Still-Life with a Basket of Fruit with Grapes, a Melon, Pomegranates and Apples

This remarkable Basket of Fruit may be identified as an important work by Bartolomeo Cavarozzi in the field of autonomous still lifes. Several years ago, I put forward the suggestion that this great painter from Viterbo also painted still lifes devoid of figures and that we can attribute to him a number of paintings that were once given to the anonymous Master of the Acquavella Still Life. Thus, we may consider Cavarozzi to be the greatest master of still lifes in Caravaggesque circles, the artist who, in the 1610s and ‘20s, was to develop the stimuli found in Caravaggio’s work, for instance in the prototypes of the Ambrosiana Basket and the basket of fruit on the table in the Mattei Supper at Emmaus now in the National Gallery in London.

The most recent scholarship, starting with my first essay written in 1996 and those that I have devoted to this aspect of the artist’s work since then¹, has borne out Cavarozzi’s sensational skill in this field, and it must have been to that very skill that Giulio Mancini was referring when he called Cavarozzi «universal in all things and in every manner of working»². In support of the recognition of Cavarozzi’s work as a painter of autonomous still lifes, I highlighted, as far back as in 2015, an important piece of documentary evidence published by Luigi Spezzaferro: On 2 March 1613 in Casa Altemps’ Libro Mastro register, Prospero Orsi was paid 40 scudi «and they are for two pictures of fruit, one by Caravaggio and the other by Bartolomeo»³. Spezzaferro himself thought that Cavarozzi must have been the artist who painted the second picture of fruit⁴. Patrizia Cavazzini’s discovery of documents, dated 1613 and 1614, testifying to a bond between Orsi and Cavarozzi, both of whom were natives of Viterbo, further corroborates the possibility that Cavarozzi was the person involved⁵. The date of 2 March 1613 would also provide a significant date ante quem for Cavarozzi’s interest in still life as an autonomous subject; the pairing with the other picture of fruit purchased by Prospero Orsi, namely the painting assigned to Caravaggio, encourages us to argue that the painting by “Bartolomeo” is likely to have already displayed an interest in naturalism. Moroever, I suspect that the painting attributed to Caravaggio may also have been painted by Bartolomeo and that Orsi sold it knowing full well that that was the case⁶.

The discovery of the extremely fine Still Life shown by Colnaghi at TEFAF 2017 (fig. 1) provided final proof of what I had been arguing for some time⁷. Later, again on behalf of Colnaghi, I had the opportunity to study the Still Life with Grapes, Figs, Apples, Melons and Pomegranates on a Fruit Stand painted on copper (fig. 2), attributing it to a moment in the mature phase of Cavarozzi’s career (the early 1620s). The Gaudium Magnum Still Life has an affinity with the copper painting in the way the basket (in the Lisbon picture) and the fruit stand (in the copper painting) are placed in the immediate foreground, as well as in a number of details that reveal the same quality in their brushwork, for example the vine leaf peeking out on the left from behind the melon in the Fruit Stand. The leaf is painted to perfection, with the same brushwork and the same effects as the vine leaves with their silvery highlights in the Basket.

Moreover, the kinds of fruit found in this still life (grapes, a melon, a pomegranate and an apple) are the same as those found in the copper painting and in other still lifes that I consider to be by Cavarozzi, for instance, the still life shown by Colnaghi in Maastricht in 2017, the so-called Acquavella Still Life and, above all, the Sangalli Still Life (fig. 3). In the Sangalli Still Life we find a very similar weave in the basket and the parallel brush strokes used to build it, but also the way the bunches of grapes hang in the foreground on the edges of the basket. Equally similar is the sumptuous arrangement of the fruit on three layers, with the apples and the pomegranate on the highest layer teetering precariously over the fruit beneath them, in exactly the same way as they do in the Sangalli Still Life.

The open melon and pomegranate with the seeds and pulp on full view are also found, with very similar brushwork, in a Still Life with a Violinist whose present whereabouts are unknown (though it was once said to be in a private collection in Udine)⁸.

As things stand today, it is problematic to endeavour to establish a definitive chronology for this and Cavarozzi’s other still lifes, though we might venture a date some time in the 1620s, in other words in a mature phase in his career, for this painting just as we have for the painting on copper.