However, save his tendency for grandeur, the Cavalier d’Arpino, with his more generalistic style, had very little to pass on to the painter from northern Italy. Even so, at that time, Giuseppe Cesari was considered one of the most influential artists in Rome. One imagines that an unknown protector recommended Caravaggio to Cesari, opening the door to his prestigious studio. Whilst the Cavalier d’Arpino concentrated on frescos, Caravaggio, as Baglione clearly states, devoted himself first and foremost to oil painting[26]. He was employed “to paint flowers and fruit”. The still life genre, which was very fashionable in Lombardy, began to evolve towards a very realistic representation where each detail was highlighted as if it had been magnified by an optical lens. The representation of natural elements predominated in the first works of Caravaggio: Boy with a Basket of Fruit, Boy Peeling a Fruit (copy), and Basket of Fruit. The sensuality of the two boys in these works is evident, though the declaration by certain critics that these paintings are odes to homosexuality seems somewhat exaggerated and simplistic. It is true, however, that slightly parted lips charge a painting with eroticism, and Caravaggio did occasionally hide messages within his works. Thus the fruit that the boy is peeling could be a bergamot, a bitter orange, the symbol of Universal Love. During the Middle Ages, it was not unusual for a husband to put on vermillion robes, which Goethe declared in his treatise “represent the colour of extreme ardour as well as the gentlest reflection of the setting sun”[27]. Therefore this painting could symbolise the transition from child to adult, with the bitter taste of the fruit representing the end of innocence.

 

Nevertheless, Nature was not, for Caravaggio, the great protector and dominator of mankind that so many other artists took it to be. Nature provided him with no feelings of exaltation nor of lyrical depression, it did not flood his soul with joy or fear, it inspired neither adoration nor meditation within him. It offered him simply a framework, a theatrical scene within which to place his characters or a series of objects, which he could reproduce faithfully on the canvas, conforming to the fundamental principles of naturalists. He was aiming, according to his own words, “to imitate the things of nature”, while at the same time conforming to the standards set by his Lombardian masters. As previously noted, Caravaggio himself said on this subject that “a painting of flowers requires as much care as one of people”. Although Merisi pronounced this himself, he did later admit, conforming to the general opinion of the time, that the human form could never be compared to simple fruit and vegetables. Beyond the prevalence of vegetables, Caravaggio’s contemporaries must have been impressed by the realism of his paintings. The sensuality which emanates from Caravaggio’s early works deeply moves the spectator from the first viewing. However, his first masterpiece, the soft and luminous landscape of the Rest on the Flight to Egypt – which clearly reminds us of the style of Giorgione – evokes more than the simple sensory impressions of the outside world.