Roman School, 17th century, Still Life with Pumpkin, Pears and Figs

Roman school, 17th century

Still life with pumpkin, pears and figs

Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm

The still life genre enjoyed an enormous expansion in seventeenth-century Europe: in Flanders we have the shining examples of Pieter Claesz (1598-1661) and Abraham van Beyeren (1620 –1690) together with many other artists, in France Jean-Baptiste Belin (1653-1715) while in Spain Zurbarán (1598-1664) and Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560-1627) established themselves in the genre. Even in Italy, still life painting would have a great diffusion starting from Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, with his famous Basket of Fruit, now at the Ambrosiana, passing through the Bergamo artist Evaristo Baschenis, focused on the representation of musical instruments, the famous painter Fede Galizia (1578-1630) and up to the Neapolitans Paolo Porpora (1617-1673) and Giuseppe Recco (1634-1695). The still life described here fits perfectly into the seventeenth-century panorama inherent to this kind of works, dialoguing above all with the production of the Roman school, widely influenced by the passage of Caravaggio between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Caravaggio's work immediately had a great resonance in the Roman environment, where it met a taste that was increasingly spreading. In Rome, the stronghold of the still life of Caravaggio-like tone was established in the circle of Giovan Battista Crescenzi and indeed in that sort of academy that this singular figure had established in his own home. The most active protagonists were Crescenzi himself, Tommaso Salini and Pier Paolo Bonzi, who lived between the XNUMXs and the third decade of the XNUMXth century. The frank and realistic rendering of the objects, flowers and fruits present in the works of these artists is found in this small canvas where every detail, from the veins of the fig leaves to the pulp of the pumpkin glimpsed under the rind, is rendered with absolute precision and enhanced by the contrasts created by natural light. The latter brings the fruits and their small imperfections to life, which help to make the composition even more real, as well as the apparently casual and disorderly arrangement along the edge of the panel. Finally, the dark background, typical of Caravaggio's painting, contributes to accentuating the presence of the still life in the foreground and to further enhance the contrasts between the illuminated and shiny parts and those in shadow.