Still Life with Ladyfingers (The Fly)

By the time Christian Berentz painted this, around 1715, still life had been a genre in its own right for about a century. Berentz had come to Rome from Hamburg, and the museum sees his northern training in the attention he pays to things as they really are. Biscuits, flasks and crystal goblets stand on metal trays, and some details are painted with extreme care. The glass is finely decorated with a dove and olive branches, crumbs lie on the silver plate, and a fly has landed on the biscuits, which is where the picture gets its name. It reached Cardinal Neri Maria Corsini as a gift from Gasparo Probstat, director of the papal customs, and it first appears in the family inventory of 1740.