Lot 27: A basket of apples, calabashes, an upturned copper vessel, figs, melons, and other fruit on rocky ledges

Luca Forte (Naples c. 1615- before 1670) A basket of apples, calabashes, an upturned copper vessel, figs, melons, and other fruit on rocky ledges oil on canvas 62¼ x 77¼ in. (158 x 196.2 cm.)

158 x 196.2 cm.

Private Collection, Spain. Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 28 April 2006, lot 116, when acquired by the present owner.

Professor Nicola Spinosa and Professor Riccardo Lattuada have confirmed the attribution, on the basis of transparencies (private communication). Both independently compared this picture with Forte’s signed Still Life in the Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota. Lattuada dated it to circa 1630-40, pointing out an interesting connection with the early work of another Neapolitan specialist in this genre, Giovanni Battista Recco, not least in terms of the dimensions of this picture, which are unusually large for Forte. Professor Spinosa also pointed to the similarity of this work with some of the earlier output of Recco, but nevertheless considered this picture a capolavoro by Forte. Luca Forte is regarded as one of the most important still-life painters active in Naples in the first half of the seventeenth century, and is particularly significant for having introduced the naturalism of Caravaggio to this genre. His development was influenced by the work of contemporary still-life painters in Rome, such as Tommaso Salini, Giovanni Battista Crescenzi and Pietro Paolo Bonzi, and by the work of certain Spanish artists, especially Blas de Ledesma and Juan van der Hamen. Little is known about his life, but he is recorded as a witness in 1639 to the marriage contract of the Neapolitan painter Aniello Falcone. Forte must therefore have belonged to the artistic circle around Falcone, whose workshop served as an academy of design as well as a school of life drawing between 1630 and 1640.