The Artist: What we know of Giuseppe Ruoppolo is primarily derived from Bernardo De Dominici’s important but not always reliable
Vite dei pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani, published between 1742 and 1745. De Dominici knew Giuseppe personally and described him as, “tall, his complexion more brown than white, heavy set and robust…one found in him a sincerity without equal and an admirable cordiality.”[1] He reports that Giuseppe was the nephew of the more famous Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo (1629–1693), whose mastery of painting fruits and vegetables, especially grapes, Giuseppe emulated, with the difference that, according again to De Dominici, the coloring of his pictures was more reddish. It was, De Dominici observed, as though Giuseppe lined up his fruit in a row and painted them without embellishment, so truthfully that they seemed more real than the actual fruit. It now seems that neither Giovanni Battista nor Giuseppe studied with Paolo Porpora (1617/19–1673), who had left Naples and moved to Rome by 1648—an eventful period which saw the populist overthrow led by Masaniello (1620–1647) and then the reinstatement of Spanish rule.[2] Rather, their focus on the aspect of each fruit points to their study of the paintings of Luca Forte (ca. 1610–15–ca. 1670) and his insistence on naturalism enhanced by a caravaggesque light. Giuseppe’s early works, of which The Met’s is a fine example, can easily be confused with those of his more famous uncle. Between Giuseppe Ruoppolo’s still life of fruits and Giuseppe Recco’s marine still life (
71.17), The Met is able present the two defining types of still-life painting in seventeenth-century Naples.
The Picture: Laid out on a marble tabletop are an assortment of dried and fresh fruit: melons (visible in the background, tied with straw strings; they are possibly Piel de Sapo melons), pine cones, strings of dried figs and raisins in a basket, apples, two types of grapes with their vines and leaves, scattered walnuts and hazelnuts, and a snail—the latter an incidental detail that, like the conspicuous cracks in the marble, may also be intended as an allusion to the corruptibility of nature and the passage of time. Is it a specifically autumnal still life? The composition is notable for the counterposed curves and the division between the highly colored apples and grapes on the one side and the monochromatic dried fruits, pine cones, and nuts on the other. But no less admirable is the focused rendering of each element—a trait De Dominici pointed out for praise. In this, Giuseppe’s point of reference was both the work of his uncle and that of Luca Forte, whose paintings De Dominici criticized for the lack of spatial clarity.
Prior to its appearance at auction in Milan in 2005, the picture was unknown to the literature. However, it has a continuous provenance back to the eighteenth century with the Mastai Ferretti family in Naples. As noted by Alberto Cottino (see Refs), as a signed, early work, The Met’s picture is an important addition to Giuseppe’s oeuvre and assists in the task of understanding the relationship of his art to that of his uncle.
Keith Christiansen 2020
[1] De Dominici,
Vite dei pittori, scultori ed architetti napoletani, Naples, vol. 3, p. 299. Giuseppe is discussed in the chapter devoted to Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo, which is where De Dominici discusses all of the most celebrated Neapolitan painters of still life.
[2] For Giovanni Battista’s biography, based on archival findings, see Gianluca Forgione’s entry in the
Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 89 (2017), available online: http://treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-battista-ruoppolo_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/
