Still Life with Fruit, Parrot, and Nautilus Pitcher

The pitcher in this picture is a nautilus shell, carried back from the Indian Ocean in Dutch East India ships, ground down until the pearl layer showed and then mounted in gilt silver by a goldsmith. In the 1650s an object like that belonged in a prince's cabinet, and so did a live parrot. Willem van Aelst painted both in Florence in 1653. He had come from Delft by way of France and was working for Ferdinando II de' Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, and for the duke's brothers, and this is one of several variations he made on the same arrangement for that family. Most of what he painted in those Florentine years stayed in the city, which is why so much of his early work is at the Pitti and not in the Netherlands.