STILL LIFE IN ROME (text page)
The nascent genre of still life rapidly reached its maturity with Caravaggio's move to Rome in 1592. In his youth in Lombardy, Caravaggio had absorbed the local and Leonardesque experiments in the study of nature and inanimate objects, and the studies of the action of light on these. In Rome, this tendency was integrated with the vitality of the ancient, re-launched also in the values of naturalistic decoration by Raphael and his school. A precocious series of masterpieces, starting from the last decade of the 16th century, in which still life appeared either isolated or combined with half-figure personages, constituted the nucleus of reference for a growing number of artists linked more or less directly to Caravaggio's naturalism, and sustained by a prestigious art-collecting hobby on the part of the aristocracy or addressed to a market activity. In several cases, as in that of the Marchese Crescenzi, we can even speak of a patron who, with his academy of the natural, directed young artists towards still life. Despite the importance of the patrons and the exceptional level attained, the critical reconstruction of the attributions, the catalogue - or, at times, even the historical identity - of the Roman painters of still life influenced by Caravaggio, still remained very complex. Thus, while the activity of Tommaso Salini (a painter who was in direct and disputed contact with Caravaggio) slowly took shape, the figures of the principal protagonists of this period remained linked to makeshift critical names: the Master of Hartford, the so-called "Pensionante del Saraceni [Saraceni's Lodger]" and the master of still life Acquavella, today identifiable with the great Caravaggio-like Bartolomeo Cavarozzi.