Still Life With Fruit And Morels

Angelo Maria Rossi known as Carlo Torre's painter or Lo pseudo-Fardella (documented between 1665 and 1701)

Still life with fruit and morels

Oil on canvas, 66 x 53 cm

Published in G. Cirillo, G. Godi, Le Nature Morte del «Painter by Carlo Torre» (Pseudo Fardella) in Lombardy in the second half of the seventeenth century, in Painting and Decorative Arts, Parma, 1996, TAV 75

This elegant fruit composition is to be included in the interesting corpus of still lifes by the painter Angelo Maria Rossi, a still life artist active in Lombardy in the second half of the seventeenth century. For a long time he was known by the pseudonym of Pseudo-Fardella and was identified for the first time in 1996 as “Painter by Carlo Torre”: this name dates back to a dedication to the well-known scholar author of the Portrait of Milan discovered on one of his paintings. The discovery by Giuseppe Cirillo of a monogram ('AMR') on another canvas made it possible to identify the artist as Angelo Maria Rossi, documented in Lombardy approximately around the middle of the 17th century (see. G. Cirillo, 'Angelo Maria Rossi alias Painter of Carlo Torre', in 'Parma for Art, 2003, pp. 77-80). It is clear that the high quality of his art significantly influenced contemporary and subsequent natural mortar production, by virtue of the refined twilight settings, the brightness that lights up, accentuating the colors with deep tones, which seem to compete with the well-known Caravaggio examples. Between 1665 and 1701 this artist painted paintings which are reported in numerous inventories of Milanese and Turin collections. Calm and delicate compositional elegance seem to constitute the distinctive features of the master's manner: these suggestions appear in fact to be found in all the works ascribed to him. The style of our painting, published by G. Cirillo and G. Godi in the catalog The still lifes of the 'Painter by Carlo Torre' (Pseudo-Fardella) in Lombardy in the second half of the seventeenth century (Parma 1996, plate 75)he finds many affinities with a large contingent of canvases also present in the volume (plates 5, 20, 21 and 35) and in Angelo Maria Rossi alias 'Painter of Carlo Torre' (in Parma for Art, vol. IX, Paper 1-2, 2003, pp. 77-79), in which similar subjects, drafts and treatment of perspective planes are found. Particularly close to the painting in question are a work that passed through a Finarte auction and is currently in the Milanese collection featuring a basket of apricots and a plate with strawberries and a still life of fruit from the Ferrari collection in Modena. Our canvas, which stands out for its technical-executive expertise and the lenticular yield of the various types of fruit, is characterized by a marked luminism and a chiaroscuro that takes up the evidence of Caravaggio and the members of his circle in the context of still life. Even the extreme and rough realism in the rendering of the individual elements that take part in the composition looks to Caravaggio models, with particular reference to the so-called fiscella of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan.