Basket of Fruit (Caravaggio)
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Basket of Fruit | |
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Italian: Canestra di frutta | |
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Artist | Caravaggio |
Year | c. 1599 |
Medium | oil on canvas |
Dimensions | 46 cm × 64.5 cm (18 in × 25.4 in) |
Location | Biblioteca Ambrosiana |
Basket of Fruit (c.1599) is a still life painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), which hangs in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Ambrosian Library), Milan.
It shows a wicker basket perched on the edge of a ledge. The basket contains a selection of summer fruit:
... a good-sized, light-red peach attached to a stem with wormholes in the leaf resembling damage by oriental fruit moth (Orthosia hibisci). Beneath it is a single bicolored apple, shown from a stem perspective with two insect entry holes, probably codling moth, one of which shows secondary rot at the edge; one blushed yellow pear with insect predations resembling damage by leaf roller (Archips argyospita); four figs, two white and two purple—the purple ones dead ripe and splitting along the sides, plus a large fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose (Glomerella cingulata); and a single unblemished quince with a leafy spur showing fungal spots. There are four clusters of grapes, black, red, golden, and white; the red cluster on the right shows several mummied fruit, while the two clusters on the left each show an overripe berry. There are two grape leaves, one severely desiccated and shriveled while the other contains spots and evidence of an egg mass. In the right part of the basket are two green figs and a ripe black one is nestled in the rear on the left. On the sides of the basket are two disembodied shoots: to the right is a grape shoot with two leaves, both showing severe insect predations resembling grasshopper feeding; to the left is a floating spur of quince or pear.[1]
Much has been made of the worm-eaten, insect-predated, and generally less than perfect condition of the fruit. In line with the culture of the age, the general theme appears to revolve about the fading beauty, and the natural decaying of all things. Scholars also describe the basket of fruit as a metaphor of the Church.
A recent X-ray study revealed that it was painted on an already used canvas painted with grotesques in the style of Caravaggio's friend
Scholars have had more than their usual level of disagreement in assigning a date to the painting:
In 1607 it was part of Cardinal
Like its doppelganger in Supper at Emmaus, the basket seems to teeter on the edge of the picture-space, in danger of falling out of the painting and into the viewer's space instead. In the Supper this is a dramatic device, part of the way in which Caravaggio creates the tension of the scene; here, trompe-l'œil seems to be almost the whole purpose of the painting, if we subtract the possible didactic element. But the single element that no doubt attracted its original owner, and still catches attention today, is the extraordinary quasi-photographic realism of the observation which underlies the illusionism. Basket of Fruit can be compared with the same artist's Still Life with Fruit (c. 1603), a painting which John Spike identifies as "the source of all subsequent Roman still-life paintings."[3]
See also
References
- ^ a b "Caravaggio". Hort.purdue.edu. Retrieved 2015-11-12.
- ^ [1] Archived November 25, 2005, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ [2] Archived August 14, 2005, at the Wayback Machine
Bibliography
- Puglisi, Catherine. 1998. Caravaggio. ISBN 0-7148-3966-3
- Robb, Peter. 1998. [M]: The Man Who Became Caravaggio. ISBN 1-876631-79-1
- Spike, John T. 2001. Caravaggio. ISBN 0-7892-0639-0
External links
- Web Gallery of Art
- Baroque attitudes to still-life
Media related to Basket of Fruit by Caravaggio at Wikimedia Commons