Vegetables, Fruit, Loaves of Bread and a Slice of Tuna

A handful of fruit, a platter, three loaves of bread and, closing the array, a chest of which we are shown one side, are displayed diagonally in the foreground and the middle ground. The picture, which bears the date 1661, is one of the masterpieces painted by Ruoppolo in his very early thirties. Shown at the Italian Still-Life exhibition in Naples in 1964, it is of crucial importance in the study of the transition in still-life painting from a Caravaggesque approach to a more robustly Baroque style – one might almost call it the transition from Spanish painter Ribera, who died in 1652, to Giordano who was born in 1634 and who consolidated his grip on the local market in the very years Ruoppolo, five years his senior, was painting this picture.

The precious quality of the painting’s stylistic fabric – from the garland of apples that have tumbled from the platter into the foreground, to the oil stain prolonging the shadow of the slice of tuna onto the sheet of paper – shows the level achieved by still-life masters only a few years after the Plague of 1656, making this wonderful picture one of the most important in the Pinacoteca di Faenza’s collections. Yet it occupies a middle ground, for while in the manner in which the light rolls over the fruit and the loaves of bread (which Battistello Caracciolo would have painted in exactly the same way) Ruoppolo can be seen as the last of the Caravaggesque painters, it is clear that Giordano had already been an influential presence for some time in the way the gush of light imparts a certain vibrancy to the reds and olive greens of the apples. Having said that, the significance of this picture’s presence in Faenza transcends its task as a mere tool in helping us to fine-tune our knowledge of southern Italian still-life painting in the transition to the age of the Baroque.

The picture comes from the collections of one of the leading players in local cultural and civic life in the early 20th century, Count Luigi Zauli Naldi, a collector, an art historian, and such an enthusiastic connoisseur of still-life painting (he even wrote for Longhi’s Florentine periodical “Paragone” in the early 1950s) that he sat (with Vitale Bloch, Ferdinando Bologna, Roberto Longhi, Benedict Nicolson, Giuseppe De Logu, Charles Sterling, Antonello Trombadori, Hermann Voss, Giuliano Briganti and Giovanni Testori) on the scholarly advisory board for the important exhibition of Italian still-life painting held in Naples in 1964