Flowers and Ducks

In Naples flower painting was a trade with its own specialists, and canvases went out of the studio unsigned as a matter of course. This one Belvedere signed. Only four or five of his pictures carry his name, and the flowers with ducks in Florence are among them. The date is a different story. The gallery publishes none, and the sources that offer one contradict each other, so the picture sits somewhere in his twenty years of painting in Naples without a year attached to it. It hangs in the Royal Apartments at Palazzo Pitti, in the room Florentines call the Sala dei Pappagalli, the Parrots. There are no parrots in it. The name is a joke about the wall hangings, French silk of around 1810 whose imperial eagles were read as parrots once Napoleon had fallen.