A (; often shortened to ; plural: ), French for "living picture", is a static scene containing one or more actors or models. They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, and may be theatrically lit. It thus combines aspects of theatre and the visual arts. A tableau may either be 'performed' live, or depicted in painting, photography and sculpture, such as in many works of the Romantic, Aesthetic, Symbolist, Pre-Raphaelite, and Art Nouveau movements. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tableaux sometimes featured ('flexible poses') by virtually nude models, providing a form of erotic entertainment, both on stage and in print. Tableaux continue to the present day in the form of living statues, street performers who busk by posing in costume. Origin Occasionally, a Mass was punctuated with short dramatic scenes and painting-like . They were a major feature of festivities for royal weddings, coronations and royal entries into cities. Often the actors imitated statues or paintings, much in the manner of modern street entertainers, but in larger groups, and mounted on elaborate temporary stands along the path of the main procession. Johan Huizinga, in The Autumn of the Middle Ages, describes the use and design of tableaux vivants in the late middle ages. Many paintings and sculptures probably recreate tableaux vivants, by which art historians sometimes account for groups of rather static figures. Artists were often the designers of public pageanty of this sort. The history of Western visual arts in general, until the modern era, has had a focus on symbolic, arranged presentation, and (aside from direct personal portraiture) was heavily dependent on stationary artists' models in costume – essentially small-scale with the artist as temporary audience. The Realism movement, with more naturalistic depictions, did not begin until the mid-19th century, a direct reaction against Romanticism and its heavy dependence on stylized format. On stage Before radio, film and television, were popular forms of entertainment, even in American frontier towns. Before the age of color reproduction of images, the was sometimes used to recreate artworks on stage, based on an etching or sketch of a painting. This could be done as an amateur venture in a drawing room, or as a more professionally produced series of presented on a theatre stage, one following another, usually to tell a story without requiring all the usual trappings and production of a