In the heart of 18th-century painting, still life proposed a course of strong moral intensity, dedicated to the straightforward and rational depiction of reality. It was an explicitly anti-baroque type of painting which contrasted poor and humble objects and environmental situations - but ones that were poetically rooted in the essentiality of daily life - with the spectacular decorative values of coeval Roman or Venetian floral compositions. This expressive line, the roots of which can be retraced to the very origins of still life at the end of the 16th century, found a great interpreter in the Lombard artist Giacomo Ceruti, also the author of unforgettable paintings dedicated to "pitocchi [beggars]" (the poor, the disinherited, vagabonds) and to their world, made up of small, simple things. His activity was continued, even if with a vein of more detached documentary value, by Francesco Londonio. Although the trend of realism was prevalently considered to be a main road of the Lombard pictorial tradition, important episodes in other regions were not lacking, as was well demonstrated by the activity of Giuseppe Maria Crespi between Bologna and Florence, the surprising severity of the kitchens painted by Carlo Magini from Fano, the trompe l'œil of the Florentine artist Antonio Cioci, and also the unusual revival of 17th-century and Caravaggio-style motifs in still-lifes painted in Naples before the middle of the 18th century by Tommaso Realfonzo and, subsequently, by the Spaniard Luis Meléndez.