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Lot Essay
Giovan Battista Recco is the rarest of the major Neapolitan painters of still life, and also the most enigmatic. Apart from a handful of signed or monogrammed works, this scion of the Recco dynasty of painters left few documentary traces. Giovan Battista enters art history in 1653 with a dated still life of oysters and fishes (Stockholm, Royal Palace) of remarkable individuality. He is usually credited with the invention of the maritime still lifes that would bring fame to Giuseppe Recco, his nephew.
Although seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inventories regularly cite Giovan Battista under his colloquial nick-name, 'Titta Recco', fewer than twenty works have been identified to date. He must have been well-established by 1656, as Raffaello Causa points out (Storia di Napoli, 1972, p. 1042), when his two large still lifes were hanging in the Ruffo villa at Portici alongside masterpieces by Mattia Preti, Salvator Rosa, and Jusepe de Ribera. The sole contemporary documents of his life are bank payments received for paintings in November 1655 and May 1656. Neapolitan artists were decimated that year by the plague; the fallen may have included one of the most promising and inventive among them.
Scholars therefore place Recco's birth around 1615, a generation younger than Luca Forte, whom he succeeded as the most influential still life specialist by the middle of the seventeenth century. His works stand out for their concentration, equilibrium and meditative spirit. Naples was under the political dominion of Spain and it is not surprising to find a master of Recco's gifts responsive to the best qualities of Spanish still lifes of the Siglo de oro. As a case in point, his great Kitchen Table with Poultry and Eggs in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, was long attributed to Velázquez. Another Recco still life was once ascribed by H.J. Hoogewerff to Sánchez Cotán. Recco painted larders and other interior themes associated with the early seventeenth-century bodegones by Alejandro de Loarte and Juan van der Hamen, but it is not known if he visited Spain.
This outstanding Larder with Onions and Dried Fish was first published by Luigi Salerno, who commented sensitively on its 'emblematic simplicity, transforming the humblest objects into a pictorial motif of great abstraction and purity.' These qualities in a Spanish key are more pertinent, in fact, for Giovan Battista Recco, than for Giambattista Ruoppolo, to whom the picture was initially attributed. It is far more likely, given our present knowledge, that Recco would have desired and also been capable of composing a still life that constitutes a touching homage to the great Sánchez Cotán.
In contradistinction to Ruoppolo and to other younger colleagues, Giovan Battista Recco never allows his brushwork to take precedence over the thought in his mind. Painstakingly, he insists upon the integrity of every onion and every fish. This is a legacy of Caravaggio, whose influence, the present picture underscores, survived longest and most tenaciously in Naples, a city he visited twice. The crystalline clarity of the light reinforces the structure and the individuality of each motif. These humble elements -- sardines drying in a cool, dry place, onions sprouting for being left too long -- are raised to the level of our eyes as if they were the actors in a history painting. Professor Salerno rightly noted the 'emblematic simplicity' of this superb still life, for there is an unmistakable comparison between the suspended fish, which cease to be and yet become food, and the green onion shoots, a symbol of regeneration as old as the Egyptians.
Although seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inventories regularly cite Giovan Battista under his colloquial nick-name, 'Titta Recco', fewer than twenty works have been identified to date. He must have been well-established by 1656, as Raffaello Causa points out (Storia di Napoli, 1972, p. 1042), when his two large still lifes were hanging in the Ruffo villa at Portici alongside masterpieces by Mattia Preti, Salvator Rosa, and Jusepe de Ribera. The sole contemporary documents of his life are bank payments received for paintings in November 1655 and May 1656. Neapolitan artists were decimated that year by the plague; the fallen may have included one of the most promising and inventive among them.
Scholars therefore place Recco's birth around 1615, a generation younger than Luca Forte, whom he succeeded as the most influential still life specialist by the middle of the seventeenth century. His works stand out for their concentration, equilibrium and meditative spirit. Naples was under the political dominion of Spain and it is not surprising to find a master of Recco's gifts responsive to the best qualities of Spanish still lifes of the Siglo de oro. As a case in point, his great Kitchen Table with Poultry and Eggs in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, was long attributed to Velázquez. Another Recco still life was once ascribed by H.J. Hoogewerff to Sánchez Cotán. Recco painted larders and other interior themes associated with the early seventeenth-century bodegones by Alejandro de Loarte and Juan van der Hamen, but it is not known if he visited Spain.
This outstanding Larder with Onions and Dried Fish was first published by Luigi Salerno, who commented sensitively on its 'emblematic simplicity, transforming the humblest objects into a pictorial motif of great abstraction and purity.' These qualities in a Spanish key are more pertinent, in fact, for Giovan Battista Recco, than for Giambattista Ruoppolo, to whom the picture was initially attributed. It is far more likely, given our present knowledge, that Recco would have desired and also been capable of composing a still life that constitutes a touching homage to the great Sánchez Cotán.
In contradistinction to Ruoppolo and to other younger colleagues, Giovan Battista Recco never allows his brushwork to take precedence over the thought in his mind. Painstakingly, he insists upon the integrity of every onion and every fish. This is a legacy of Caravaggio, whose influence, the present picture underscores, survived longest and most tenaciously in Naples, a city he visited twice. The crystalline clarity of the light reinforces the structure and the individuality of each motif. These humble elements -- sardines drying in a cool, dry place, onions sprouting for being left too long -- are raised to the level of our eyes as if they were the actors in a history painting. Professor Salerno rightly noted the 'emblematic simplicity' of this superb still life, for there is an unmistakable comparison between the suspended fish, which cease to be and yet become food, and the green onion shoots, a symbol of regeneration as old as the Egyptians.