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Luca Forte
Napoli, 1605 c. - 1670 c.
and Neapolitan painter
from the circle of Battistello Caracciolo
The fortunate reappearance of a painting from Forte’s very early maturity allows us to illuminate the point of maximum contiguity of the Neapolitan milieu with the Roman one. At the same time, in the age of the outgoing Caravaggism, this generous offering of summer and autumn fruit, conceived as a hymn to earthly joys, already makes the squadron of supporting artists of the local still life of Baroque style heard behind the door: from Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo (1629-1693) to Giuseppe Ruoppolo (1631-1710) who, if we were to limit ourselves to the parts of large decorative commitment, must have done their homework on our canvas.
Pumpkins, pomegranates, peaches, figs, medlars, annurche and quinces apples, muscatelle and angelica pears, pizzutella and red Aglianico grapes with fruit seller
1630 - 1635
Oil on canvas, 122.5 x 164 cm
Provenance
Private collection
This colourful cascade of late summer and autumn fruits on a market stall was brought to my attention by Maria Cristina Terzaghi, a scholar of seventeenth-century painting. An unexpected gift for which I am grateful: especially since it is not so common the resurfacing of works that, due to their quality and value, force us to re-examine working hypotheses and groupings of an entire figurative season. In excellent condition, the canvas is among the major additions of recent years to the corpus of still life and risks being one of the pinnacles of the southern scene of the second thirty years.
It seems understandable that such a painting was initially directed towards the Roman sphere. The evidence, as we will see, is not lacking. As we delve deeper into the analysis of each of these fruits - from the dark green and ochre pumpkins at the bottom left, to the vinous reds of the angelica pears in the background - we realize that none of the names usually associated with still life at the time of Caravaggio in Rome - from the “Gobbo dei Carracci”, to the “Master of the Acquavella Still Life” to Agostino Verrocchi (1586-1659) - seem to satisfy the stylistic characteristics of a canvas that must be brought back to the southern context at a date to be placed during the 1630s. And Terzaghi herself was quick to straighten out the shot on the Neapolitan scene. In reality, if the style does not lie, the painting belongs to Luca Forte: beyond and beyond the cages of the genre, one of the most interesting personalities of Neapolitan painting of the late Caravaggism.
A century after his death, people in the trade still remembered him. A critic of style like the eighteenth-century Bernardo De Dominici, author of the lives of Neapolitan artists who grew up in the cult of Francesco Solimena (1657-1747), does not express a very flattering opinion of him: “Giovan Battista Ruoppoli was a pupil of Paolo Porpora, who, abandoning the painting of battles, applied himself to representing various kinds of animals, and excellently painted fish, and various fruits, and other things of the sea, also painting fruit, citrus fruits, poultry, birds and other edible things with a better manner, and more beautiful composition than what Luca Forte had painted; that although in his time he was considered excellent in this kind of work, in any case he was poor in compositional invention, because his paintings are seen, that do not have much forward and backward, and all the things are placed almost in a row one after the other on the same plane, and few things are seen by this painter, that have forward and backward”. One wonders what De Dominici would have added or modified if he had been able to see our painting; in any case, in modern times, and above all in the post-war period and in the 60s, that studies on Forte restart in great style.
Offered to the judgment of the public and amateurs in the exhibition held in Naples in 1964, the research on still life is the highest fruit of the final season of stylistic criticism matured in the circle of Roberto Longhi (1890-1970). In the anthology of paintings gathered in Palazzo Reale, Forte had the right prominence. Two years earlier, Longhi’s magazine, “Paragone” had hosted the contribution of Raffaello Causa on which the bibliography on the painter would take off (1962). Causa intuits that the experiments of post-Caravaggio painting are to be found among the masters of still life and is among the first to point out, in Forte’s career, the connections with Battistello Caracciolo (1578-1635): “Forte’s characteristic feature - he wrote - is a stony and turned material, almost as if in the formal contingency of a texture evidently created in the ways of luministic painting, little by little the iron law of drawn and chiaroscuro volume returns to assert its demands (approximately what happened in Battistello’s later production)”.
Four years later, in a popular publication for the Fabbri Brothers’ “Maestro del colore” series, dedicated to the Caravaggesques of the South, Causa himself specifies: “It is in Naples that we should look for still life specialists with recognized names and surnames who participate in a naturalistic climate: from Forte to Porpora, from Recco to Ruoppolo.” These lines should have prompted the equating of the still life masters to the great history painters. If in the patrician collections of the 17th and 18th centuries, still lifes were exhibited with sacred or mythological paintings; in modern museum reorganizations they have been somewhat ghettoized. This is what happened for many years in the Pinacoteca di Capodimonte where, only in the latest arrangement of the seventeenth-century rooms also curated by the writer (2022), the paintings of Forte and other specialists were relocated between the Riberas and the Falcones, in an accrochage that attests their importance and all their experimental portion.
Archive papers mention Forte starting from the second thirty years, in the mature phases of Battistello and above all in the years of the unchallenged local affirmation of a crucial Spaniard like Ribera (1591-1652). As can be seen from our painting, the relationship between genre and figure painters was as close as it was one of mutual emulation. A document from 1639 cites Forte as a witness at the wedding of a painter, Aniello Falcone (1607-1656); another connects him, in 1631, to a satellite of Ribera like Filippo Vitale, who died in 1650. Paintings by Forte are listed in the inventories of the patrician collections of Giuseppe Carafa and Ferrante Spinelli, Prince of Tarsia. The painter’s fame soon spread beyond the borders of the Viceroyalty, between Madrid and Barcelona: proof that the golden age of Spanish painting, in terms of still life, was the work of Neapolitan masters.
Ferdinando Bologna noted the “Battistello-style” setting), up to the markedly horizontal Still Life with Birds, which I published a few years ago (Causa 2019). But the connection with the Forte in Sarasota is no less encouraging, among the four or five most important Neapolitan still lifes preserved in American museums and which bears a dedication to Carafa himself (lynched by the crowd in 1647). But without anticipating further, let us return to a canvas that invokes; indeed, demands the complicity of a spectator willing to explore every little nook and cranny (ending with the pumpkins hidden behind the figure) of a painting of ambitious majesty.
To explore the strategies of a composition that grows on itself, multiplying in a series of rapid micro events of colour and light, it is best to start from the lower left side of the canvas. There appears a handful of green and ochre pumpkins of different species, only the last of which is open, recreated with astonishing meticulousness. Lying on a bed of plants, the five cucurbits react, like astronomical bodies, to the stream of light that rains down from the left. There is no doubt that the exceptional mimicry of this stage corresponds to Forte’s usual level. As we look up at the market stall, we immediately list, in random order, fifteen pieces - including pears, apples and pomegranates - on which the light is refracted in a game of rapid crushing. As we delve deeper into the reading, the larger fruits have made a quartet of medlars slip between the pumpkins. But the show has only just begun.
In the upper portion, as equally many mini still lifes, appear five wicker baskets with peaches, figs, plums and pears in a bloom of reds, greens, ochres and violets. The tactile consistency of the plums and the yellow-red angelicas is of such perspicuity that it would be difficult to find among the figure painters who were working to make the notes (not the peels) to the mastery of the Spaniard Ribera, who settled in Naples in ‘16.
If the fireworks come to an end, the upper portion of the canvas closes with the explosion of the carousel of palmate leaves of the fig tree (not without, in the group in the centre, a fruit obscenely opening). In the centre of the page stands out a bunch of pizzutella grapes (or horn grapes), with long or curved acini, produced mainly in the southern regions. It is tempting but risky to try to decipher the painter’s initials in the (apparently?) random commas of the shoots; in any case it is the grapes themselves, on each berry of which the light is refracted with short pecks, that steal the scene from the companion fruits in the remaining part of the painting. And a slightly lopsided basket and a scale pan are filled with black, red and white grapes. Holding it up with three iron cords, listed ring by ring, is a young woman with a veil over her hair.
The fruit seller wears the costume of the commoners of the Spanish Viceroyalty between Naples and the lands of Abruzzo and Lucania. The care with which the typical dress that the fruit sellers of the nativity scenes of the 18th century will wear is made is equal to that with which the fruits are painted: ending with a series, four by four, of golden fabric buttons. Likewise, the infinite gradation of reds lavished on the fruits is found in the flesh tones of the face and lips, in the corals of the necklace up to the blood-coloured drips of the frills of the overdress. Seen from quarters, as if leaning out with a bang into the physical space of the observer, the fruit seller constitutes a coup de théâtre, an authentic painting within a painting. The woman opens an unprecedented glimpse into the collaboration of the figure painters in the still life; or rather into the chapter of the four-handed paintings, notoriously one of the most arduous challenges for the connoisseur as well as one of the most difficult questions in the study of post-Caravaggism between Rome and Naples.
Now, it is a question of seeing whether the fruit seller also belongs to the person responsible for the inanimate parts. Now the chiaroscuro hand holding the scales is, judging by the style, a typical detail of the mature Battistello Caracciolo, around the end of the third decade. For those who know the corpus of the person who was, for a short while, the closest thing to a pupil Caravaggio ever had, it is easy to think of formulaic works from the late 1620s such as the Lot and his daughters in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche and which we had as a loan for the first exhibition dedicated to Battistello in the Sala Causa in Capodimonte (2022). It was on the reasoned margins of that painting, where the still life parts seem to presuppose a different hand, that I tried in the monograph on Battistello (2000) to set up a plot of relationships between Caracciolo and Luca Forte, publishing a painting depicting a Girl with still life.
Nevertheless, it is not possible to maintain at the moment that the fruit seller is an entirely autograph work by Caracciolo. Compared to more inspired details - the hands or the shirt sleeves with deep undercuts - the three-quarter face is of less sustained quality. A progress in the recognition of the author of the figure could arise from the comparison with the angel in the Annunciation (fig. 5-6) that an expert such as Zeri believed to be by Carlo Sellitto (1581-1614) but which seems to be attributed, rather, to an early follower of Caracciolo.
In the upper portion, as equally many mini still lifes, appear five wicker baskets with peaches, figs, plums and pears in a bloom of reds, greens, ochres and violets. The tactile consistency of the plums and the yellow-red angelicas is of such perspicuity that it would be difficult to find among the figure painters who were working to make the notes (not the peels) to the mastery of the Spaniard Ribera, who settled in Naples in ‘16.
If the fireworks come to an end, the upper portion of the canvas closes with the explosion of the carousel of palmate leaves of the fig tree (not without, in the group in the centre, a fruit obscenely opening). In the centre of the page stands out a bunch of pizzutella grapes (or horn grapes), with long or curved acini, produced mainly in the southern regions. It is tempting but risky to try to decipher the painter’s initials in the (apparently?) random commas of the shoots; in any case it is the grapes themselves, on each berry of which the light is refracted with short pecks, that steal the scene from the companion fruits in the remaining part of the painting. And a slightly lopsided basket and a scale pan are filled with black, red and white grapes. Holding it up with three iron cords, listed ring by ring, is a young woman with a veil over her hair.
As mentioned at the beginning, the Fruit Seller is an example of how complex the dialectic of identity between Roman and Neapolitan Caravaggism can be, if considered from the still life point of view. The comparison with the Roman specialists of Caravaggio’s time is demonstrated by the naturalism of the fruits and their reactivity to the exploratory value of light. These are the first clues that allude to Forte’s knowledge of the “Gobbo dei Frutti”, the Cortona master who, slightly younger than Caravaggio, held the effort until 1636 (over a quarter of a century after the Master’s death). As proof of the popularity in the Roman context of these subjects with market scenes, there is, or rather, existed until the Second World War, a Fruit seller with a basket of vegetables at the National Museum of Stockholm, which we know thanks to a photo preserved, with the reference to the Gobbo, at the Federico Zeri archive of the University of Bologna.
No less important appear the connections of Forte with a master of the calibre of the aforementioned “Master of the Acquavella Still Life”, who often avails himself of an equally excellent figure painter like Bartolomeo Cavarozzi and who for this reason, not by chance, some would like to identify with the Viterbo native himself. Equally relevant are the relationships with that Verrocchi, well spotted by Causa in the 70s and who constitutes the missing link between the Caravaggio season of Neapolitan still life and that of still life at the maximum volume of presentation.
In conclusion: the fortunate reappearance of a painting from Forte’s very early maturity allows us to illuminate the point of maximum contiguity of the Neapolitan milieu with the Roman one. At the same time, in the age of the outgoing Caravaggism, this generous offering of summer and autumn fruit, conceived as a hymn to earthly joys, already makes the squadron of supporting artists of the local still life of Baroque style heard behind the door: from Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo (1629-1693) to Giuseppe Ruoppolo (1631-1710) who, if we were to limit ourselves to the parts of large decorative commitment, must have done their homework on our canvas.
The painting certainly enjoyed success among Forte’s colleagues: recently, for example, a Kitchen Interior with Vivandiera (156.5 x 228 cm) was published, where an acronym appears that can be dissolved in the historical name of Ambrogio Russo, documented in 1627 and 1632, son-in-law of Battistello and cited in the sources, together with Giacomo Recco and Forte himself, among those who “were very famous in painting flowers and fruits from nature”.
Offered to the judgment of the public and amateurs in the exhibition held in Naples in 1964, the research on still life is the highest fruit of the final season of stylistic criticism matured in the circle of Roberto Longhi (1890-1970). In the anthology of paintings gathered in Palazzo Reale, Forte had the right prominence. Two years earlier, Longhi’s magazine, “Paragone” had hosted the contribution of Raffaello Causa on which the bibliography on the painter would take off (1962). Causa intuits that the experiments of post-Caravaggio painting are to be found among the masters of still life and is among the first to point out, in Forte’s career, the connections with Battistello Caracciolo (1578-1635): “Forte’s characteristic feature - he wrote - is a stony and turned material, almost as if in the formal contingency of a texture evidently created in the ways of luministic painting, little by little the iron law of drawn and chiaroscuro volume returns to assert its demands (approximately what happened in Battistello’s later production)”.
Four years later, in a popular publication for the Fabbri Brothers’ “Maestro del colore” series, dedicated to the Caravaggesques of the South, Causa himself specifies: “It is in Naples that we should look for still life specialists with recognized names and surnames who participate in a naturalistic climate: from Forte to Porpora, from Recco to Ruoppolo.” These lines should have prompted the equating of the still life masters to the great history painters. If in the patrician collections of the 17th and 18th centuries, still lifes were exhibited with sacred or mythological paintings; in modern museum reorganizations they have been somewhat ghettoized. This is what happened for many years in the Pinacoteca di Capodimonte where, only in the latest arrangement of the seventeenth-century rooms also curated by the writer (2022), the paintings of Forte and other specialists were relocated between the Riberas and the Falcones, in an accrochage that attests their importance and all their experimental portion.
Stefano Causa
A full fact sheet is available on request.