Paolo Bartolomeo Clarici, known as Abate Paolo (Ancona, 1664 – Padua, 1725)
Still life with fish, fruits and embroidered fabric
Oil on canvas, cm 91 x 110.5
With frame, cm 108.5 x 130.5
Critical note by Prof. Alberto Crispo
Paolo Clarici, better known as Abate Paolo due to his ecclesiastical title, usually painted hunting scenes and fragrant still lifes rich in vegetables and fruits, and has recently gained appreciated fame due to the consolidation of the spectrum of his attributions. An early doubt about the insistent attribution to Giacomo Ceruti and other naturamorfisti from central and northern Italy of a couple of his canvases matured within the collection of the former Baron Vitali. Maria Silvia Proni cautiously opted to recognize the hand of an anonymous Lombard artist of the 17th-18th centuries, but the strict and incontrovertible comparisons that these works weaved with the paintings in the Der Schulenburg gallery only recently allowed Alberto Crispo to make use of the sources to better place the execution of the range of paintings in question between the end of the 17th century and the first quarter of the 18th century, leaning towards the parallel identification of the artist of the same in Abate Paolo.
A canvas that once belonged to the Bergamo collector Giovanni Secco Suardo, then merged into the collections of the Venetian marshal Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg, has in fact allowed to reconstruct and consolidate documentarily the work of this artist. Comprehensive of various works, the commander's collection had been reviewed in an ancillary catalog drawn up in Germany only after the 18th century, which reported the presence of some works by "L'Abbé Dito Paulo", that is, the abbot known as Paolo. The present painting contributes to enriching and better defining the oeuvre of this artist, alongside the other similar canvases that entered the possessions of the marshal in 1735 (general reference inventory: inv. Schulenburg, compiled a few years later) which were the first to cease a long tradition of misunderstanding. The critics Safarik and Bottari had already considered it correct to identify in the same 'Abate' one Giovanni Agostino Cassana, also known as Abate Cassana. Supporting and appropriating this version, Mina Gregori then gave credit to a past misunderstanding, understanding that in the aforementioned Schulenburg archive the proper name "Paolo" actually stood for paolotto, that is, a Franciscan friar with whom the editor would have intended to indicate Cassana by reason of the ecclesiastical title. Confirmed instead its validity as a proper name within a second inventory, that of the Scottish financier John Law who fled to the lagoon following the bankruptcy, it has therefore become possible to finally appreciate an objective documentary proof of Paolo's work.
Having completed his apprenticeship in Rome and then moved to Padua, the city in which he became prefect of the academy of painting and sculpture, Abate Paolo was described as follows by the chronicler Ricci, within the Memorie storiche delle arti e degli artisti della marca di Ancona (Macerata 1834, pp. 374-5): "He dedicated himself entirely to painting flowers, imitating with grace and truth the most beautiful works of nature". The contribution of this artist to the Veneto-Lombard compositional tradition of the early eighteenth century was decisive: the re-proposition that Giacomo Ceruti made of it, also aligning himself with the choice of the animals and vegetables figured, tells of a long formal debt that a good part of the subsequent pictorial tradition observed with admiration.
The object is in good condition.
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