Lot 113: Luca Forte (Naples c. 1615 - before 1670)

A basket of apples, calabashes, an upturned copper vessel, figs, melons, with other fruit on rocky ledges
oil on canvas, unframed
58 1/2 x 78 1/4 in. (148.5 x 198.5 cm.)

Private Collection, Spain.

We are grateful to Professor Nicola Spinosa and Professor Riccardo Lattuada who, on the basis of transparencies, believe this picture to have been painted by Luca Forte (private communications). Both independently compare this picture with Forte's signed Still Life in the Ringling Musem of Art, Sarasota. Lattuada dates it to circa 1630-1640, pointing out an interesting connection with the early work of another Neapolitan specialist in this genre, Giovanni Battista Recco, not least in terms of the dimensions of this picture which are unusually large for Forte. Professor Spinosa also points to the similarity of this work with some of the earlier output of Recco, but nevertheless considers our picture a 'capolavoro' by Forte.

Luca Forte is regarded as one of the most important still-life painters active in Naples in the first half of the seventeenth century, and is particularly significant for having introduced the naturalism of Caravaggio to this genre. His development was influenced by the work of contemporary still-life painters in Rome, such as Tommaso Salini, Giovanni Battista Crescenzi and Pietro Paolo Bonzi, and by the work of certain Spanish artists, especially Blas de Ledesma and Juan van der Hamen. Little is known about his life, but he is recorded as a witness in 1639 to the marriage contract of the Neapolitan painter Aniello Falcone. Forte must therefore have belonged to the artistic circle around Falcone, whose workshop served as an academy of design as well as a school of life drawing between 1630 and 1640.

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