Attributed to GIOVANNI PAOLO CASTELLI, called SPADINO

STILL LIFE WITH A GUINEA PIG AND DEAD GAME

GIOVANNI PAOLO CASTELLI, called SPADINO
Rome, 1659 – circa 1730

Oil on canvas
Canvas size: 74.5 × 98.5 cm / 29.3 × 38.8 in
Unframed

The second half of the seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary flourishing for still-life painting in Rome and brought significant changes to the genre. The established repertoire of the Roman school, in which compositions of flowers and fruit had occupied a central place, gradually expanded. New subjects began to appear alongside them, including depictions of dead game and hunting trophies—subjects previously associated primarily with Northern European painting and relatively uncommon within the Roman tradition.

The German painter Franz Werner von Tamm, who worked in Rome from approximately 1685 to 1695, played an important role in this development. His work exerted a significant influence upon a generation of Roman still-life painters. Tamm reinterpreted the Northern tradition of the hunting still life, combining the precise observation of animals, birds and plants with the decorative splendour of Roman Baroque painting. The presence of dead game also lent these sumptuous compositions a subtle suggestion of vanitas—a reminder of the fragility of life concealed within an image of abundance.

The present still life vividly demonstrates how Giovanni Paolo Castelli, called Spadino, one of the most distinguished Italian practitioners of the genre, absorbed and transformed Tamm’s pictorial language.

Castelli formally adopts several motifs favoured by his Northern colleague. Above the cascade of dead game, he places a living guinea pig—an exotic animal that appears repeatedly in Tamm’s work. Its small, alert figure enters into an expressive dialogue with the motionless bodies of the birds, intensifying the tension between life and death.

At the same time, Castelli decisively alters the character of the image. In Tamm’s work, hunting trophies generally retain a contained, courtly intimacy, appearing almost like precious objects gathered within an enclosed composition. Here, by contrast, the still life becomes part of an expansive landscape. The space opens towards a luminous sky and an ancient temple, while the accumulation of game, bunches of grapes and autumnal vine leaves acquires an almost theatrical scale.

In Castelli’s hands, the Northern tradition of the hunting still life is thus transformed into a spectacle imbued with a distinctly Italian sense of space, light and Baroque theatricality.

A closely related and slightly smaller version of this composition, measuring 67 × 89 cm, was formerly presented by Antichità Castelbarco with an attribution to Giovanni Paolo Castelli. The close repetition of the composition indicates the success of the subject and suggests that it circulated within the artist’s workshop or immediate circle.