riddles of the semantic content of the works of the XVI-XVII centuries, the solution of which allows you to penetrate the essence of each individual monument, as well as determine their most general patterns. An attempt to solve this problem was made on the material of Western European, primarily Dutch, still life and the most popular collections of emblems at the time. The author of the book sought not so much to present a detailed iconological analysis of individual works as to outline the ways of their objective reading and comprehension by the readers themselves.