Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo

Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo plays the key role in southern Italian still-life painting in the transition from the first to the second half of the 17th century. Ruoppolo was born in Naples in 1629 – he was thus Luca Giordano’s (1634 – 1705) senior by five years – and he succeeded in carving himself a place in the limelight on the eve of the Plague of 1656, but we do not know for certain under whom he learnt his trade. A group of stylistically kindred canvases (the Faenza painting ranking among the most valuable of these, if for no other reason than that it is dated) has prompted scholars to argue that he may have worked with Luca Forte, a specialist from an earlier generation and heavily influenced by Caravaggio, who died in 1670.

As Ruoppolo’s career progressed, he set off down what we might call a more firmly Baroque path. His compositions took on a festive, theatrical feel that is undeniably decorative in tone. Achieving the highest level of depiction, his still-lifes portray veritable panoplies of fruit and vegetables, in which the artist shows us that he is as skilled at painting fruit (especially grapes) as he is fish. It is hardly surprising that Giordano’s nose for the Baroque sniffed out Ruoppolo’s mimetic talent, to the point where he even involved him in the production of four large still-lifes with figures for a series commissioned by Gaspar Méndez de Haro, Marquis of Carpio, for the Feast of Corpus Domini in 1684.