The Artist: During the last few decades, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi has emerged as one of the most fascinating followers of Caravaggio. Born in Viterbo, north of Rome, he was trained by a compatriot, Tarquinio Ligustri. His earliest known work, an altarpiece of Saint Ursula and her companions (1608) in the church of San Marco, Rome, gives little hint of the naturalism that marks his finest work. Among these must be counted a painting of Saint Jerome at his desk accompanied by two youthful angels, for which he was paid by the Medici in Florence in 1617 (see fig. 1 above). A work of extraordinary quality, with an emphasis on naturalistic description and optical verity, the picture marks the opening of a new, more modern phase of caravaggism.
Some time prior to 1617, he obtained living quarters in the palace of Giovanni Battista Crescenzi, a Roman noble who, in addition to his pursuits in architecture and painting, established an academy so that, according to our primary source, the painter/biographer Giovanni Baglione, “day and night there would be the occasion for all to learn the difficulties of art; and sometimes he would have them copy from life and would look for something beautiful and curious—fruits, animals and other bizarre things—that could be found in Rome, and he gave these to those youths to draw so that they would become good masters, which actually happened” (…teneva Accademia tanto di giorno quanto di notte tempo, acciocché avessero tutti maggiore occasione d'apprendere le difficoltà dell'arte; et anche talvolta havea gusto di far ritrarre dal naturale et andava a prendere qualche cosa di bello e di curioso che per Roma ritrovavasi di frutti d'animali e d'altre bizzarrie e consegnavala a quei giovani che la disegnassero, solo perché divenissero buoni Maestri si come veramente adivenne). The importance of this focused activity is evident in the astonishingly rendered worm-eaten table in the
Saint Jerome no less than in the beautiful still life of a skull, books, and a crucifix arranged on it. Equally astonishing is the focused light and the study of its play over the various surfaces. All of this attention to detail speaks to an artist with an instinct for still life painting.
In 1617, Cavarozzi accompanied Crescenzi to Spain, and returned to Rome in 1619. It was probably in Spain that he painted a remarkable work of Saint John the Baptist in the wilderness, in which the vine leaves and lamb are, again, marvelously rendered, with meticulous attention to texture and light (figs. 2–3). The quality of the picture is such that, like another painting of the Sacrifice of Isaac (private collection), it has been ascribed to Caravaggio.[1] Yet the poetics are quite different: there is an elegance and delicacy and an attention to detailed description and to surface effects, rather than an attempt to describe a psychological drama. This approach aligns Cavarozzi with Orazio Gentileschi rather than Caravaggio and reminds us that the history of caravaggism has many strands.
Despite the exquisite still life elements in the pictures cited above, it remains a matter of contention whether Cavarozzi painted independent still lives or whether he collaborated with a specialist. Papi (see Refs.) has noted that in 1613, a “Bartolomeo” painted a
Table with Fruits that was sold to the Altemps through Prospero Orsi, a painter/dealer who played a key role in promoting the work of Caravaggio. Indeed, at the same time that Orsi sold the work of Bartolomeo [Cavarozzi?] to the Altemps, he sold another still life ascribed to Caravaggio. Papi goes further in identifying Cavarozzi as the author of the finest group of still lifes painted in early seventeenth-century Rome, paintings usually ascribed to the so-called Master of the Acquavella Still Life (named after the dealer who once owned the key work).
Upon Cavarozzi’s return from Spain, where his paintings introduced artists to the practice of Caravaggio, his work loses some of its quality. He repeated, almost ad nauseam, a fine composition of the Holy Family. The poetics of light and texture that made his earlier work so astonishing was substituted with a tendency toward academism—doubtless in response to the success of Bolognese artists such as Guido Reni, Domenichino, and Francesco Albani.
The Picture: Distributed over the surface of the painting are ten bunches of grapes of different varieties, a branch laden with peaches, branches of figs, some cherries, a praying mantis, and three birds, identifiable as pied wagtails. The dimensions well exceed the common size of a still life painting and indicate a special function.
The Attribution: The painting is one of the few still lifes that can be attributed with relative certainly to Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, who—as noted above—spent his formative years in the academy established by the noble-born Giovanni Battista Crescenzi for the purpose of studying from nature. The opulent vines that weave through the composition can be linked most closely to the extraordinary foliage in the upper-left corner of the painting of Saint John the Baptist in the Cathedral in Toledo, Spain (noted above). The author of the only monograph on the artist, Gianni Papi (see Refs.) believes The Met’s picture dates before Cavarozzi left for Spain in 1617 and is more or less contemporary with
The Lament of Aminta (private collection), a beautiful picture of two figures—a youth playing the recorder and a female with cymbals (fig. 4). On the table behind which they sit is a still life of grapes, an open music score and a violin. The Met’s painting testifies to Cavarozzi’s careful observation of nature: his impressive ability to handle the tonal qualities of the twisting and folding leaves, the smooth surfaces of the cascading bunches of grapes, and their sensual aspect and tactility. More than a mere still life, the picture is a quasi-scientific record of a variety of grapes and other fruits and thus reflects a moment when art and the natural sciences intersect. (Cassiano del Pozzo, one of the central figures in the study of the natural sciences promoted in the Accademia dei Lincei, owned a work by Crescenzi.) There is the suggestion in the format and varieties of grapes with the later work of Bartolomeo Bimbi (1648–1729), who painted still lives documenting the botanical collections of the Medici (fig. 5). The birds have been identified as pied wagtails, common to yards, gardens, and stone walls.
Although bunches of grapes presented artists with a perfect vehicle to show their skill at capturing effects of light and surface textures, as a matter of course, an erudite seventeenth-century viewer would associate the painter’s success with an episode in Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History, where the Greek painter, Zeuxis, depicted grapes with such realism that birds came down to peck at them (for more about this story, see
L.2016.26).
Keith Christiansen 2019
[1] On all of these works, see Gianni Papi,
Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, Soncino, 2015. For an overview of scholarship on the Crescenzi accademy and the artists who were associated with it, see Alberto Cottino, “L’Accademia del marchese Crescenzi e il ‘caso’ Tommaso Salini”, in Anna Coliva and Davide Dotti,
L’Origine della natura morta in Italia: Caravaggio e il Maestro di Hartford, exh. cat., Villa Borghese, Rome, 2016, pp. 145–56. See also Luigi Spezzaferro in
Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 23, 1979.
