Paolo Paoletti, still life with fruit, vegetables and mushrooms

Paolo Paoletti (Padua, circa 1671 – Udine, 1735)

Still life with vegetables, fruit and mushrooms

Oil on canvas, 76 x 106 cm

With frame, 87 x 117 cm

Criticism sheet Prof. Alberto Crispo

The unpublished painting illustrated here depicts vegetables, mushrooms, fruit and flowers on sloping stone planks; in particular we note cardoons, celery, curly lettuce, cucumbers, avocado leaves, apples, almonds and different floral varieties. The still life is a typical work of Paolo Paoletti (Padua 1671 circa – Udine 1735), as revealed by comparisons with other works by the artist: see in particular a painting formerly in the collections of the Counts Thun, recently acquired by the Autonomous Province of Trento, in which we find the large cardoon around which the entire composition revolves. The same reappears in other examples of our painter, such as a still life formerly on the Roman antiques market erroneously attributed to Agostino Verrocchi by Federico Zeri (Zeri Photo Library, entry no. 63568), where we also see, very similar, avocado leaves, curly lettuce and cucumbers. The mushrooms are then reproduced in a large canvas which appeared on 8 July 2010 at Sotheby's in London, lot 188, with an absurd reference to the circle of Giuseppe Vicenzino, which also depicts flowers perfectly consistent with those outlined in our painting.

Finally, we can point out that the curly lettuce and the celery reappear, in very similar forms, among the elements of a still life that was sold on the English market more than ten years ago (Christie's South Kensington, 11 July 2008, lot 97, as part of the circle of Abraham Brueghel). Unlike other specialists in this pictorial genre, our artist was already remembered by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art historians, including Luigi Lanzi, according to whom “He was especially notable in flowers, and he also portrayed fruit, herbs, fish and game with great truth” (L. Lanzi, Storia pittorica della Italia…, III, Florence 1823, pp. 241-242). He was also one of the first still life painters to whom a monograph was dedicated (T. Miotti, Le nature morte di Paolo Paoletti, Udine 1968) and thanks to more recent studies, further information has been added on his life and artistic career (in this regard see at least G. Bocchi, Paolo Paoletti “industre emulator della Natura”, in Quadri a fiori e frutti. Dipinti di natura morta in Castel Thun e nei musei trentini, exhibition catalogue, edited by E. Mich, Trento 2009, pp. 75-83; A. Craievich, Una traccia veneziana per Paolo Paoletti, in L' impegno e la conoscenza. Studi di storia dell'arte in onore di Egidio Martini, edited by F. Pedrocco, Verona 2009, pp. 226-231). We know therefore that he was born in Padua around 1671, since the death certificate of 1735 says he was about sixty-four years old, and that he moved to Udine very early, he was not yet twenty years old. We also have news of a stay in Venice, having been registered with the local Fraglia dei pittori from 1708 to 1715, even if already at the latter date he was listed as “outside” and since 1712 he had been exempted from paying the relative tax, perhaps because he no longer resided in the city. It is therefore probable that at forty years of age he returned to Udine, where he was protected by Count Leonardo Caiselli, who hosted him in his palace in Borgo San Cristoforo, and he painted still lifes for his patron and for other clients, as Lanzi also reports: “The family that hosted him has an entire room of these delights; and many have them in other houses within and outside Friuli” (L. Lanzi, Storia pittorica… cit., p. 315). His paintings were in Palazzo Giacomelli, Palazzo de' Concina, the villa d'Attimis Maniago di Buttrio, the residence of the Florio counts, the villa Canciani in Varmo and the Valentinis castle in Tricesimo, while other works were in the Wram collection in Gorizia and in the castle of the Zoppola counts near Pordenone. Paoletti died in Udine in 1735, as confirmed by documents kept in the archive of the church of San Cristoforo.