“He possessed great talent at painting flowers and figures”. It seems an obvious statement for our times, but the famous phrase, attributed to Caravaggio, overturned the classic hierarchy between painting genres. An insult at his time. Just think that the Marquis Giustiniani, one of his protectors, had little esteem for a great artist “who was able to portray flowers and other minute things”. Michelangelo Merisi, known by the name of Caravaggio (Caravaggio, 1571 – Porto Ercole, 1610), was two centuries ahead of his time. Through his works, he showed interest in the inanimate subject, no longer peripheral and complementary to the human figure, but central and perfect in itself.

Grapes and shoots, but also apples, pears, figs, earn the same dignity of saints and heroes. It is the reason why we consider him a precursor of Courbet’s modernity and realism. As the latter, Caravaggio possessed a rebellious nature and a quarrelsome temperament. His life was full of scandals and repeated transgressions, which did not compromise, in any way, his limitless artistic style and creative freedom.

“I liked to provoke those whining priests”, he declared. “They wanted triumphant images and I gave them saints with peasant’s feet and wrinkled faces… But that’s how I want to paint and I’m the greatest”.

He painted the most famous still life of all time (also portrayed on the one hundred thousand lire banknote issued in Italy from 1994 to 1998). It is the Basket of fruit at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan. A 31×47 cm oil on canvas, representing a more vital than still ‘nature’.  (31×47 cm), oil on canvas representing a ‘nature’ more alive than still. The painting, which the young Lombard painted around 1596 on commission from Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte (representative of the Medici in Rome), entered the collection of the archbishop of Milan, Federico Borromeo. Before leaving the city for Rome, he expressed the desire to donate it to the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, an institution he founded. 

Borromeo mentions the work in a codicil, dated September 17, 1607. “A painting of the length of an arm, and about three-quarters in height, where, on a white background, is depicted a basket of fruits, some with twigs and leaves, and some without/among them, there are two bunches of grapes, one white, and/the other black; figs, apples, and other fruits, painted by Michele/Agnolo da Caravaggio.” Borromeo would return to the canvas, praising it, but underlining that “I would have liked to place another similar basket next to this, but no painting could reach its incomparable beauty and excellence, and therefore, it remained alone.” These words reveal how no work of art was ready and worthy to meet, at such a level of mimesis, the client’s requests.The painting opens up to a double reading. On one side, there is the lenticular representation of the painted nature. The leaves partially crumpled and wilted, with small dark spots, the apple, the white grapes and their white layer on the surface. On the other side, there is an overview. The painting conveys the observer’s gaze towards an ideal sphericity thanks to the widespread and enveloping brightness of the canvas and to that slight, strategic expedient of placing the protruding and in precarious balance basket, compared to the surface in the foreground. The choice of this disposition, therefore, allows the painting to bring out the objects portrayed thanks to the layer of a clear, uniform and bright background. The light seems to originate from a natural source. It reveals the shades of colour. It unveils the clear, unripe grapes in the foreground and those already rather ripe in the bunch that appears behind the rotten apple, creating a three-dimensional illusionistic effect of the image.

The fruit, the absolute protagonist of the painting, becomes, with its imperfections marked by the passing of the time (the dried leaves, the apple with a hole on its top), an existential metaphor that requires a serene, in-depth reflection on the vanitas (emptiness) of the existence, and the fragility and ephemerality of life.

Similarly, the woven wicker basket – which we find in all its gleam and palpable tactility in two other masterpieces by Caravaggio: the Boy with a basket of fruit at the Galleria Borghese in Rome and the Supper at Emmaus at the National Gallery in London – symbolizes the Church that welcomes and protects its children, and the desire of the clergy to offer themselves to humanity, as the basket’s protruding position on the shelf implies.

In all these references and hints, as well as in the extraordinary pictorial quality of the canvas, lies the greatness of Caravaggio’s masterpiece.

FIAMMA DOMESTICI