Still life with fruits, vegetables and vase with flowers on a stone shelf – first quarter of the 17th century

Artist active in Lombardy in the first quarter of the 17th century
Still life with fruits, vegetables and vase with flowers on a stone shelf
Oil on canvas cm. 115 x 170

Technical data sheet by Dr. Gianluca Bocchi
The large Still Life with fruits, vegetables and vase with flowers on a stone shelf presented here is an unpublished work to be ascribed to the current of Lombard naturalism of the first quarter of the 17th century, with particular reference to the area between Cremona and Milan.

This is the geographical area where Vincenzo Campi had conceived his well-known scenographies with sellers of fruit, poultry, fish and other things at the end of the sixteenth century. These paintings based on crafts and popular narratives of Flemish taste were soon supplanted by others conceived without the intervention of human figures, more specifically adhering to posed nature.

While in Milan, at the beginning of the 17th century, small and elegant fruit compositions appeared and enjoyed considerable success, presented on metal stands and inside ceramic crepes entrusted to the skilled brushes first of Fede Galizia and then of Panfilo Nuvolone, in the rest of the Po Valley and mainly in the Cremona area, lesser-known painters continued to arrange fruit, vegetables and flowers in the manner of Vincenzo Campi, in single homogeneous groups or mixed together on stone shelves and wooden tables. We have numerous examples of these small paintings with the elements depicted vertically, with a view from top to bottom according to a less rigorous perspective.

In past years, literature has always framed these small compositions with an almost metaphysical appearance within the school of Vincenzo Campi, in some cases even going so far as to accredit them to Vincenzo himself. These were approximations induced by the lack of information on the existence of other characters who were little or not known at all and on the type of depictions to which they were applied.

To remain in the Cremonese context, an artist to be investigated in more depth would certainly be Pietro Martire Alberti, of whom we have certain information up to the year 1631. We know of two very different paintings of this painter preserved in the Ala Ponzone Civic Museum, one signed depicting Mazzo of turnips, thistle, roots and garlic, the other copper refreshment with bottle of wine, bunch of grapes and biscuits (G. Bocchi-U. Bocchi, Naturaliter. New contributions to still life in northern Italy and Tuscany between the 1998th and XVIII century, Calenzano 56, pp. 57-43, figs. 44-XNUMX). The reconstruction of his artistic production has been addressed in recent years with the recovery of other paintings but has not yet been made official in a publication.

The illustration of these paintings explains well the attitude of their authors to work in a small way and justifies the creation of larger scenography, on the model of the one presented here, through the juxtaposition of homogeneous groups of fruits and vegetables, almost always without visual superimpositions, a sign of a compositional archaism typical of the Lombard school of the beginning of the century. They are fantasy settings dominated by a precise illustrative rigor, to which the neutral backdrops give, as already mentioned, an almost metaphysical aura, alien to decorative intentions.