PWhy does a painter paint a still life? To make her say what? To show that he’s good? To delude ourselves that we are facing reality and not its reproduction? Still life is a challenge. Humble all the senses. It smells and tastes. Perfection is achieved by Caravaggio in Fruit basket at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. Against a yellow background, a slightly protruding woven wicker basket dominates. Contains fruit of various kinds. Clusters of white and black grapes protrude downwards. Some pears, a bacata apple, figs and finally a peach. The leaves are dry and punctured. The basket rests on a wooden surface.
A still, distant still life that can be interpreted as an allegory of the fragility and precariousness of human existence. That fruit talks about us. Caravaggio celebrates the imperfection of nature. Here is the painter’s proof of reality.
Roberto Longhi contrasts Caravaggio’s vision with the «useless microscopies of the Flemings, extreme degeneration of the lenticular acuity of the great, but dangerous, Nordic 1400s, which was now ending in the patience work of nuns and Carthusians». And the sequel, which has become genre painting, will yield to virtuosity, amazement, special effects. «Mario dei Fiori will now paint vegetable festoons on the mirrors of the Roman princes. The simple “still life” is expired and buried together with the spirit of Caravaggio. And of the composite combinations between the “baroque” and the old Nordic sedulity, it is better to remain silent ».
Thus the still life will become the exercise of wonder, a soulless genre, through which to show surprising virtuosity. On musical instruments Evaristo Baschenis will paint the dust.
I make these reflections in Maurizio Bottoni’s studio, where I return after many years, and I observe a pumpkin, a bunch of asparagus, a piece of bread on which satisfied flies flutter. What moves it? It is no longer the spirit of Caravaggio that observes the changing, altering reality; but a reflection on the eternity of nature which reproduces itself identically and overcomes death. His asparagus, his pumpkin, like his admirable pigs and his rhinos, are forever. Nature, trees, flowers reproduce and replace each other to tell us about the eternity of nature. What Bottoni expunge from Caravaggio is withering, the passage of time, decadence, stopped in a moment, but already started in an inevitable process. Everything is still in Bottoni, his nature does not know the wind. I look, and I feel that Bottoni doesn’t want to reproduce reality, he wants to make it eternal, petrify it. He wants to prevent his asparagus and his pumpkins from transforming themselves, an inevitable condition for nature, but not for painting, which exists for that reason.
Maurizio Bottoni, Hanging pumpkin, 2015, oil on panel, diameter 100 cm.
Even his dear flies will be there forever, escaping their too short life. To Elena Pontiggia who questions him, she replies: «What interests me is not so much reality; I try to follow what is happening in reality. I don’t just paint what I see, but I also try to represent the process behind it. The painting of the Zolla, for example, was born with a series of superimpositions: first I painted the fragment of earth as it was at the beginning, then I repainted it as it became as I observed it.
Also in the painting with the egg (a small, very intense work with an egg in a niche, ed ), first I painted the egg on the tenth day of incubation, where you could see the reddish shape of the chick, then above I painted the egg as you see it now». It’s not even like that. His spirit, his suspension of time, his victory over time correspond to the conception of John Keats in the Ode on a Greek urn:
Ah, branches, happy branches! They will never be scattered
Your leaves, and will never say goodbye to spring
(…)
Oh, attic form! Graceful pose! with an embroidery
Of men and girls in marble,
With forest branches and trampled grasses –
You, silent form, like eternity / Torment and break our reason. Cold pastoral!
When age has ravaged this generation,
You will still be there, eternal, among new pains
No longer ours, friend to man, to whom you will tell
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that alone
On earth you know, and that’s enough.
The vital passage, our victory, finally Bottoni’s victory, is in the passage in which we speak of those images that remain, eternal, “among new pains that are no longer ours”. Compared to other agitated, sorrowful, desperate painters, for Bottoni art is not suffering. It’s resistance. Other pumpkins, other asparagus will pass, not those of Bottoni. Nature lives.
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