Emilian School, 18th Century, Still Life With Fruit

Emilian school, 18th century
Still life with fruit and cookies
Oil on canvas, cm 32 x 52,5
With frame cm 44,5 x 64 x 5,5

Composite still life enlivened by a colorful arrangement of fruits. The compositional planes are also highlighted by the supports that contain the first fruits: a delicate silver tray, in the background, and a square stone just ahead. The pictorial mode, which favours a uniform colour scheme, is more detailed in the definition of small details. The milky drops of split figs glide transparently on the leaves below the group. The opaque figurative preference, focused on a neutral and earthy palette, is lit in correspondence with the large apricots in the foreground and the crowded grape berries, ready to create a changing sheet of colors in the corpulent bunch that they constitute.
The painting is attributable to the Emilian cultural context, moderately contained in the range of colors and essential in the figural perfection that characterizes it. A similar pictorial performance was characteristic of Cristoforo Munari (Reggio Emilia, 1667-Pisa, 1720), as shown by the painting now preserved at the Uffizi in Florence. An artist of decanted decoration, Munari was actively engaged in the Emilian territory, adding to it the particular Roman repertoire, appreciated during a stay in the capital, rich in encounters with the Nordic fringes exemplified by Christian Berentz; entered into business with the Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, initially only in epistolary relations, in 1706 Munari entered the Academy of Florentine drawing. The same linear, dry and muffled in the sign, was instead Nicola Levoli (Rimini, 1728-1801), another exponent of the Emilian school of the eighteenth century. The example of Francesco Malagoli (documented until 1779, native of Modena) exemplifies the silent composition of the present, a delicate formal nitore, not at all lavish: the eighteenth-century tradition of Felice Rubbiani, who influenced long the Malagoli, It is also evident in the work under consideration because of the harvest intimism with which the fruits of nature are offered to the viewer. 

The object is in good condition