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| Caravaggio Basket of Fruit ca. 1596 oil on canvas Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan |
Brushmarks
The surface of a drop of water is perfectly smooth. It was in the rendering of such drops that Caravaggio came closest to trompe l'œil. They are so striking in this painting that one wonders, for an instant, if actual drops of water haven't fallen onto its surface. This testifies to a marvelous technical finesse, and certainly in these passages one can detect no trace of brushwork. This finesse, this illusionism, stands out by contrast against the frank and visible brushwork on the fruit and leaves, and against the wide, dashing strokes with which the "abstract" background is laid in, strokes whose direction oscillates in response to the orientation of the light.
Shadow and Light
That orientation is precisely accounted for on each water drop. This collection of tiny spheres, consistently treated so differently from the rest of the canvas, form something like a network, a mesh that encloses and pulls together the whole. The gaze that begins by fixating on one of them is automatically driven to seek out others. But the cohesive role conferred by light on the water drops is not the only consequence of the general function Caravaggio has assigned it in the service of his quite singular naturalism and his commitment to delve deeply. In his work, basically, the form that light carves out on a shape, the luminous portion, succeeds in rendering the shape solid and "present" in relation not only to its own shaded portion – which will simply establish the form and volume of that object in isolation – but also in relation to the lighted portion of the object next to it.
From Offering to Offertory
The basket rests on a piece of furniture or a shelf of which only the edge is visible. We tend at first to assume that this edge is the same as the outward limit of the canvas, but soon notice that the basket slightly overlaps this boundary, even casting a small shadow below itself: advancing toward us, it invites us to come and examine its contents more intimately. The basket theme reappears in other important Caravaggios: the Boy with a Basket of Fruit (Borghese Gallery, Rome), and especially The Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery, London).
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| Caravaggio Boy with a Basket of Fruit 1593 oil on canvas Galleria Borghese, Rome |
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| Caravaggio The Supper at Emmaus ca. 1601 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
These three versions lead us to perceive in the Basket of Fruit the redeployment of a scriptural and liturgical theme – which raises in its turn the thorny question of what place such still-life paintings were able to command, what role they were able to play in the religious and mental evolution of the 17th century and, by extension, the wider modern epoch.
– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)