Luca Forte

(Napoli - Napoli, 1670)

Attributed to

Oil on canvas

cm. 51,5x66. Framed

As studies on Neapolitan still life in the seventeenth century have progressed - a unique crossroads of exceptional and closely related artistic personalities, not least because of frequent parental crossbreeding - Luca Forte's work has come to be increasingly gigantic. Not only because of his historical role as a leader in the flowering of the genre in the Neapolitan area, but above all because of the height of his pictorial achievements, with their fascinating combination of elements related to the beginnings of Italian still life and specifically Caravaggesque, and forward leaps of a more distinctly Baroque character. We have here an essay, probably to be placed in the youthful phase of Luca Forte's activity, of the rigorous elegance of his constructive logic: the perspective planes are scanned with crisp essentiality, concentrating, rather than on the opulence and multiplanarity that was to be the dominant note of the great Neapolitan masters of markedly Baroque imprint, on the masterful rendering of volumes and the lenticular investigation of surfaces, with the virtuosity exhibited in the reflections of light on the various fruits in relation to the different consistencies of their peels. In our canvas, the compositional layout pushes the forms onto the foreground as in a frieze and proposes some of the author's most recurrent solutions in the depiction of fruit: think of the Still Life of Fruit and Flowers in a Crystal Vase at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, the pair of octagonal-format Still Lifes at the Duca di Martina Museum in Naples, and the Still life of fruit next to a chipped wall in the Molinari Pradelli collection in Marano di Castenaso.