This imposing and sumptuous still life of a wooden table laden with fruit was painted in the seventeenth century in Rome. On the left, white and black grapes, figs, pomegranates, and apples spill forth from a large bowl, while on the right, apples, pomegranates, a large citrus fruit, pumpkins, and melons, some split open, crowd every inch of the table. In the right background are three putti; one carries a basket of apples and grapes on his shoulders, while the other two hold
aloft a silver vase full of flowers.
The horizontal format of the canvas suggests that the work was originally part of the furnishings of a palazzo, perhaps serving as a sopraporta, or overdoor, picture. It is moreover quite likely that it was one of series representing the Four Seasons, for, in the seventeenth century, representations of putti bearing baskets of or frolicking amidst flowers and fruits were generally interpreted as allegories of that subject. According to the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, the most important iconographical repertoire of the early modern period in Italy and across Europe, representations of the Four Seasons could be executed by showing:
“…four beautiful lads, one older than the other. The first one [thus the representation of Spring], bears on his shoulders a basket full of flowers. The second [the representation of Summer], holds sickle in his right hand. The third [the representation of Autumn], carries a basket filled with fruits in his left hand, while in his right he has a dead animal. These boys are naked. The fourth [the representation of Winter] is clothed and has his head covered. He carries a cane on his shoulders from which a dead bird hangs; with his left hand he carries another dead bird different from the other one.” [1]
The representation described by Ripa derives from a scene on a medal coined under the emperor Caracalla, and although the subject was adapted and changed over the course of the following centuries, it remained nonetheless recognizable and flourished particularly in the context of palatial interior decoration.
Allegorical representations of the seasons personified by putti with flowers and fruits appear in a number of inventories of Roman collections of the seventeenth century. But one example can be found in a list of the works belonging to Alessandro Vittrice, Bishop of Alatri, compiled in 1650, which recorded an anonymous painting “di tre putti chiamati primavera con diversi fiori, e frutti con cornice nera filettata d’oro” (“three putti called spring with various flowers and fruits with a black and gold frame.”) [2] Alessandro Vittrice, it might be interesting to note, was the heir of Gerolamo Vittrice, a significant figure patron and collector in Rome in the early 1600s, who himself owned an extremely rare still life attributed to Caravaggio: “un altro quadro mezzano di fiori e frutti corniciata bianca mano del Caravaggio (“Another half-painting of flowers and fruits in a white frame, made by Caravaggio.”) [3] Such was the cultural ambient of Caravaggesque Rome in which the present marvellous Still Life was created. It might, however, be noted that while in the Vittrice’s painting, three putti with flowers and fruits represent Spring, in the present work, it is Autumn which is portrayed, for the fruits represented—grapes, figs, pumpkin, apples, and so on—are grown instead in that season. The putti themselves represent the months of the season: September and November hold the vase of flowers inaugurating Autumn, while December carries away the basket of mature fruit, marking its close.
From a stylistic point of view, the superb quality with which the fruits on the table are represented, the bold chiaroscuro, the ray of light penetrating the background of the painting, and the firm flesh of the putti are all indications that the present work is a masterpiece by a Caravaggesque still life painter. An early inscription on the back of the work, “G.B.V. / DI MICHELANGELO DELLE BATTAGLIE / O DI CAMPIDOGLIO,” is suggestive of the work’s authorship. While “di Campidoglio” could refer to the painter Michele Pace, who kept his studio in that neighbourhood, Maria Cristina Terzaghi has argued convincingly that the painting should be more correctly attributed to Michelangelo Cerquozzi, often referred to in contemporary documents as Michelangelo delle Battiglie. [4]
Cerquozzi was one of the few Italian members of the Bamboccianti, a group of mainly Dutch and Flemish artists active in seventeenth-century Rome. Inspired by the northern tradition of depicting peasant scenes, the Bamboccianti produced small genre pictures featuring the typical figures of contemporary Italian street-life. Cerquozzi’s best work captures the naturalism of the Bamboccianti and adds narrative elements. In addition to his genre subjects, and sometimes in combination with them, Cerquozzi produced high quality and similarly naturalistic still life compositions. Passeri wrote in the seventeenth century of Cerquozzi’s connections to Pietro Paolo Bonzi, one of the pioneers of Roman still lifes, but his importance in the field was not sufficiently appreciated until Briganti’s ground-breaking article of 1954. In the light of more recent research, Cerquozzi has emerged as a pivotal personality in the development of Roman still life painting.
Cerquozzi returned to the still life genre throughout his career. His early paintings took after Bonzi’s work, and show the influence of Caravaggio’s famous Basket of Fruit on a Stone Ledge (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan). He soon began to compose large still life paintings which included with life-size figures. For example, in both Youths Picking Fruit (1640–45, Museo del Prado, Madrid) and the Harvest of Pomegranates (after 1640, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), figures and fruit alike evoke the memory of certain early works by Caravaggio, though the sumptuousness of the pumpkins, the open pomegranate, and the presence of a landscape visible in the background point to a more advanced phase in the evolution of the genre towards a fully Baroque idiom. Indeed, the Baroque freedom of vision and plein air setting of these compositions help us to understand Cerquozzi as a mediating figure between Caravaggio to the full-blown Baroque in the genre of still life painting.
Terzaghi has noted that the letters “G.B.V” also inscribed on the canvas’s reverse might refer to a patron or later owner; so too might the inscription “Cardinale Giuseppe,” in whose collection the work was registered with the number 136, indicated by the two labels affixed to the back of canvas. Although these clues are inadequate to solve the mystery of the painting’s commissioning and provenance, the inscriptions are nonetheless clear about a Roman context in which the work was created and first received.
