Master of the Hartford Still Life

On 4 May 1607 officials of Pope Paul V listed the paintings they had confiscated from Giuseppe Cesari, called the Cavalier d'Arpino, one of the leading painters in Rome. The pope handed them to his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Among them were two early canvases by Caravaggio, who had worked in d'Arpino's studio as a young man, the Boy with a Basket of Fruit and the Sick Bacchus. There were also two large still lifes by a hand nobody could name. One shows dead birds hanging from hooks around a single living owl, the other a vase of flowers with fruit and vegetables.

That painter is now called the Master of the Hartford Still Life, after a table of flowers and fruit in the Wadsworth Atheneum, a museum in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1976 the art historian Federico Zeri suggested the master might be the young Caravaggio himself. Other candidates put forward include d'Arpino's brother Bernardino Cesari and Prospero Orsi, a Roman decorative painter, and the question is still open. Because they are on the 1607 list, the Borghese birds and flowers must have been painted before that spring.