Still-life with Fish, a Squid and Sea Urchins

Well-known to still-life connoisseurs and aficionados, the Faenza painting deserves to attract the esteem and attention of a far wider audience in its capacity, quite simply, as one of the great pictures of Neapolitan 17th century painting outside Naples, or in any event, as the greatest such painting belonging to the oldest museum in the Po Valley. The ploy of the goldfish warbling like a note held in a concert of dark shades, shows that it is in the pivotal segment of such pictures that we need to discern the peak of imagination and creativity in Neapolitan artistic circles in the middle of the century. Yet it is the entire presentation of the four sea creatures that is deceptively simple.

The fish in the centre, which has flopped into the foreground with its mouth, mirrors, a little to the side, a companion beast that arches upwards to display its tail. Between and overlapping the two, the red fish lies straight as a blade in the centre of the composition, cunningly turning into the tail of the lobster. This jumble is crowned by the squid’s watery body, painted on the basket in a play of transparencies. None of the masters of the brush on the local scene would have been capable of such a feat other than Luca Giordano, of course. This, especially since, on the basis of the most recent research, we are inclined to recognise Recco’s style, known also in the territory ruled by the Spanish crown, as being one of the true legacies of the greatest master of the late Baroque age – one might almost call it a “continuation of Giordano’s policy by other means”.

One last thing: as is often the case with respect to the generic manner in which still-life subjects were, and still are, presented, one cannot but admire the precision with which an art historian and connoisseur of the calibre of Federico Zeri (†1994) presented this painting, of which he had in his archive (now available for consultation on line) at least four black and white reproductions (various items of everyday domestic use: basket, invertebrates: lobster, mollusc, oyster, sea urchin, squid).