Christian Berentz
1658–1722 · Holy Roman Empire · Baroque, Still life painting
The story
Christian Berentz learned to paint in Hamburg, the free imperial city on the Elbe where he was born in 1658. One of his teachers there was Georg Hainz, a specialist in painted cabinets of curiosities, shelves crowded with shells, goblets and small precious objects. Berentz then travelled through the Low Countries, spent part of 1679 in Venice and reached Rome around 1680. He never left, and died there in 1722.
In Rome he lodged in the house of Marchese Niccolò Maria Pallavicini, one of the city's great collectors, and he brought the northern still life with him. His pictures are laid tables, fine glass, fruit and sweets, painted with a close eye for surfaces and reflections. Carlo Maratta, the leading painter in Rome in those years, sometimes added the figures. A large canvas in the Capodimonte museum in Naples, with people gathering grapes among Berentz's fruit and flowers, is one of their joint works.
