The Painterly Act
On Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit
Painting is a mirror for the world. As cliche as it is, one key question to ask of any painting is what does the painting seek to mirror. A key question for the institution of painting is why we need such a mirror at all. This institutional question became sharper with the rise of photography, but it has always loomed.
For a while at least, there was a stock answer for European painting: We need a mirror for the religious world. Painting was used for pedagogical purposes; to teach and dramatize key religious lessons. Of course, the institution was sustained in other ways as well. As Michael Baxandall meticulously shows in Painting & Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Italian patrons of painting had many reasons for providing such pedagogical objects, from personal glorification to political power to the paying of debts.
Painters tend to be highly skilled weirdos. So it would not be a smart bet to think that this narrow function would permanently hold sway. As Europe came out of its medieval doldrums, painters started to seek new functions for the institution and their places in it. This pushed them to mirror different parts of the world, even if the subject matter continued to be dominated by religious themes.
Caravaggio played a very special role in the evolution of the institution of painting. He was armed with the technical innovations of the Renaissance but a whole generation removed from its dissolution. The world was ready for a new talisman.
Although he was only active for 18 years and died before 40, Caravaggio transformed painting in a staggering number of ways—from the use of live models to lighting techniques to, perhaps, the use of convex mirrors. What he is most known for, of course, is his incredible rendering of realistic drama.
What he is not well known for, on the other hand, is being one of the founders of the genre of (Italian) still life. This is partly because only one pure undisputed still life by Caravaggio still exists.1 This is Basket of Fruit in Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.
Basket of Fruit was painted almost exactly in the middle of Caravaggio’s career (maybe, dates are disputed). Flowers and fruit played a very important role in many pictures in the first half of his career, including Lute Player and Boy with a Basket of Fruit.
Accelerating a trend started earlier in the century, both of these eschew religious themes for more pedestrian ones. Boy with a Basket of Fruit even pushes us away from a focus on humans by placing so much emphasis on the fruit, with the boy playing a role that could have easily been played by a table (although it has been speculated that the homoeroticism might be to please Cardinal Del Monte, Caravaggio’s first patron). The boy’s upper body almost seems photoshopped in, its hazy finish contrasting with the sharp reality of the fruit.
The boy is gone in Basket of Fruit.2 So is a three-dimensional setting. Caravaggio often placed his pictures is a vacuum or semi-vacuum. This is a particularly stark example. The first thing I noticed seeing it in person is the flatness of its pictorial space. It is set against a sand colored background that is very bright for Caravaggio. I wonder if this is how it looked originally or whether time has faded the color. This physical claim seems likely. That makes one wonder if the color was picked for that very reason, given some themes in the painting.
A moment’s attention presents a twist. The fruit sits in a wicker basket. This sits, seemingly, poised on the edge of the pictorial space itself. This creates the illusion (a special case of the trompe-l’oeil illusion) that the basket is going to fall out of the pictorial space into the viewer’s space. Caravaggio uses this technique to great effect in other paintings, perhaps most famously in his Supper at Emmaus. (It is hard to see in the version here; it’s easier to see if you zoom in at the Ambrosiana’s webpage for the painting).
The fruit itself is rendered beautifully. The basket features a peach, an apple, a pear, four figs, a quince, and four types of grapes.3 Most of the fruit is extremely realistic. It jumps out at you just as much as it does in Boy with a Basket of Fruit, even without the hazy boy to contrast with the fruit. If all you take from the painting is a desire for a nice apple, the painting has been successful.
But the apple here is not that nice. It has two visible worm holes and visible rot. Once you notice this, you realize that the basket resembles something you find after coming back from a week’s vacation. Some of the grapes are turning to mush, there are many insect holes in the leaves, and there is noticeable wilting.
Why get rid of the boy? What is the point of still life? (This is the sort of question you’d be proud to hear a jet lagged 10 year old ask at the Ambrosiana.) No doubt one main reason is that it gives the painter the chance to show off. Again, if all it does is send you to the grocery, it has been a success.
Caravaggio had other motivations as well. His rendering of flora was of a piece with his project to make painting mirror concrete individuals in the actual world. His fruit is not the Platonic forms of peaches, figs etc. His fruit is the fruit you find when you come back from vacation. It is particular, individual.
Then, of course, we have the visual metaphors. The sexual metaphors derived from fruit is old hat. Basket of Fruit resists this interpretation with its withering leaves and partially obscured figs and peach; this resistance is strengthened in contrast with the lusciously sensual Boy with a Basket of Fruit. Caravaggio can certainly play the sex card but doesn’t, here.
More apt with Basket of Fruit are the death metaphors. Not only are these pieces of fruit mirroring actual pieces of fruit, they are showing the materiality of those actual pieces of fruit. We share the same materiality with the fruit. We will also wither and turn to mush.
Have a look at the painting’s right hand side. The leaf on the bottom right appears unfinished, especially in contrast to the wonderfully detailed withering leaf to its left. The furtherest right grapes are also less finished than any of the other fruit. Everything on the left hand side, on the other hand, is highly detailed, from the sheen on the white grapes to the droplets of water on the far left leaves.
There is something more incongruous on the right hand side. Look closely at the shoot whose far right end goes off canvas. It is clearly not lodged in the basket. It is floating free, throwing off the symmetry of the whole picture.
Here Caravaggio is breaking our expectations of realism. At the very least, he is highlighting the theatricality of painting (see my previous Caravaggio essay about the theatrical lighting in his Madonna di Loreto). The painting might realistically depict actual fruit, but it is staged nonetheless. That far right shoot is being moved by someone off canvas.
Moved in which direction? My initial interpretation was that it was being taken out of the basket, that the moment captured by the painting is part of the process of beautifying the basket. This could be as part of an ordinary daily project—someone arranging the fruit in the kitchen or dining room. This is not the most interesting interpretation. More interesting is that it is Caravaggio himself that is beautifying the right hand side of the basket before finishing the painting—before completing the painterly act. On this way of seeing it, those unfinished leaves are almost a ghost; they are not meant for the final, merely fictional, picture.
Michael Fried goes further. He suggests that the right hand shoot is coming towards the basket and represents Caravaggio’s hand and brush. Curiously, he doesn’t point out how the right hand side is unfinished, crucial evidence for his interpretation. Fried’s and my interpretation share the thought that Caravaggio is depicting the process of painting. He maintains that Caravaggio is depicting the literal act of painting, whereas I maintain that instead we are seeing a snapshot of the process surrounding the actual painting. Perhaps Fried is right. What I don’t like about his interpretation is that it makes the picture too…hokey. It makes Caravaggio’s meaning ironically ham-fisted.
In either case, what Caravaggio is doing on the right hand side is contrasting the realism of the representation with the artificial theatricality of the process of painting. Painting is a mirror for the world, but it stages the world a bit first.
What is painting for? Caravaggio wanted to thrill, shock, stimulate. But he was on to the artifice of the whole thing, and was cheeky about it. He subtly explored the limits of painting.
This exploration became increasingly less and less subtle as time went along. Realism is various ways fell first in the 18th and 19th centuries before they came for depiction and representation itself in the 20th. These changes can be seen—should be seen—as part of the same project Caravaggio was engaged in.
Without prejudice towards later developments, what always gets me about painting in the last 100 years is that it has turned its back on something that works. We can know this even if we don’t know what it’s working at. An optimist will say that what works has just moved to other forms. Photography ruined realism in painting, they’ll say. We get our realism kicks from film now. Painting uses a different sort of mirror now.
We can go with the optimist, but we should never turn away from Caravaggio and his painterly acts.
Still Life with Fruit on a Stone Ledge is often attributed to Caravaggio—some even claim it is one of his greatest paintings—but this is highly disputed. For some reason Sebastian Schütze’s Taschen catalogue doesn’t even mention this painting, even in the list of attributed works. I can’t tell where this painting is even located. (I guess we’re doing footnotes now…)
Interestingly, 260 years later Degas would shock by going back to Caravaggio’s original idea in Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Lute Player with his Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers. Despite some obvious similarities with Lute Player, I don’t know of any intentional connection.
I only know this because of this delightfully nerdy website.