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Lot Essay
After Fede Galizia, Panfilo Nuvolone is considered the most important master of still life painting in Lombardy at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Indeed, Galizia's magisterial compositions set the course for younger artists in great part because Nuvolone emulated them so willingly and so well. Such details as the luminosity of the fruit and the isolation of a single subject in the center of a darkened stage had already been explored by Galizia by 1600, roughly a decade before Nuvolone's earliest known still lifes.
This scintillating Fruit bowl with peaches and grapes was discovered and published by Luigi Salerno in two separate publications of 1984. The attribution is based on comparisons with two signed and dated still lifes: the Grapes, Peach and Pear on a Metal Dish of 1617 (ex-Galerie Sanct Lucas, Vienna) and the Peaches and Grapes on a Metal Dish of 1620 (formerly Dubino collection, Milan). Orange and yellow peaches, usually surrounded by bunches of purple and green grapes, are Nuvolone's signature motif, occurring in roughly two-thirds of his fifteen known still lifes. The Lodi picture depicts fruits that are similar, although not identical, to the Dubino picture of 1620, while its rich contrasts of light and dark suggest a slightly earlier date by comparison to the 1617 still life formerly in Vienna.
All of Nuvolone's still lifes reflect the influence of Fede Galizia and the present painting is no exception. A white ceramic bowl is another Galizia characteristic that very likely inspired Piero Lorenzelli and Alberto Veca (1985) to re-assign the Lodi still life to the more famous painter. Flavio Caroli, author of the Galizia catalogue raisonné (loc. cit.), preferred to leave the question open. However, Nuvolone's authorship was justly restored by Alessandro Morandotti (in Zeri, 1989), noting that 'The intimate and secret world of the Lombard Galizia is supplanted by the meticulous description of the Cremonese Nuvolone, to whom the still life in the Lodi collection surely belongs'. In other words, while Fede Galizia retains an aura of mystery, Nuvolone is a naturalist who selects his subject and studies it minutely. Their contemporaries understood their differences and collected them both: by 1635, the Duke of Savoy in Turin owned one of Galizia's still lifes and three by Nuvolone.
We are grateful to Dr John Spike for the above catalogue entry.
This scintillating Fruit bowl with peaches and grapes was discovered and published by Luigi Salerno in two separate publications of 1984. The attribution is based on comparisons with two signed and dated still lifes: the Grapes, Peach and Pear on a Metal Dish of 1617 (ex-Galerie Sanct Lucas, Vienna) and the Peaches and Grapes on a Metal Dish of 1620 (formerly Dubino collection, Milan). Orange and yellow peaches, usually surrounded by bunches of purple and green grapes, are Nuvolone's signature motif, occurring in roughly two-thirds of his fifteen known still lifes. The Lodi picture depicts fruits that are similar, although not identical, to the Dubino picture of 1620, while its rich contrasts of light and dark suggest a slightly earlier date by comparison to the 1617 still life formerly in Vienna.
All of Nuvolone's still lifes reflect the influence of Fede Galizia and the present painting is no exception. A white ceramic bowl is another Galizia characteristic that very likely inspired Piero Lorenzelli and Alberto Veca (1985) to re-assign the Lodi still life to the more famous painter. Flavio Caroli, author of the Galizia catalogue raisonné (loc. cit.), preferred to leave the question open. However, Nuvolone's authorship was justly restored by Alessandro Morandotti (in Zeri, 1989), noting that 'The intimate and secret world of the Lombard Galizia is supplanted by the meticulous description of the Cremonese Nuvolone, to whom the still life in the Lodi collection surely belongs'. In other words, while Fede Galizia retains an aura of mystery, Nuvolone is a naturalist who selects his subject and studies it minutely. Their contemporaries understood their differences and collected them both: by 1635, the Duke of Savoy in Turin owned one of Galizia's still lifes and three by Nuvolone.
We are grateful to Dr John Spike for the above catalogue entry.