Still-life with Musical Instruments, Musical Scores, Apples and Pears on a Pewter Platter

The direct and highly prolific continuer of a successful genre comprising still-lifes with musical instruments first devised by Evaristo Baschenis in Bergamo in the 1640s, Bartolomeo Bettera should not be seen as a mere imitator of the latter painter, also known by the nickmane of “Prevarisco”, but rather, and more properly, as a painter with a strongly independent artistic temperament of his own, endowed with an expressive and stylistic charisma of the loftiest quality sustained by a sophisticated mastery of technique and considerable inventive originality. Bettera, whose best work achieved results of such excellence that they have been mistaken for autograph work by Baschenis on more than one occasion in the past, proved capable of renewing and of modernising the latter’s “Cartesian” compositional formulas, bringing them up to date and into line with the more theatrical and decorative taste typical of the Baroque that held sway in Lombardy in the second half of the 17th century.

This change of course by comparison with Baschenis’s sophisticated and poetic approach (briefly compare, for example, the painting under discussion here with Baschenis’s Composition with Lute, Violin, Gallichon, Bass Viola da Gamba, Sheets with Musical Notes, Cabinet, Goose Quill and Book now in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo¹ is revealed in an exemplary manner by our masterpiece, a painting of primary art historical importance in that it is one of the rare works known today that Bettera actually signed in full and on which he also indicated the city in which he had painted it.

The work was originally devised as a companion piece for the Composition with Theorbo, Lute, Guitar, Gallichon, Spinet, Violin with its Bow, Recorder, Sheets with Musical Scores, Books, a Celestial Globe, a Jewel Box and a Curtain (fig. 1), with which it shares a common format, the architectural setting with an external vanishing point that draws the observer’s eye into the gradually diminishing depth of the chess-board tiled floor, and the rapid rhythm underpinning the arrangement of the musical instruments and other objects on a table covered by a heavy Anatolian carpet.

In terms of its collecting history, according to Marco Rosci in his monographic essay on Bartolomeo Bettera², we learn that this picture and its companion piece came from the Tallone collection in Milan before entering a private collection in Gemonio in the province of Varese, presumably some time in the 1960s or ‘70s, where Rosci was able to inspect them in person. The wonderful pair were unfortunately then separated, with only the Composition with Carpet on Table, Sheets with Musical Notes, Guitar, Lute, Violin, Book, Platter with Apples and Pears, Trumpet, Gallichon, Terrestrial Globe, Bass Viola da Gamba and Curtain being put up for sale in 2005³.

Despite numerous attempts, it has regrettably proven impossible to discover the current whereabouts of the Composition with Theorbo, Lute, Guitar, Gallichon, Spinet, Violin with its Bow, Recorder, Sheets with Musical Notes, Books, a Celestial Globe, a Jewel Box and a Curtain, which we hope may one day be reunited with its companion piece.

Close examination of the black and white photograph published by Rosci in his monographic essay of 1985 and of the colour photograph in the Sotheby’s auction catalogue of 2005 reveals that the canvas had been subjected at the time to a fair amount of repainting which had altered its original appearance. For example, the statuette in the style of Michelangelo in the upper right-hand area of the painting was completely hidden from view in 1985; a black cord had been placed in front of it; the sheet of music resting on the carpet beneath the scroll of the bass viola da gamba had suffered changes in both its size and shape; a number of shadows had been emphasised; and even the signature was illegible – indeed, neither Rosci nor Sotheby’s make any mention of it. Thus we may assume that between 1985 and spring last year, when the painting was put up for auction⁴, it was restored more than once, thus recovering the correct legibility of the original composition and making it possible to reinstate the extremely precious inscription now visible beneath the orange resting on the table on the right. I use the words “extremely precious” because the indication of the place («F. in Bergamo») where Bettera painted the two pictures is an extremely useful clue for establishing their date.

At least from 9 March 1672 until 18 May 1673⁵, he seized the opportunity to make his first trip to Rome, updating his cultural experience in the city in order to bring it into line with the “international” taste so fashionable in the papal capital at the time, where artists of the calibre of Francesco Noletti known as Il Maltese, the mysterious Benedetto Fioravanti, Carlo Manieri, Antonio Tibaldi and foreign painters Jacques Hupin and Meiffren Conte (to name but a few) were active in the third quarter of the 17th century. Their work frequently includes elements typical of Bettera’s repertoire, such as Turkish carpets, musical instruments, heavy curtains, small items of furniture, caskets and valuable coin cabinets inlaid in ivory, old books and curios worthy of a Wunderkammer.

The discovery and first-hand study of the still-lifes painted by the illustrious artists mentioned above in Rome therefore enabled Bettera, who was aged just over thirty at the time, to shake off the slavish dependence on Baschenis’s teachings that is such a feature of his early work (for example, a canvas formerly in a private collection in New York, Musical Instruments, Plaster Statue and Drapery, previously attributed to Baschenis, and another now in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, Musical Instruments, Drapery and an Armillary Sphere) and to embark on a personal, independent path of aesthetic development in keeping with the international Baroque taste of the second half of the 17th century, enriching his expressive vocabulary with highly sophisticated spatial optic effects and illusionistic artifice typical of the Flemish and Dutch traditions. It is precisely in this new season of Bettera’s mature output that we feel we should place the Gaudium Magnum Foundation’s painting, which we might hypothetically date c. 1680, in view of the total absence of autograph works of unquestionable date by the artist.

Analysing the work under discussion in greater detail, we see that it presents considerable affinities in terms of its style, its composition and the artist’s choice of figurative repertoire with a number of his paintings of similar date including: in particular, with two of the four canvases in a series now in the Pisani Moretta collection in Venice (Musical Instruments, Scores, Books and Drapery and Musical Instruments, Drapery and a Platter with Apples), the first of which bears a virtually identical signature to that on our painting, «Bartolomeo Bettera P. in Bergamo» (this is a detail of the greatest interest because Bettera was accustomed to adding different signatures to his best work according to the period in which he painted them: «Bartolomeo Bettera F»; «Bartol.º Bettera Bergamasco F.»; «Bartolomeo Bettera BergamSIS F.»; «Bartolomeo Bettera Bergamo»); and with the pair of paintings shown at a recent exhibition held in Turin (figs. 2–3)⁶.

If we take a closer look at these two splendid paintings, now in a private collection in Bergamo, and compare them with our companion pieces, we are immediately struck: by the surprising similarity in their size (120 x 155 cm as opposed to 123 x 156 cm); by the spatial handling of the scene bordered on the outside by sumptuous curtains and in depth by the light grey wall of the room, which the observer’s eye reaches only after following the gradually diminishing depth of the chess-board tiled floor; by the measured handling of light, with the intensely analytical ray of light shining down from above, caressing the polished surfaces of the instruments while simultaneously highlighting the tactile and chromatic qualities of the various materials (the wood of the string instruments, the metal of the brass instruments, the wool of the carpet, the thick paper of the musical scores and the precious embroidery in gold thread on the brocaded fabrics). It should then be highlighted the vigorous chiaroscuro contrast that produces such deep, dense shadows, as well as the meticulous description of the still-life’s “players”, arranged on the stage in accordance with a complex pattern of overlapping diagonal lines at an intense rhythm, dominated by solids over voids (while in Baschenis, the very opposite is the case). Then it is unique the way in which the artist imparts an impression of relief to the warp and weft of the Anatolian carpet by applying thick filaments of pure paint that one can touch with one’s fingertips; and his unusual decision to include small plaster statues (possibly stored in his workshop) that are, in fact, scale models of classical and Renaissance sculptures. And finally, it is absolutely impossible not to notice the artist’s use of the same cartoon for the red curtain with its sophisticated gold embroidery, for the terrestrial and celestial globes, for the bass viola (in this instance, a mirror image), for the guitar inlaid with ivory (here rotated by 180 degrees) and for the lute with its two-tone bowl which, in this instance, is shown bottom up, so to speak, while in the painting I showed at the exhibition in Turin it is shown bottom down. Thus everything suggests that the painter conceived these four genuine masterpieces of his full maturity in roughly the same years, most probably between the end of the 1670s and the start of the 1680s.

In conclusion, we should note that, while in Baschenis’s work we often perceive “between the lines” an echo of the themes of vanitas, the inexorable passage of time and the precarious nature of life (his instruments covered in a light layer of dust, their extremely thin strings snapped by long use, are especially memorable), what tends to prevail in Bettera’s work, on the other hand, is an allegorical meaning alluding to the five senses. In that respect, in the present painting we can detect hearing (the music produced by the instruments), taste and smell (the apples and pears resting on the white ceramic fruit tray), sight (the spectacle of the painting characterised by astonishing illusionistic ploys) and touch (the Anatolian carpet emerging in relief from the smooth surface of the canvas thanks to the thick layers paint that give it a three-dimensional feel). But if we think about it, over all these elements that embody the five senses, thus sensitive life, there looms the marvellous curtain held up by cords, ready to drop down over the “great theater of life”, to close like a final curtain marking the end of the spectacle offered for our admiration by the masterly brush of Bartolomeo Bettera.