Still Life With Fruit

17th century, Roman school

Still life with fruit

(2) Oil on canvas, cm 43 x 59

With frame, cm 53 x 70

The pair of still lifes examined grapes, peaches, figs, melons and watermelon is for stylistic and formal references to be linked to the hand of a 17th century Roman painter well aware of the works of the Roman painter Giovanni Paolo Castelli, known as Spadino (Rome, 1659 - 1730).

The archival research has made it possible to distinguish three painters from the Castelli family, specialized in the genre of still life: the two brothers Bartolomeo (called the Old) and Giovanni Paolo (called the Swordsman) and his son, Bartolomeo the Younger, also nicknamed Swordman. In particular, it was thanks to Federico Zeri in the fifties that we began to specify progressively the core of still life in Collezione Spada in Rome, generically identified as "Spadino", and assigning four to the hand of the young Bartolomeo (remember the Still Life with grapes, apples and figs and Still Life with peaches, 13 x 29.5 cm, Galleria Spada). The very dark variants of the old "Spadavecchio" were a discriminating element in distinguishing the hand of Giovanni Paolo Castelli from that of the family (Ferdinando Bologna, Natura in posa. Aspetti dell'antica natura morta italiana, 1968 and Luigi Salerno, Nuovi studi sulla natura morta italiana e Nature morte di frutta, 1989). Heir to an already elaborated tradition, John Paul reinterprets with a heavy sense of frankness the most genuine simplicity of the fruits portrayed. Opposing the dual temptation of realism and inventive exuberance, Spadino dedicated himself to painting fruits, rather than flowers, animals, pottery, glass or silver, to evoke the luxury of men and the sumptuousness of nature, Making a symptomatic taste for abundance and splendor combined with the sense of precariousness of vegetation. Formed within the brilliant climate of the naturamorphism of the Capitol, the Spadino never forgot the suggestions arising from the Flemish Abraham Brueghel, who had marked the evolution of the genre in the second century XVII, and not even by the German Christian Berentz, in Italy since 1689. The analysis of natural equipment through sudden turns of color, turning from dark to light lakes, as happens in the present, derived from this particular oltramontana comma, established in the capital and strongly influencing the context.