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The origins of the Basket of Fruit remain obscure. It might have been commissioned directly by Federico Borromeo when he lived in Rome, between April 1597 and May 1601. Or it might have been a gift from Cardinal del Monte. In a letter to Borromeo of 1596, del Monte thanks him for certain presents received and expresses his intention to reciprocate with a gift of ‘paintings and clocks’. He says he is sorry for the delay, caused by the fact that ‘I am dealing with persons with whom I have to arm myself with patience’ – which sounds like a reference to the temperamental Caravaggio.

Opinion is also divided on the question of what Borromeo thought of the painting. He singled it out in an intriguing passage in his Musaeum, part of a tract entitled ‘De Pictura Sacra’, ‘Of Sacred Painting’, written in 1618: ‘Of not little value is a basket containing flowers in lively tints. It was made by Michelangelo da Caravaggio who acquired a great name in Rome. I would have liked to place another similar basket nearby, but no other having attained the incomparable beauty and excellence of this, it remained alone.’30 Borromeo’s reference to flowers instead of fruit has called into question the sincerity of his admiration for the painting. If he had truly loved it, surely he would never have made such an elementary mistake. But it was not uncommon for a churchman to refer to the mystic grapes of Christian belief as flores vineae, the ‘flowers of the vine’ – a phrase inspired by the Song of Songs. Rather than indicating Borromeo’s indifference to the picture, the passage may actually reveal his awareness of its deeper connotations.31

PAINTINGS FOR PRAYER AND DEVOTION

Federico Borromeo’s ownership of the Basket of Fruit suggests that with del Monte’s support Caravaggio’s circle of patrons and collectors soon widened. As well as painting secular subjects, such as The Musicians and The Lute Player for del Monte himself, the artist created a number of private devotional works – images of the saints, and the Holy Family, intended as aids to prayer and meditation. These too were subtle and original works that did much to enhance his steadily growing reputation for independence of thought and style.

Two of these religious pictures, The Penitent Magdalen and The Rest on the Flight to Egypt, have been together in the Pamphili Collection in Rome ever since they were first recorded there in an inventory of 1652. Their earlier history is not known for certain but it is likely that their first owner was Donna Olimpia Aldobrandini, whose heir married Prince Camillo Pamphili in 1647, taking all the family pictures with her. Olimpia Aldobrandini was the niece of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, with whom Cardinal del Monte played hazard and frequented the company of courtesans, so she would have been well placed to buy works from Caravaggio in the later 1590s;32 these two pictures appear to have been part of the unsold stock that the painter brought with him when he moved to the Palazzo Madama. Mancini, the most reliable source of information about the early years, says that both were painted at around the same time as The Gypsy Fortune-Teller, when Caravaggio was living in the house of Monsignor Fatin Petrigiani.33 That would place them in 1595–6, a date consistent with their lightness of palette and slightly soft style.

Bellori thought The Penitent Magdalen was a shockingly unorthodox work of art and described it as one of the most extreme examples of Caravaggio’s obsession with reproducing raw and unmediated reality:

Since Caravaggio aspired only to the glory of colour, so that complexion, skin, blood and natural surfaces might appear real, he directed his eye and work solely to that end, leaving aside all the other aspects of art. Therefore, in order to find figure types and to compose them, when he came upon someone in town who pleased him he made no attempt to improve on the creations of Nature. He painted a girl drying her hair, seated on a little chair with her hands in her lap. He portrayed her in a room, adding a small ointment jar, jewels and