Now fully independent, the artist chose to concentrate on the genre of still life with a particular predilection for the depiction of musical instruments and kitchen interiors.

Born in Bergamo to the merchant Simone Baschenis and Francesca Volpi in 1617, Evaristo Baschenis was baptised in the parish of Sant’Alessandro in Colonna on 7 December. The family, originally from Averara in the upper Val Brembana, had a solid artistic tradition that was to influence the young man in his choice of a profession. He served his apprenticeship from 1639 to 1642 in the workshop of Gian Giacomo Barbelli from Cremona, who undertook by contract to “give him a place to sleep in a room, teach him his profession and art faithfully, and do everything required and expected of a master”.¹

Baschenis worked with Barbelli on decorative commissions in Lombardy that also involved artists specialising in the illusionistic ceiling painting known as quadratura, like Giovan Battista Azzola and Domenico Ghislandi. On completing his apprenticeship, the young man settled in Bergamo and inherited the property left by his father, who died in the plague of 1630. He was ordained in September 1643 and thus acquired the nickname “Prevarisco”, a corruption of Prete Evaristo or “Evaristo the Priest”.

Now fully independent, the artist chose to concentrate on the genre of still life with a particular predilection for the depiction of musical instruments and kitchen interiors. His carefully studied compositions and rigorous perspective find precedents of the work of artists like Ambrogio Figino, Fede Galizia and Panfilo Nuvolone, without of course forgetting the examples from northern Europe, which are well documented in the finest collections of the time. The artist may also have found precious sources of inspiration in the virtuoso representations of 15th- and 16th-century marquetry and the illustrations in treatises on perspective.²

Baschenis proves to have been a cultured, up-to-date artist capable of establishing fruitful dialogue with clients and artists. An example is provided by his relations with the painter of battle scenes Jacques Courtois, known as Borgognone, with whom he also developed a brisk trade in works of art facilitated by his frequent journeys between Milan, Brescia, Venice and Rome. The painter’s work soon found favour with the most discerning collectors, who obliged him to produce a stream of copies and variations, especially on the theme of musical instruments. He succeeded nevertheless in developing his representations from the total chromatic and compositional synthesis of the 1640s and 1650s to the richer and more complex works of the next two decades.

The Cerruti Collection canvas proves particularly useful in retracing these steps in that it can be regarded, in virtue of its accentuatedly schematic nature, as the first in a series of which at least three more autograph and chronologically successive variants are known: one owned by Count Paolo Lupi and sold to the Pinacoteca di Brera in 1912; one in Palazzo Pisani Moretta, Venice; and one in a private collection in Turin, characterised by the addition of a sumptuous curtain in the background.³ Attention can also be drawn to a workshop copy in a private collection in Bergamo, with the addition of a candle holder on the left, and another similar in all respects to the Cerruti version sold in the Bukowskis auction in Stockholm on 3 June 2014.⁴

[Simone Mattiello]

¹ De Pascale, Ferrari 2017, p. 6.

² Rosci 1971, pp. 34-36.

³ E. De Pascale, in Bergamo 1996-97, pp. 150-151, cat. 8.

⁴ Bukowskis, Stockholm, Classic Sale no. 580, 2-5 June 2014, lot 834.