Renaissance Art - Canestra di frutta

Basket of Fruit ( Italian: Canestra di frutta) (c.1599) is a still life oil painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), which hangs in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Ambrosian Library), Milan.

It shows a wicker basket perched on the edge of a ledge. The basket contains a selection of summer fruit.

Caravaggio's Fruit: A Mirror on Baroque Horticulture

Jules Janick

Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture

Purdue University, West Lafayette Indiana 479076-2010

“ The uppermost fruit is a good-sized, light-red peach¹  (Prunus persica) attached to a stem with wormholes in the leafⁱ resembling damage by oriental fruit moth (Orthosia hibisci).

Beneath it is a single bicolored apple² (Malus pumila), shown from a stem perspective with two insect entry holes, probably codling moth, one of which shows secondary rot at the edge;

one blushed yellow pear³ with insect predations resembling damage by leaf roller (Archips argyospita);

four figs (Ficus carica), two white^4a and two purple^4b—the purple ones dead ripe and splitting along the sides, plus a large fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose (Glomerella cingulata);

and a single unblemished quince⁵ (Cydonia oblonga) with a leafy spur showing fungal spotsⁱⁱ.

There are four clusters of grapes (Vitis vinifera), black^6a, red^6b, golden^6c, and white^6d; the red cluster on the right shows several mummied fruit, while the two clusters on the left each show an overripe berry. There are two grape leaves, one severely desiccated and shriveledⁱⁱⁱ while the other contains spots^iv and evidence of an egg mass. “