Caravaggio show opens in Rome

(ANSA) - Rome, November 16 - An exhibition exploring the evolution of Caravaggio's still life painting opened at Rome's Borghese Gallery on Wednesday. 'The Origin of the still life in Italy - Caravaggio and the Master of Hartford' includes such masterpieces as the 'Basket of Fruit', on special loan from the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and the 'Young sick Bacchus' and the 'Boy with a basket of fruit' from the Borghese Gallery collection itself.
    In total approximately 40 artworks are on display until February 19, including works by the so-called Master of Hartford, a mysterious young painter believed by some art historians, including Federico Zeri, to have been Caravaggio himself. The exhibition begins by looking at the tradition of naturalism in Caravaggio's native Lombardy, represented by Vincenzo Campi, Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Giovanni Antonio Figino, credited with painting the first ever still life in Italy, 'Metal Plate with Peaches and Vine Leaves' (1590-1594). The exhibition curators have juxtaposed Caravaggio's the 'Young Sick Bacchus' and the 'Boy with a Basket of Fruit' and the four paintings unearthed by Zeri from the Scipione Borghese collection in the 1970s and attributed to the 'Hartford master' in order to play up the contrast between the two styles: "drier and more wooden" for the unknown painter and full of the poetry of naturalism for Caravaggio. The Hartford master was the first painter to devote himself entirely to still life, while Caravaggio uses the genre to bring about his very personal painting revolution. The 'Basket of Fruit' has an "extraordinary monumentality the same dignity as a figure", Borghese Gallery director Anna Coliva said.
    Here for Caravaggio still life was "not an accident" but an act of "artistic will", and indeed the painter said that for him painting a figure or a piece of fruit amounted to the same thing. Already therefore art "doesn't just reproduce reality but is a kind of parallel world," Coliva continued. The exhibition continues by exploring the work of numerous masters who followed in Caravaggio's footsteps and devoted part of their output to still life.