Panfilo Nuvolone

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This still life is in beautiful condition. The panel is unreinforced and flat. The paint layer is stable. It is a little hard to read properly under ultraviolet light, but one can see a restoration in the left of the foremost peach and a couple of spots in the leaves on the right of the still life. It is unlikely that there are any other retouches of any note. While the work would respond to cleaning, it can also be hung in its current state.
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Born in Cremona, Panfilo Nuvolone is documented in Milan from 1610, working in the Lombard capital during the lush artistic environment fostered by its archbishop, Cardinal Federico Borromeo.  Under Borromeo, the arts and sciences of all genres flourished and still life was dominated by a woman, Fede Galizia.  Nuvolone’s tactile compositions bear the influence of  Fede, and his works are often mistaken for those of the female artist.  While it is possible that models were exchanged between their two workshops, it seems likely that the young Nuvolone took inspiration from the older painter’s compositions, thus accounting for similarities in his early works.¹  Nuvolone’s compositions, however, have a sense of monumentality and marked naturalism that is absent from those of Fede.²  Here, the blush of the peaches, applied in diagonal strokes, the softness of their flesh, and the crisp, curling vine leaves are all characteristic of Nuvolone’s delicate and sensitive manner of painting.  

This beautiful still life, painted with exquisite naturalism, follows a composition by another Milanese artist, Giovan Ambrogio Figino.  That painting, now in a private collection, is the only known still life in Figino’s oeuvre and dates between 1591 and 1594.³  Figino’s prototype was discovered in 1967, and, being singular in his corpus, would not have been recognized as the artist’s hand, had it not been for an inscription on the reverse, reading, Io Ambrosij Figini Opus.⁴  The panel is also inscribed with a madrigal, praising Figino’s work, thus directly attributing the panel to the artist.⁵  Roberto Paolo Ciardi later uncovered another version of the poem, among those in a series in part signed by the Milanese writer, Gregorio Comanini.⁶  The madrigal and panel appear to be vying with one another, as Mario Marubbi writes:

“The picture is thus seen as embodying a sort of contest between painting and poetry, almost as if Figino were trying to convey the tactile, olfactory, and gustatory aspects of the scene in addition to the visual, thereby outdoing the literary composition.”⁷

The painting is not mentioned in Comanini’s discourse, Il Figino, published in 1591, yet his poem was published in 1594; Giacomo Berra and Alessandro Morandotti therefore conclude a date of execution for Figino’s panel within those three years.⁸  Caravaggio’s Basket of fruit, now in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, is thought to date between 1595 and 1596, after the publication of Comanini’s laudatory poem, making Figino’s Peaches the earliest known Italian still life of fruit.  

In 1607, Caravaggio’s painting was documented in the inventory of Cardinal Federico Borromeo in Milan, along with a number of works by Jan Brueghel the Elder.⁹   It is possible that Nuvolone had seen these works, along with Figino’s, and was influenced by their intense realism, imitating the spots of decay on the surface of Caravaggio’s fruits and the curling parched leaves of Brueghel’s blooms in his own creations.  While Giovan Ambrogio Figino can be considered a forerunner in fruit still life painting, it was Panfilo Nuvolone, alongside Fede Galizia and Osias Beert, who pioneered the genre, both in Italy and throughout Europe.

 

1.  F. Porzio, “Panfilo Nuvolone”, in La Natura Morta in Italia, Milan 1989, vol. I, p. 226.
2.  Ibid.
3.  R.P. Ciardi, Giovan Ambrogio Figino, Florence 1968, pp. 105 – 106, reproduced fig. II.
4.  R. Longhi, “Anche Ambrogio Figino sulla soglia della ‘natura morta’”, in Paragone, 209, July 1967, pp. 18 – 22.
5.  R.P. Ciardi, op. cit., p. 105.
6.  Ibid.
7.  M. Marubbi in Painters of Reality, The legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, A. Bayer, ed., New York 2004, p. 180.
8.  G. Comanini, The Figino, or, On the purpose of painting.  Art theory in the late Renaissance, G. Maiorino and A. Doyle-Anderson, ed.,  Toronto 2001; G. Berra, “Contributo per la datazione della ‘Natura Morta di Pesche’ di Ambrogio Figino”, in Paragone, 469, March 1989, pp. 3 – 13; A. Morandotti, “Giovanni Ambrogio Figino”, in F. Porzio, op. cit.,  pp. 220 – 221.
9.  S. Segal, "An early still life by Fede Galizia", in Burlington Magazine, 140, March 1998, pp. 166 – 167.