Vincenzo Campi

Four big canvases of food hang together at Brera. Fish laid out for sale, a poultry stall where a boy has hold of a goose's neck, a kitchen in full operation, a young woman behind a heap of fruit. Vincenzo Campi painted them around 1580. They spent the next two centuries near Cremona, in the guest rooms of the Hieronymite monastery at San Sigismondo, where the house inventories list them from 1718 on. They reached Milan in 1809, when the Napoleonic government suppressed the religious houses of Lombardy and their contents were gathered into Brera.

Campi came from the busiest painting family in Cremona. His father Galeazzo and his elder brothers Giulio and Antonio kept the city's churches supplied with altarpieces, and Vincenzo did that work too. What he added was the market picture, an idea out of Antwerp, where the Flemish painters Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer had been piling meat, fish and vegetables across the front of a canvas with the sacred story shrunk away behind. Campi kept the goods and let the story go.

The Augsburg banker Hans Fugger wanted the same thing for the dining room of his castle at Kirchheim in Bavaria and ordered a set of five, which Campi signed and dated in 1580 and 1581. Those canvases are still in the castle, and they are how the four Brera pictures got their author back. In Milan they had long been catalogued under his brothers Giulio and Antonio, until the signed German set turned up. Which of the two series was painted first is still argued over.