Andrea Belvedere

Andrea Belvedere painted flowers in Naples for about twenty years and then stopped, for good. In the 1690s he was called to Madrid to work for Charles II of Spain, where he supplied the flowers and fruit in decorations whose figures were painted by Luca Giordano, the fastest and most sought-after Neapolitan of the day, among them work at the Escorial outside the city. The king died in 1700, Belvedere went home, and in Naples he turned to the stage, writing comedies in Neapolitan dialect and putting them on. Nothing in the record shows him going back to painting.

His birth year is unsettled. He was listed for a long time as born in 1646, until his death record came to light giving his age as about 80 when he died in Naples on 27 June 1732, which puts his birth around 1652. The city knew him as Abate Andrea. He worked out of the Neapolitan still-life tradition of Giuseppe Recco and Giovan Battista Ruoppolo, and he taught the flower painters who followed in the city, Gasparo Lopez and Tommaso Realfonso among them.

The canvas of his in Florence, flowers with ducks beside them, is in the Royal Apartments at Palazzo Pitti, in the Sala dei Pappagalli, the Parrots Room. More of his flowers stayed in Spain and are now in the Prado.