Still Life with Grapes and Other Fruit

Grapes, apples and pears spill across a ledge beside a seed-filled open pomegranate — harvest fruits that may evoke the bounty of autumn, with the pomegranate itself a long-standing symbol of abundance. Luca Forte, the Neapolitan still-life specialist active from about 1630 to 1670, typically added tiny insects, snails and droplets of moisture to his fruit, and here his painstaking brushwork on a copper panel gives every surface a polished smoothness like fine enamel. He was known for his sensitivity to the material nature of the objects he represented, capturing their solidity and roundness through light; his compact, jewel-like panels were the model on which the later flowering of Neapolitan still-life painting was built. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.