Giovanni Paolo Castelli detto Spadino Art

Oil painting on canvas measuring 50 x 99 cm without frame and 62 x 111 cm with coeval frame, depicting a still life of fruit by the painter Giovanni Paolo Castelli known as Spadino ( Rome 1659 - 1730 ). This magnificent canvas, hitherto unpublished to my knowledge, depicts a display of fruit set out in the open at the edge of a wood (apples, peaches, black and white pizzutella grapes, two split watermelons and a plum), and at the edge of a stream, with a hilly landscape opening up to the left. The fruit is placed in the foreground, very close to the viewer's point of view, and occupies, with its bright and festive colors, most of the field of vision. The painter does not seek a particular spatial geometry or constructive scheme, but indulges in a skilful and brilliant chromatic weaving of the surfaces, by means of a pictorial material applied with exceptional fluidity and vibration, if you like, even sensual in its luminous and 'tactile' corpulence in the taste of the full Baroque. The quality is excellent and the style appears surprisingly free and evocative, although it retains traces of the old Flemish naturalism typical of Roman Baroque still life painting, strongly influenced by the work of Abraham Brueghel, as evidenced, for example, by the tiny drops of visible dew, or the luminous reflections on grapes or the flesh of watermelons. These are all elements that undoubtedly indicate as its author one of the most important specialists of this pictorial genre in late Baroque Rome: Giovanni Paolo Castelli known as Lo Spadino. The painting in fact appears to be entirely typical of the painter's mature work, i.e. towards the end of the 17th or beginning of the 18th century (the chronological collocation is suggested by the similarities with the work of another great contemporary still life specialist, Pietro Navarra...

Giovanni Paolo Castelli called Spadino (Rome 1659 - Rome 1730) Still life Oil on canvas, cm. 81x31 - with frame cm. 92x41 Shaped and gilded wo...