果物籠

Around 1599, in a Rome where painters treated fruit and flowers as filler beneath a saint or a goddess, the young Caravaggio did something almost provocative. He painted a plain wicker basket of fruit on a bare, glowing background and nothing else. No figure, no story, no excuse. This is his only known standalone still life, and it is often called a starting point for the whole genre in Italian art. What makes it strange is that he refused to idealise. The apple has a wormhole, some leaves are curling and dry, a few grapes have gone soft. Where Flemish painters chose flawless specimens, Caravaggio painted the actual fruit of a market stall, caught in the middle of decay. It passed into the collection of Cardinal Federico Borromeo, whose gift of pictures formed the core of this Milan gallery, and it has hung here among the works he gathered ever since.