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that his mother had taken him to Rome. At the age of just thirteen he had found work as a colour mixer for Niccolò Circignani, who was then directing the decoration of the Vatican Loggie for Pope Gregory XIII. He soon graduated to the painting team and made enough of a name for himself to win several important independent commissions in Rome during the later 1580s. Following the death of his most influential patron, Cardinal Farnese, in 1589, he accepted an invitation to carry out a series of paintings for the Certosa di San Martino in Naples, including a monumental canvas, The Crucifixion. He returned to Rome in 1591 and on Clement VIII’s accession became the pope’s leading painter.

Cesari’s art was a limp but occasionally elegant hybrid of High Renaissance and Mannerist styles. As a painter of religious subjects, he answered the Counter-Reformation call for clarity, grace and decorum. But in his smaller, erotically charged mythological pictures, he experimented with complicated poses and frequently arcane symbolism. He painted the rape of Europa and the judgement of Paris, as well as the naked Diana and her companions surprised by the huntsman Actaeon. A composition of Perseus swooping from the skies to rescue an alluring and unusually languid Andromeda from the clutches of a diminutive lapdog of a dragon proved especially popular; several versions survive.

Caravaggio probably began working for the Cesari brothers in the middle of 1593. It was an eventful time for his new employers. In late 1592 Bernardino Cesari had been sentenced to death for associating with known bandits and had run away to Naples. But by May of the following year he was back in Rome, having secured a papal pardon thanks to the intervention of Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrato, one of several powerful patrons of the Cesari workshop. Giuseppe now needed all the help he could get. The studio was busy: the papal treasurer, Bernardo Olgiati, had commissioned the decoration of an entire chapel in the church of Santa Prassede. Figures of the prophets, sibyls and doctors of the Church were required, as well as a Resurrection and a monumental Ascension. There was also a commission to decorate the vault of the Contarelli Chapel, in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, with small scenes set into an intricate stuccowork design. Six years later Caravaggio would win the commission to paint two large canvases for the walls of the very same chapel – works that would instantly establish him as the most original religious artist of his time, and forever overshadow the earlier contributions of the Cesari workshop. But in 1593 he was just another apprentice painter from Lombardy with everything to prove.

The sources say that Caravaggio was employed to paint ‘flowers and fruit’. Artists from northern Italy had recently begun to work in the relatively new field of still life painting. It was a genre of secular art – albeit frequently with undertones of religious meaning – that had its roots in post-Reformation Flanders and Holland. But its popularity had begun to spread southwards across Europe during the late sixteenth century. The Spanish played a part in disseminating this new taste, buying works of art in their northern territories and taking them to the cities that they controlled in Italy. It is likely that Caravaggio had seen Dutch or Flemish still life paintings during his time in Milan, and perhaps that was why Giuseppe Cesari marked him out for the same line of work. It is likely that he would have contributed the decorative festoons of frescoes by the Cesari workshop, as well as painting canvases for direct sale to private clients. Cesari also bought and sold Dutch and Flemish cabinet pictures, which suggests that he was well aware of the new taste among Roman collectors for the novelties of landscape and still life painting. But the supply of such pictures from the north was inevitably limited. Who better than an artist from Lombardy – a man from fertile Caravaggio, surrounded by the orchards that supplied Milan – to create homegrown depictions of flowers,