Description

Michelangelo Pace, known as Michelangelo di Campidoglio (Rome, 1610 – Rome, 1670)

Still Life with Fruits and Birds
Oil on canvas dimensions: 75 × 104

Luigi Lanzi defined Peace as an excellent fruit painter, almost a “Raphael of his kind” NOTE. We know little of his life, but the sources tell us of a collaboration with Borgognone, to whose paintings he added elements; However, looking at this painting, the derivation of his style from the work of Michelangelo Cerquozzi is evident.
A peculiarity of this work, however, resides in the arrangement of the objects “on stage”: compared to the compositional construction of famous artists of his contemporaries – from Cerquozzi himself to Abraham Breughel, who also inspired him – the elements here are scattered disorderly on the table .
An emphasis is placed by the artist on the presence of dead birds displayed on the same shelf; Pace rarely inserts animals in his compositions, which almost harks back to the still lifes of the Flemish seventeenth century.
From this beautiful test, one can almost deduce a desire on the part of the artist to fill the surface of the painting almost in height, paying little attention to the superimposition of the planes of the rich compositions of contemporary still lifes.

Bibl.: Nature morte italiane ed europee dal XVII al XVIII secolo, a cura di G. Sestieri, p. 24, scheda 9.

Our reference: A05318