Caravaggio, Boy with a Basket of Fruit, c. 1593–95, oil on canvas, 70 x 67 cm (Borghese Gallery, Rome)
Like an aspiring actor moving to Los Angeles, Caravaggio arrived in late 16th-century Rome in hopes of forging a career in the wealthy seat of Catholicism. Born in 1571 as Michelangelo Merisi, he is better known by the name of his family’s hometown outside of Milan in Northern Italy. Caravaggio arrived in Rome sometime in late 1592 or early 1593 with little formal training and no significant social connections that might have helped him access education, artistic training, and commissions. Despite these disadvantages, Caravaggio’s early work produced without commission for the open market won him attention from elite patrons and eventually prominent commissions for Rome’s churches and wealthy homes.
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
Boy with a Basket of Fruit likely dates to the 1593–95 period when Caravaggio painted a number of moderately-sized works for general sale. Like Caravaggio’s other early Roman work, the painting features a half-length figure with disheveled hair in front of a plain background. The figure is merely “boy,” a youth. He comes from no myth, religious story, or historical episode. This sort of image that features a unspecified quasi-contemporary figure from everyday life is known as genre painting, a category of art that rose in popularity in the 17th century.
Boy (detail), Caravaggio, Boy with a Basket of Fruit, c. 1593–95, oil on canvas, 70 x 67 cm (Borghese Gallery, Rome)
The modestly sized genre painting was almost certainly made without a commission to be sold on the open market. Like a number of other early paintings Caravaggio made, Boy with a Basket of Fruit does not refer to any particular story, folk saying, or anecdote. While patrons often commissioned highly specific works, stipulating theme and details to suit an exact location, works made for the market typically avoided specificity in order to appeal to as broad a clientele as possible. At the same time, artists working “on spec” (on speculation), typically sought to display their full range of skills in a single composition. Boy with a Basket of Fruit joins a figure with an especially sensitive expression with an intensely observed still life presentation in the fruit basket.
Strategic composition
The youth in Boy with a Basket of Fruit may be unnamed, but Caravaggio has lavished specificity on the figure. Strong brows frame a soft face under a mess of tousled curly hair. An undershirt slides off his shoulder as the boy balances an abundant basket of fruit against his torso.
Fruit basket (detail), Caravaggio, Boy with a Basket of Fruit, c. 1593–95, oil on canvas, 70 x 67 cm (Borghese Gallery, Rome)
The basket is so large and so full of different types of succulent fruit—apples, cherries, grapes, peaches, figs—that we don’t worry about where his left arm has gone, or why his right arm bends so angularly at the wrist. Caravaggio’s four-year apprenticeship beginning at age 13 to painter Simone Peterzano in Milan does not seem to have given him much anatomical training. An additional eight months employed in Rome at the workshop of Giuseppe Cesari d’Arpino gave the young painter more experience, but anatomy would prove to be a weak area throughout Caravaggio’s career.
Should the viewer linger over the painting long enough, several anatomical awkwardnesses begin to show. The painfully bent wrist joins a shoulder uncomfortably placed—like a dislocation. Since the basket obscures most of the torso and because the artist denied the viewer any left arm or hand beyond a floating curve of cloth, we might begin to suspect compensation. Caravaggio likely had to accommodate his poor anatomical skills with compositional sleight of hand. The painter obscures tricky joins with distracting fabric, a fruit basket, and the deep shadows that Caravaggio would eventually develop into hallmark tenebrism.
Interpretations
The exquisitely described fruit spilling out of the basket distracts from technical deficiencies in the figure’s anatomy. Dusty musk coats red and white grapes. An odd blemish dots the skin of a pear. The figs split. Brown creeps onto foliage. In contrast to two green grape leaves, a third falls out the side of the basket, yellow and brown, with a withered stem, clearly dying. Some scholars have read a vanitas message in the imperfection of the fruit and presence of dead vegetation. The vanitas paintings soon to become very popular in Europe typically sport clear symbols: timepieces, snuffed candles, a skull. Little other than wilting foliage in Boy with a Basket of Fruit suggests a warning to focus on spiritual matters over earthly material possessions.
Left: Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, c. 1594–95, oil on canvas, 66 x 49.5 cm (The National Gallery, London); center: Caravaggio, The Lute Player, 1596, oil on canvas, 100 x 126.5 cm (Wildenstein Collection); right: Caravaggio, Bacchus, c. 1598, oil on canvas, 95 x 85 cm (Uffizi, Florence)
Also confounding is the figure’s sexual air. Half-lidded eyes, parted lips, and bare shoulder have led some viewers to perceive the painting as homoerotic. The clench of an abdomen is felt as the figure’s arms grasp the basket, his torso tightly curving around it. One might wonder if more than the basket of fruit is on offer. Considered together with other small half-length figures Caravaggio painted during his first few years in Rome—Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Bacchus, Lute Player—Boy with a Basket of Fruit fits a pattern of erotic suggestion but remains less explicit than others (for example, Bacchus’s fingers threatening to untie the velvet ribbon at his waist).
From market to commission
Like the gesture towards vanitas encouraged by Caravaggio’s attentiveness to the still life elements of Boy with a Basket of Fruit, the erotic elements neither insist on a specific interpretation nor deny one. Should the viewer wish to see a moralizing message, enough of the composition supports that. The same is true of a homoerotic reading. Because Caravaggio created these artworks for the open market, ambiguous compositions available to multiple interpretations suit artworks meant to appeal to as broad a swath of customers as possible.
Caravaggio’s early paintings succeeded in lifting the painter’s career from workshop assistant to commissioned artist. The aforementioned early paintings were probably made during Caravaggio’s employment at Cesari d’Arpino’s workshop; documentation shows they were confiscated from Cesari in a 1607 legal settlement. The famous art patron, Cardinal Scipione Borghese took possession of them before giving them to Pope Paul V. [1]
Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, c. 1595, oil on canvas, 94.2 x 130.9 cm (Kimbell Art Museum, Texas)
Caravaggio’s expanding social network facilitated his big break. An art dealer located near the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome introduced the artist to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte who purchased The Cardsharps, another genre painting Caravaggio made during his first years in Rome. [2] In 1595, Caravaggio joined del Monte’s household. Cardinal del Monte (executor of the will of the first man charged with decorating the prominent Contarelli Chapel inside the church of San Luigi dei Francesi), gave the commission to Caravaggio in 1599. The paintings the artist made for San Luigi dei Francesi, the Calling of Saint Matthew, Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, and Inspiration of Saint Matthew, established Caravaggio as a serious painter of history painting, the most prestigious genre in early modern Italy. Not bad for a guy with a basket of fruit.
