Lot 27: Giovan Battista Recco (Naples c. 1615-c. 1660)

Apples in a wicker basket, with a cabbage, parsnip, lettuce and an apple on a stone ledge
oil on canvas
34 1/4 x 43 1/4 in. (87 x 109.9 cm.)

Tokyo, Seiji Togo Memorial Yasuda Kasai Museum of Art; and on tour in Japan, Italian still life painting, from The Silvano Lodi collection, 28 April-26 May 2001, no. 21.
Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung; and Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, La natura morta italiana: da Caravaggio al Settecento, 6 December 2002-23 February 2003; and 26 June-12 October 2003.

Italian still life painting, from the Silvano Lodi collection, exhibition catalogue, Tokyo, 2001, p. 60, no. 21.
M. Gregori, in the exhibition catalogue, Natura morta italiana tra Cinquecento e Settecento, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, 2002, p. 199, illustrated (note by Roberto Middione); 2nd ed., Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, 2003.

A generation younger than Luca Forte, Giovan Battista Recco inherited the mantle as the leading Neapolitan still life specialist in the mid-seventeenth century. He is sometimes credited with the invention of the marine still lifes that became a signature motif of that great tradition. He undoubtedly was the master whose example persuaded his compatriots to put aside their miniaturist brushes and appreciate nature's fullness, even in its humblest elements. The scholar Raffaello Causa called him 'the indispensable master of the two Dioscuri, Giovan Battista Ruoppolo and Giuseppe Recco'.

Apart from a handful of signed or monogrammed works, this scion of the Recco dynasty of painters left few documentary traces. Giovan Battista Recco was not mentioned by Bernardo De Dominici, the eighteenth-century biographer, although his colloquial nick-name, 'Titta Recco', is found in the inventories of the art collections of prince Ferrante Spinelli, don Flavio Ruffo and the marchese Ferdinand van den Einden. Giovan Battista must have been well-established by 1656, as Causa points out (Storia di Napoli, 1972, p. 1042), when his two large still lifes were hanging in the Ruffo villa at Portici alongside masterpieces by Mattia Preti, Salvator Rosa, and Jusepe de Ribera. Scholars therefore place Recco's birth between 1615/30. The sole contemporary records of his life are bank payments received for paintings in November 1655 and May 1656 - and then silence. Many Neapolitan artists succumbed that year to the plague, their number may have included one of the most promising and inventive among them.

Giovan Battista Recco enters art history in 1653 with a dated still life (Stockholm, Royal Palace) of remarkable individuality. The unpretentious table-top composition of a basket of oysters and fishes shows no signs of the archaic style of Giacomo Recco, his presumed master. Indeed, Giovan Battista Recco's pictures stand out for a kind of concentrated observation, compositional balance and quiet dignity that is often compared to the best qualities of Spanish still lifes. As a case in point, his great Kitchen Table with Poultry and Eggs in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, was long attributed to Velázquez. Another Recco still life was once ascribed by H.J. Hoogewerff to Sánchez Cotán. Recco painted larders and other interior themes associated with the early seventeenth-century bodegones by Alejandro de Loarte and Juan van der Hamen, but it is not known if he visited Spain.

This outstanding still life by Giovan Battista Recco, recently rediscovered in 2001, constitutes the most important addition to the artist's catalogue in more than thirty years. The picture was exhibited with the Lodi collection in Japan in 2001 and then was requested for the exhibitions of Italian still lifes curated by Mina Gregori in Munich 2002-2003 and Florence, 2003. The attribution was confirmed in the exhibition catalogue by Roberto Middione, the leading specialist on Giovan Battista Recco. The artist's distinctive traits are exemplified in the present work. The stone ledge, a favourite device, is closely comparable to the foreground of Recco's fully signed Basket of Lobsters in a private collection in Milan (J.T. Spike, Italian Still Life Paintings from Three Centuries, reference photographs, no. 38). The light that enters from the left, raking across the pitted surfaces, is also distinctive. It seems a truly optical light penetrating a dark room, as opposed to something merely painted.

Differently from his junior colleagues, Giuseppe Recco, whose motifs tend to dissolve in the darkness, and Giambattista Ruoppolo, who freely flourishes his brush, Giovan Battista Recco steadfastly insists upon the integrity of every apple and parsnip. This is the legacy of Caravaggio, whose influence, the present picture underscores, survived longest and most hardily in Naples. The rustic basket that intriguingly rises up like a masonry wall streaked by light is unmistakably inspired by that master's still lifes. The action of light reinforces the structure of every motif, no matter how visually convoluted. Rendering a coarsely ruffled insalata riccia, at right, becomes a kind of tour de force. It is surely significant also that Recco's formative years coincide with the most active years of Jusepe de Ribera, the caravaggesque caposcuola of Neapolitan painting. The tones of red, grey and tan, glowing softly in the enveloping darkness, lend a meditative quality never seen in Giacomo Recco, but highly prized by Ribera.

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