(active in Rome in the first half of the 17th Century)
Apples, grapes and other fruit on a stone ledge, a blue tit and woodpecker on branches, a bronze vase with tulips, lilies, roses and other flowers, and a figure with a basket of flowers on the right,
oil on canvas, 100 x 143.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
with Theodore Johns, London, 2016 (as Giovanni Stanchi);
Private collection, USA;
sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 28 January 2022, lot 330 (as Giovanni Stanchi);
where acquired by the present owner

Exhibited:
London, Shapero Gallery, Caravaggio’s Impact, 5–9 December 2016 (as Giovanni Stanchi)

Literature:
A. Cottino, Un caso interessante: il cosiddetto ‘Maestro delle mele rosa’ tra caravaggismo e vasi a grottesche (con ricordi e novità), in: P. Di Loreto (ed.), Scritti in onore di Claudio Strinati. L’arte di vivere l’Arte, Rome 2018, pp. 176, 178, fig. 5 (as ‘Maestro delle mele rosa e anonimo figurista’).

The production of the artist identified as the ‘Maestro delle Mele Rosa’ has been reconstructed by Alberto Cottino based on the Still Life with Fruit, Flowers,Turnips, Apples and a Goldfinch from the Molinari Pradelli collection in Marano di Castenaso, Bologna, which is characterised by a naturalistic and Caravaggesque style, and by the arrangement of the fruit in small groups and the presence of distinctive pink-coloured apples. These details have allowed Cottino to gather a small group of about ten works, with the same characteristics. A further recurring element is the presence of a red tulip, mottled with white, with elongated petals, depicted closed or open like a fan.

Works by this anonymous artist are also conserved in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin and the Amedeo Lia Museum in La Spezia. The painting presented here belongs to this group. It depicts a table richly set with flowers and fruit, illuminated by a shaft of light inspired by Caravaggio’s compositions, while a young man in elegant clothes holds a basket of flowers.

As Cottino points out, it is interesting to observe in the present painting the combination of Caravaggesque objects with others from a different earlier culture, such as in this case, the grotesque vase. Ornamental objects of this type, gilded or silver metal vases, decorated with embossing and classical scenes, also characterised the production of another anonymous artist active in Rome at the same time as the still life painter, who is known by the name of ‘Master of the Grotesque Vase’ by art historians. It is also possible that behind these conventional names there were actually workshops formed by several artists.

The great success of the still lifes painted by Caravaggio in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries gave birth to a new pictorial genre. Works such as his famous Basket of Fruit, (today in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan), and also still-life elements included in his more complex narratives, such as the basket of fruit depicted in the foreground of his Supper at Emmaus in the National Gallery, London or the transparent jugs of Bacchus in the Uffizi, Florence, gave rise to a new way of painting what seventeenth century critics named ‘still objects’.

Among the first specialists of this genre active in Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century was the anonymous artist known as the ‘Master of Hartford’, who, it is thought worked in the circle of Cavalier d’Arpino. The ‘Maestro delle Mele Rosa’ is now revealed to be an important collaborator of d’Arpino and was active, according to Cottino, by 1620–1630.