Still Lif With Flowers, Fruit And Mushrooms by Nicola Casissa (1680 - 1731)

Painting, oil on canvas, measuring 74 x 108 cm without frame and 93 x 125 cm with a wonderful coeval frame, depicting a ‘posed’ still life with flowers, fruit and mushrooms by the painter Nicola Casissa ( Naples 1680 - 1731 ).

This sparkling posed still life gives an account of the richness and scenography that such images achieved in Naples in the late Baroque period: we know from inventories how the still life genre reached unprecedented heights.

This delicate canvas, of exquisite workmanship and appreciable for its excellent state of preservation, shows us definite influences of the work of Andrea Belvedere, the one who ferried Brueghel's inventions into 18th-century Naples, giving his compositions a brilliance and gracefulness that had not yet appeared.

The differences from Belvedere and the whole of the 17th century with this canvas are the cascading of the floral boquet, in the brightened palette and in the fractured brushstrokes that form the petals of the white hydrangeas in the middle of the canvas; here we are witnessing an evolution from the naturalism of the previous painters, where the various elements emerged from a dark background with a sharp light that returned the volumes of the fruit or flowers.

We encounter in our canvas a greater complexity, namely a landscape in the background and a copper vase from which flowers fall, on the left we find a melon, peaches and small mushrooms.
Studying the way of composing the canvas, of using such delicate and vivid colours and the figurative poetics of the whole, we cannot but name the talented painter Nicola Casissa ( 1680 - 1731 ).

Looking at this extraordinary work, we cannot but perceive a compact and dense en plein air composition where our artist's brushstroke becomes faster but always descriptive with an intense dynamism that seems to animate the composition itself with a strong sense of decorativism and pomp with iridescent tones of red, blue and white that are truly successful and energetic.

Analysing the illuminated palette, the sophisticated use of light that snakes crackling among petals and stems, the all-Rococo frivolity of the depiction, I cannot but think of a rather early dating of this work in Casissa's activity, thus around 1700 or very early years later.

The paintings and works of art published here are my exclusive property and therefore are always available to be viewed, by appointment, in my exhibition sites located in Sanremo and Brescia.

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Mr. Riccardo Moneghini
Art Historian