Still Life of Flowers and Fruit; with Gilded Urns

Giovanni Stanchi, known as Dei Fiori (Rome, about 1608 - 1675), was an Italian painter. Author of still lifes, his flower paintings are remarkable. He is present in many art catalogs and antiques auctions. A painting of him (Garland of flowers and butterflies) is exhibited at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. We still know little about Giovanni Stanchi and about the rest of his prolific family of naturamortists, who worked in Rome for almost the entire seventeenth century, and even less do we know how their workshop and their collaborations were organized (very close at least since the fifth decade of the seventeenth century, not only in the largest and most demanding canvases), so much so that some scholars prefer not to venture into the distinction of individual hands. In any case, it is likely that Giovanni, born several years before the brothers Niccolò and Angelo, is one of the artists who marked the transition from Caravaggesque naturalism to the more mature phase of Baroque decorativism. Indeed, it is possible that he - together with Michelangelo Cerquozzi, with whom he has many affinities - was trained in the workshop of Agostino Verrocchio, perhaps the most important in Rome in the third / fourth decade of the seventeenth century and the last custodian of naturalism at the beginning of the century, as he hypothesized the art historian Alberto Cottino.