“Boy with a Basket of Fruit”
This oil on canvas painting, titled “Boy with a Basket of Fruit”, is by the Italian Baroque artist, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, from circa 1593. This is one of Caravaggio’s early works that he created just after moving to Rome while still under the tutelage of d’Arpino’s workshop.
Caravaggio was not yet receiving commissions for work, so he created this piece to try to sell to the general public. The model is the Sicilian painter and friend of Caravaggio, Mario Minniti, who was roughly 16 when he sat for this painting. Minniti modeled for several of Caravaggio’s works.
This painting is a genre piece that was meant to show off Caravaggio’s artistic abilities through the realism of both the skin of the subject, the fruit, and the draping of the clothes. As is common with his works from this period, Caravaggio uses diagonal natural daylight to illuminate his subject.
The life-like fruit has been the subject of many art history studies. They are so accurate and precise in their depictions that horticulturalists can analyze and determine not only the type of fruit, but the specific breed of the fruit.
“Boy with a Basket of Fruit” is currently on display at the Galleria Borghese in Rome, Italy.
For more on Caravaggio, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
“Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter’d loving,
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
Till then not show my head where thou mayst prove me.”