Basket of Fruit

A simple wicker basket of fruit sits on a ledge against a plain pale ground: grapes, a bursting fig, apples and a pear, with leaves that curl, dry, and show worm-holes and spots of rot. Caravaggio gives the humble subject the full weight of a portrait, and refuses to prettify - the decay is as exactly rendered as the ripeness. Among the first independent still lifes in Italian painting, now in Milan's Biblioteca Ambrosiana, it quietly insists that close attention to a real, perishable thing is subject enough for art.