Scuola Napoletana della fine del XVII secolo,... Lot n° 114

The composition of this canvas is extraordinarily rich and varied: all the iconographic choices made by the seventeenth-century still life genre are depicted in a single composition. There is architectural whimsy, with its taste for the elements that make Baroque architecture monumental, such as large capitals, pillars, and sinuous volutes; among these marbles stand out the rich vases of flowers, luxuriant as in Giacomo Recco's painting and mediated by the minuteness of the Flemish tradition. Although the animal theme is absent, the still life of fruit reminds us of the compositions and variety of vegetables depicted by Abraham Breughel, as can be seen from the typical detail of the open gourd, lower right. The landscape is vague, undefined, and deliberately somber, to allow individual elements to stand out in the composition, which is thus not weighed down and difficult to read. Oil on canvas, cm est. 149x229, int. 131x211