Fede Galizia

A signed still life of peaches in a dish, dated 1602, is often called the first dated still life by an Italian painter. It was made by Fede Galizia, a painter in Milan who was setting fruit on a plain ledge and studying it closely at a time when almost no one in Italy thought such things worth a picture of their own.

She learned the craft from her father, Nunzio Galizia, a miniaturist, and that training in small, exact detail shows in the way she rendered the bloom on a peach or the skin of a quince. Recognition came early. The Milanese art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo praised her while she was still a girl, and she went on to paint portraits and altarpieces for the city's churches as well.

Galizia also took up the story of Judith, the widow who beheaded the enemy general Holofernes, and returned to it more than once. Her fruit pieces are what secured her name, quiet arrangements laid out in even light. She made her will in June 1630, during an outbreak of plague in Milan, and is thought to have died of it soon after.