The Artist: Born in the Lombard city of Cremona, where he was trained by Giovanni Battista Trotti, called il Malosso (1556–1619), Panfilo Nuvolone moved to Milan by 1608 or 1609. There he enjoyed a successful career as a painter of altarpieces and mural decorations. Between 1609 and 1611, he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the church of Santa Maria del Giardino (destroyed in 1865). In 1610 he was contracted to decorate the Sansoni chapel in the Franciscan church of Sant’Angelo, where he embraced the “theatrical rhetoric”[1] that marks the paintings of the prominent painters Camillo Procaccini and Morazzone. Another cycle of frescoes (destroyed) was carried out between 1618 and 1621 for the convent of Santi Domenico e Lazzaro. Among his most important surviving cycles is the decoration of the choir of Santa Maria della Passione. He also carried out decorative painting in the Palazzo Ducale for the Spanish governors of the city. In his late work, Panfilo was sometimes assisted by his gifted son, Carlo Francesco (ca. 1609–1661), who was to become the protagonist of a delicately sentimental style akin to that of Bartolomé Estebán Murillo in Spain (see The Met
2012.100.2).
Panfilo’s religious paintings conform to the somewhat academic, if robustly rhetorical, style that typifies so much Counter-Reformation painting in Milan in the late sixteenth century, when the city had the saintly Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) as its cardinal archbishop, later succeeded by his cousin Federico (1564–1631). Absent from those works is anything indicating the heightened naturalism that, by contrast, characterizes Panfilo’s still lifes and makes him an important figure in the history of Italian still-life painting. It is important to recall that idealization in religious painting and faithfulness to appearances in portraiture and still lifes was very much part of late Renaissance aesthetics. Federico Borromeo, a protagonist of the arts and founder of the prestigious Biblioteca Ambrosiana, prized his
Basket of Fruit by Caravaggio (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan), which he owned by at least 1607. Although painted in Rome, the picture is indebted to Caravaggio’s Lombard training. As an indication of that tradition as well as what amounts to a hierarchy of styles related to a ranking of the different kinds of painting, with still lifes occupying a low rung, we can point to the fantastical allegorical heads composed of still-life elements by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) and a remarkable painting of peaches on a silver dish painted about 1591–94 by Ambrogico Figino (1548–1608). Arcimboldo’s paintings asserted an elevated status through their imaginative reformulation of the natural world into allegory (composite heads symbolizing the seasons or the elements or suggesting the portrait of an eminent figure). By contrast, Figino’s plate of peaches was accompanied (on its reverse) by a madrigal, thereby suggesting a comparison of painting to poetry.
Panfilo’s primary debt for his still lifes was to the outstanding female painter, Fede Galizia (1578–1630), who was another pioneer in the genre. Indeed, the work of the two artists was sometimes confused by contemporaries. This was the case with one of Fede Galizia’s most characteristic paintings, mistakenly listed as by Panfilo in a 1635 inventory of the prestigious collection of the duke of Savoy, Carlo Filippo Emanuele (1562–1630). As this misattribution indicates, Panfilo’s reputation in this genre was considerable. As early as 1620, we find a still life of his in the collection of the cardinal, and later archbishop of Milan, Cesare Monti (1593–1650), and another was owned by Diego Felipez de Guzmán, 1st Marquis of Leganés, who from 1635 to 1640 served as the Spanish governor of the city. The inventory description of the marquis’s painting sounds very much like The Met’s picture: “una pintura de melocotones y ubas con una salba, de panfilo nuvolone, en table…” (a painting of peaches and grapes on a salver by Panfilo Nuvolone, on panel), reminding us of the consistency of his compositions. A reconstruction of this aspect of his activity as an artist is based on two pictures, one dated 1617, and the other 1620.[2]
The Picture: A peach, two pears, grapes, and grape leaves are arranged on a silver stemmed salver set on a table top against a plain, dark background. This preferred formula, which Panfilo employed with variations in multiple paintings, including one in which the peach and two pears are replaced by three peaches, derives from the work of Fede Galizia (see, for example, fig. 1 above). However, Panfilo’s arrangements, though they may at first seem simple, tend to be more opulent and richer in effect than Fede’s more abstractly constructed compositions. The Met’s picture is a relatively recent discovery, having been published for the first time in 2001 (see Refs). The contrast of the polished silver with the soft surface of the peach and the translucency of the grapes emphasizes Panfilo’s mastery of a soft light playing over objects of varying textures and surfaces. Mario Marubbi (2004) has remarked that, “unlike Fede, who carves out each detail, isolating it in a timeless setting, Panfilo places his still lifes in a temporal dimension, emphasizing elements of decay, as in the spotted peach and dried-up grapes. Moreover, he animates his scene with insects….” Indeed, wasps buzz about the grapes, suggesting an olfactory dimension to the picture as well as alluding to decay—without, however, transforming the still life into a vanitas image. The wasps also recall a famous still life by the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis, whose painting of grapes attracted a live bird—a theme that can be traced back to the very beginnings of Italian still-life painting (see
L.2016.26). Panfilo underscores the truthfulness of the depiction by including a portrait of himself reflected in the silver stem of the salver. This, too, can be traced to precedent, for Andrea Solario (1460–1524) included his reflection—optically inverted, as it would be in actuality—in a picture showing the head of Saint John the Baptist on a stemmed salver (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Such reflections became common among still life painters both north and south of the Alps, and they underscore painting as a mirror of nature. Here, again, there is an analogy with Fede Galizia, who, in a portrait of the erudite Jesuate, Paolo Morigia (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana), shows a reflection of the windows opposite him in the pair of glasses he holds (fig. 2). Morigia admired the portrait for it truthfulness.
By isolating a salver of fruit on a table with a plain black background, Panfilo’s picture seems to privilege observation and representation over artifice—an approach shared by Caravaggio’s more spatially dynamic
Basket of Fruit. Caravaggio’s illustrious Roman patron, Vincenzo Giustinianni, recorded that the artist made the polemical declaration that that it took as much skill to paint a good picture of flowers as one of figures, thereby attacking the accepted Renaissance hierarchy of the arts (commented upon above) and emphasizing the primacy of observation and naturalism. Unlike Caravaggio, Panfilo did not allow his activity as a painter of still lifes to affect the conceptual style of his figurative pictures. Like one of the two dated still lifes of Panfilo’s, The Met’s picture has been dated to about 1617.
Keith Christiansen 2020
[1] For an overview of Panfilo’s career, see Francesco Frangi’s entry in
Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 79 (2013), accessible online: http://treccani.it/enciclopedia/panfilo-nuvolone_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/
[2] G. De Logu,
La natura morta italiana, Bergamo 1962, pp. 28, 163
