ITALIAN SCHOOL (NAPLES?), 17th century

STILL LIFE WITH SQUASH, MELON AND ARTICHOKE

Oil on canvas, 52 × 62 cm / 20.5 × 24.4 in
with frame: 67.7 × 77 cm / 26.6 × 30.3 in
Old relining; scattered retouching; wear consistent with age.

PROVENANCE: Private collection, Bruxelles

This compact still life, representing a cut squash, a melon and an artichoke arranged against a tenebrist background, belongs to the naturalistic current that flourished in Naples during the seventeenth century. The emphatic chiaroscuro, the low foreground plane and the sharply articulated vegetal textures connect the work to the tradition shaped by Paolo Porpora and the Recco family, whose studios established a distinctive Neapolitan vocabulary of cultivated darkness and tactile realism.
The strong descriptive precision visible in the rendering of the fruit, however, also recalls the contribution of Flemish painters active in Naples. Among them, Abraham Brueghel played the most decisive role in introducing a more structured, textural and botanically attentive approach to still-life painting in the city. The present canvas shares several of these characteristics, suggesting that it may have been executed by an unidentified artist of Flemish origin working in proximity to Brueghel’s milieu and absorbing aspects of his naturalistic vocabulary.
Although the authorship remains undetermined, the painting demonstrates the fertile artistic exchanges between Italian and Flemish workshops in the mid-seventeenth century. Its careful modelling, dense atmospheric shadow and subtly interwoven textures place it within that transregional milieu, where naturalism was enriched by cross-cultural methods and where still-life imagery became a refined vehicle for observing matter, ripeness and decay.