(active between Città di Castello and Florence? - first half of the 17th Century)
Flowers in a vase and fruit in a basket on a table,
oil on canvas, 75.5 x 67 cm, framed

Inscribed and indistinctly dated on the reverse (now covered by the lining canvas): FRANC. RANVCCI/163.

Provenance:
art market, Florence;
where acquired by the present owner

We are grateful to Alberto Cottino for confirming the attribution on the basis of photographs.

The presence of an inscription on the back of this painting which was providentially photographed before being covered by the lining canvas (see fig. 1), allows us to identify the creator of this important work, which is dated 1630 (or 1636?), as being one Francesco Ranucci. This is a fact of considerable interest for the study of a niche subject that is largely concerned with anonymous works.

Observing the ‘excellent quality’ of this painting, Alberto Cottino has emphasised that this work is ‘entirely Caravaggist in its analytic declination of light, deployed to describe with focused lucidity the fruits, flowers and objects concentrated in the foreground, thereby generating a striking contrast with the dark background’. The ‘criterion of separation orchestrating the decorative arrangement of the fruits and flowers’ and the ‘fine clear’ brushwork, are, for Cottino, signals of a certain archaism that suggests comparisons with some among the protagonists of the first generation of Caravaggist still-life painters, such as the Hartford Master and the Master of the Palazzo San Gervasio. However, for Cottino the closest point of comparison is with a pair of paintings that have been frequently published, usually with an attribution to the Sienese painter Astolfo Petrazzi, although Federico Zeri assigned them to the Lombard school (see M. Ciampolini, Pittori senesi del Seicento,II, Siena 2010, p. 595). One of these two paintings was with Sotheby’s Florence, 12-13 May 1975 (lot 46, see fig. 2): in addition to representing a basket of fruit at the centre which is similar to that in the present painting, it also represents, to the right, a vase filled with flowers, identical both in shape and decoration – including the shield with an as yet unidentified coat-of-arms – to that depicted to the left in the present painting; moreover it also shows a cut melon that finds its exact counterpart in the work under discussion. In view of these observations, this pair of paintings, like the present painting, should be restored to the illusive painter Francesco Ranucci.

Very little biographical information is known about the author of these three paintings. Cottino recites as much as is reported by Bénézit of the seventeenth century painter Francesco Ranucci who at an unspecified date copied the gonfalone or standard by Raphael at Città di Castello, in which resided an important family named Ranucci, which had a standard-bearer among their ancestors. The Tuscan provenance of the present painting, as well as of the two paintings which passed through Sotheby’s Florence, is, for Cottino, sufficient evidence to secure an attribution in this region, although the Caravaggism of the present painting is ‘so intensely lively as to find no points of comparison with the works of other painters active in the region at the start of the seventeenth century, signalling that its author can only have trained at Rome’. There is a Francesco Ranucci mentioned during the first decades of the Seicento in Florence in the correspondence of the Medici, however, we do not know his profession.