PENSIONANTE DEL SARACENI

When he published this painting at the end of the 1920s, Roberto Longhi described it as an ‘Unfinished meal - the carafe half-emptied, the melon and the water melon cut, the pear intact and the apple cut, and the flies jumping on their own shadows’. Longhi was at this time just beginning his research into Caravaggio and, in his view, the painting, which is impressive but really only of medium size, was by Caravaggio. Who else could have painted a masterpiece of such intensity and of such compositional excellence?

Caravaggio’s paternity in this case, however, was quite short-lived. By the 1950s the work had been attributed to an anonymous artist close to Carlo Saraceni named ‘Pensionante del Saraceni’. Agreement on this attribution was almost unanimous, but it has not yet to a precise identification of the artist. His probable French nationality and his first-hand knowledge of Caravaggio appear to be the only secure information we have about him. The group of works attributed to him is tiny and the Washington painting is his only true still-life.

In this still-life the table is covered with a silken cloth on which are placed a pear, a monumental slice of water melon, a melon, a plate of fruit and a glass carafe half full of white wine. Two flies buzz at a distance, but they could easily jump onto these recently abandoned leftovers. The dark background is one of the walls of a room, not just a backdrop as it is in the more or less contemporaneous painting in Rome attributed to the Master of the Hartford Still-life. In Pensionante’s picture the few pieces of fruit and the splendid carafe reflecting the light possess an extraordinary presence. The soft, almost velvety light is unlike that in Caravaggio’s youthful works. It dissolves the forms and multiplies the reflections in the shadows.

This painting and a small group of other paintings were attributed in the 1940s to an anonymous artist called ‘Pensionante del Saraceni’, literally the boarder of Saraceni. He was believed to be French. The theme of the chicken vendor was popular with sixteenth-century northern painters, as well as with Lombard and Bolognese artists. Pensionante has studied the subtle atmosphere of Caravaggio’s Gypsy Fortune Teller and created an intense relationship between the two figures. The soft, velvety quality of the light and modeling differs sharply from the chiaroscuro of other Caravaggesque painters.

The theme of the painting, like that of Caravaggio’s painting, is trickery. The young man holds out two coins for the two chickens to the vendor, whose crafty expression suggests a foolish pleasure in the transaction, behind his back his customer filches a third.

A fruit seller and a young serving woman haggle over the price of a melon. The play of hands is indebted to Caravaggio, but its treatment is awkward. More assured is the still-life. The basket of fruit, which seems to jut over the table, and the wilting leaves suggesting the freshness of the fruit are motifs derived from Caravaggio’s London Supper at Emmaus, and ones much favoured by still-life painters following him, such as Pietro Paolo Bonzi and the Master of the Acquavella Still-life. The melons, too, occur in pictures by these artists. Painted from three different viewpoints, and arranged on a parabola, they are veiled in a soft translucent light, and seem to detach themselves from the painting. They are strikingly close to the Washington Still-life and it has recently been suggested that the Washington painting, usually attributed to Pensionante del Saraceni, is by a different artist, who also contributed the still-life to this picture.

The hard, crisp quality of the outlines of the figures, and the modelling in light, are close to the works of Dutch and Flemish Caravaggesque painters.