水果静物

Caravaggio scattered fruit and glass through his religious paintings all his life, yet only two still lifes survive that stand entirely on their own. This is one of them. A wicker basket spills grapes, figs and squash across a bare stone ledge, everything caught in that hard shaft of light he loved, falling from the upper left as if through a gap in the roof. Some of the fruit is bruised and some leaves are curling, for he painted decay as carefully as ripeness. Not every scholar agrees the hand here is his, and the picture has been dated anywhere from 1601 to the end of his short life, which closed in 1610.