MASTER of the Acquavella Still-Life

Italian painter, considered the most important still-life painter working in Rome during the second and third decades of the seventeenth century. The master was named after the Still-life with a Basket of Fruit and a Vase of Flowers formerly with the Acquavella Gallery, New York, and subsequently in the Lorenzetti collection, Bergamo. Scholars have since identified a stylistically coherent group of still-life thought to be by the hand of this anonymous post-Caravaggesque master. The name-piece of the group was ascribed to Luca Forte, Angelo Caroselli, then Giovanni Battista Crescenzi. More recently, the whole group of works has been assigned to Pietro Paolini, who trained in Rome in the workshop of Caroselli. These hypotheses remain unsubstantiated. Of the pictures in the group, compositions that combine figures with exuberant displays of fruit, vegetables and foliage are thought to be collaborations with Bartolomeo Cavarozzi. The anonymous master combined his astonishing powers of observation with Cavarozzi’s compact figures.