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By Root 1424 0

the basket without the boy. The weight of the painter’s attention on his apparently straightforward theme is palpable. The basket on this occasion contains a considerably reduced ration of produce. There are figs, an apple, a quince, a peach, a pear and four bunches of bloom-clouded grapes. These are the fruits of late summer, ripe to succulence, but also on the turn. There is a dark wormhole in the red-streaked cheek of the apple. Two of the grapes at the apex of the uppermost bunch have shrivelled to raisins. There are black spots as well as bright pearls of dew on some of the foliage. A parched vine leaf has turned thinner than paper, while the peach leaves have curled and dried to dark, perforated twists. The basket of woven straw has been placed on the most minimally suggested of ledges. It overhangs the edge a little, a fact that the painter indicates with the smallest crescent of black shadow. The transience of nature is linked to precariousness. Entropy and the fear of falling are connected in Caravaggio’s mind.

The background of the painting is a golden void, reminiscent of a cream-coloured wall in the sun. An early inventory of Federico Borromeo’s collection shows that it was kept unframed. This may have been deliberate: it may have been hung high on a wall the same colour as the ground, to emphasize its trompe-l’æil effect and make it yet more of a tantalus.29 In any case, the blank background had been a characteristic peculiarity of Caravaggio’s work from the very start of his career. It is the hallmark of an artist utterly uninterested in extraneous detail. For Caravaggio, making images is a way of focusing the mind. To paint something is to isolate it for the purposes of contemplation.

The total isolation of forms in the Basket of Fruit might have lent the image a quality of objectivity, akin to that of the contemporary specimen studies in the albums compiled for Cassiano dal Pozzo collectively known as ‘The Paper Museum’. But in Caravaggio’s hands it has the opposite effect. The objects of his concern have been removed from the world of the merely mundane. The possibility of transfiguration seems to linger in the stillness that surrounds them. The picture implicitly contrasts death with hope. From withered grapes comes wine, just as from the dead body of Christ flowed the blood of salvation. The fruits and leaves are haloed by the golden light, which seems to emanate from several sources. The light gives modelling to some and reduces others to sharp and ragged silhouettes. There is a measure and a rhythm to the arrangement of objects and shapes, which creates the sense that there must be more going on than meets the eye. Leaves droop and curl with an exquisite sense of placement, fastidiously arranged in such a way as to hang clear in the golden air.

Caravaggio exhausted the genre of still life – for himself, at least – in the act of painting his only example of it. Roberto Longhi, searching for words to express the uniqueness of the painting, called it ‘a humble biological drama’. It is precisely the picture’s dramatic quality that makes it so unusual, and so powerful. The vanitas connotations of bruised fruit and the eucharistic implications of grapes come together in the painted basket. But the accumulation of symbols is not enough for Caravaggio, who prefers to express his meaning dynamically. His idea of still life painting is not an assemblage of objects but a theatre of forms. The huddled windfall fruit have a corporeal solidity. The grapes overspill. The foliage is uncannily anthropomorphized. The most daring detail is the single tendril of vine that reaches into the picture from an unexplained point of origin outside its right-hand edge. The blackened silhouettes of leaves hanging from that single, knubbled stalk might almost be hands stretching. They are figures of death or desperation reaching towards the light and life. The work is, in the end, only a still life painting, but it is filled with the same energies, the same sense of agony and paroxysm, as Caravaggio’s greatest religious pictures.