time, he was painting what his patrons asked him to paint and what he imagined they wanted him to paint. Still, he was insisting on his right to exercise his uncompromised and uncompromising genius and his theories about art. The canvases of this period seem wholly sincere and at the same time ironic, like private jokes on the subject of the artistic conventions that he was being encouraged to follow. Such contradictions may be part of the reason why even theseâthe most apparently âold-fashionedâ of his worksâstill strike us as so modern. Whatever unease we may feel with these traditional themes and conventions, Caravaggio feels it also, along with us and for usâpreemptively, so to speakâand his work at once celebrates, gently mocks, and transcends the subject matter (the portrait of the mythological figure, the sentimental religious scene) that, handled by a less original painter, can sometimes fail to translate across the intervening centuries.
The rendering of beauty together with the simultaneous joke about beauty is at the heart of Caravaggioâs only surviving still life, The Basket of Fruit , which Del Monteâs friend Cardinal Federico Borromeo is thought to have commissioned from Caravaggio, or possibly to have received as a gift from Del Monte. An ardent fan of still lifes in general and of Northern art in particular, Borromeo collected the work of Jan Breughel, who painted exuberant, splashy studies of glorious floral arrangements in which each showpiece tulip, iris, or peony is an honor to its species.
Anyone could have predicted that Caravaggio would have been unlikely to do anything of the sort, and in fact his painting can be seen as a kind of challenge to the vibrant bouquets of his Northern contemporaries. His still life is another avowal of his belief in painting from nature and at the same time making his audience aware that they are looking at a painting. It is also rebellious rejection and refutation of the months during which he toiled as the (no doubt underpaid) flower-and-fruit man in Cesariâs studio.
Nearly every fruit in Caravaggioâs basket looks as if it has spent too long on the vine or on the ground in the orchard. The pear is speckled with brown spots, the figs have begun to split, and no one has even bothered to turn the apple around so that the wormhole wonât show in the painting. The leaves are in even worse condition, half wilted and autumnal, or disfigured by dry, discolored patches, frayed edges, and the ragged gnawings of insects. The water droplets sprinkled about only serve to make us aware that the fruit is anything but dewy or fresh.
Breughelâs flowers seem to want to explode out of the painting, but Caravaggioâs fruits rest heavily on the woven straw basket, each piece weighing on the other. Nothing, weâd think, could be more ârealâ than these decidedly unidealized fruits, and yet at the same time the artist is continually subverting our sense of reality. The grapevine on the right rises on a diagonal, countermanding the laws of gravity. The leaves and branches are attached to the fruits in ways we canât remember ever having seen. The only shadow in the painting is cast by the base of the basket, which hangs over the ledge on which it is set, and which seems to project into some disorienting dimension between us and the subject of the painting.
The relation of the fruit basket to its flat, golden, shadowless background reminds us of the fantastic, unreal space of ancient Roman wall painting, and of how the saints and Madonnas seem pasted onto the gilded panels of early Lombard and Sienese paintings. The effect is almost as if Caravaggio set out to paint a Netherlandish still life and wound up doing something utterly Italian, entirely his own, and far more compelling than anything that might have resulted from having done the expected. Except perhaps for the most committed botanist or serious student
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