Carafe of Flowers

In Rome in the early 1590s, the young Caravaggio earned his keep painting flowers and fruit in the workshop of the Cavalier d'Arpino, a leading Roman painter. His biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori later described a lost picture by him, a carafe of flowers showing the transparency of water and glass and the reflection of a window. Look at the round glass here and you will find one too, a pale square of panes on the left of the bowl. In 1995 the art historian Maria Rosaria Nappi suggested this little copper might copy Caravaggio's lost carafe. Archival research by the scholars Maurizio Calvesi and Francesca Curti argued against it, and the gallery lists the work as attributed to Jan Brueghel the Elder, around 1591 to 1595. Calvesi read the reflected window frame as a Christian cross, set on a sphere that stands for the world.