Artworks

A radiant bouquet mixing red, pink, white, yellow and blue flowers with amongst others, tulips, jonquils and chrysanthemum is presented in a sculpted gold and blue vase resting on a table. Next to it, there is a white, fringed cloth, a dagger, a silver plate with a tumbler and a wine glass as well as a dish containing salami, preserves, cheese and bread and a plate with olives.
As Dr. Francesca Baldassari points out, this painting supplements the exceptional output of still lives by Pier Francesco Cittadini, called Il Milanese, a versatile and prolific painter who produced both altarpieces and easel paintings, creating still lives, landscapes and portraits. On moving to Bologna around the age of seventeen, following the death of his master Daniele Crespi, Cittadini entered the studio of Guido Reni and spent his apprenticeship producing copies of Reni’s paintings. His biographical data is scant and complicated by the presence of his brother Carlo and several sons in the bottega, that he directed. Yet, his fundamental role in the invention and execution of the paintings dedicated to the various genres within that studio remain undisputed as suggested by the consistently high stylistic quality they all have in common.
When considering Pier Francesco Cittadini’s repertoire of still lives, it should be stressed that they do not include signed works, but only works authenticated by the older sources, such as the flower insert in the Gallery of Bacchus in the Palazzo Ducale at Sassuolo (documented in 1650-1652), the series of Allegories of the Seasons painted for the Conti Legnani - now divided between the civic collections of Bologna and the Galleria Estense in Modena - and the two Still Lives with Flowers and Fruits in Casa Ghislieri which later passed to the sacristy of the church of Santa Maria di Galliera in Bologna. Other significant additions hitherto made to Cittadini’s oeuvre in the light of the stylistic analysis include the four paintings in the Galleria Estense in Modena - perhaps with a provenance from the Palazzo Ducale in Sassuolo - as well as a magnificent Vase of Flowers on a Carpet of the Istituto Giovanni XXIII, added to Cittadini’s corpus by Eugenio Riccomini .
Some aspects of Cittadini’s still lives recur in the works of another protagonist of the Emilian painter: Cristoforo Munari, who came from Reggio. They both share a taste for combining in the same composition such choice objects as the boxes of gelatine, the plate of olives, the crystal glasses, the dagger and the white cloth with fringes, with others decidedly more rustic such as the bread and the salami. The use of perspective in the rendering of these objects is also similar. Comparisons can be drawn between the present work and Munari’s Still Life (1710) in the Frits Lugt Collection which also features a dagger, a crystal glass and a salami with lookalike stylistic traits.
The extraordinary quality of the painting presented here - whose stylistic affinities with the artist’s authenticated still lives cited above is so self-evident as to make any further comparison superfluous - can be grasped especially in the precious rendering of the vase and in the minute description of the flowers. Such elements are comparable, in their mastery, to those painted by the Nordic painters studied by Cittadini during his residence in Rome around the 1660s.
Mixing various influences, Cittadini makes use of an original artistic vocabulary and depicts his subjects in a naturalistic way. With all this considered, it is possible to propose a date for this work during or after the artist’s Roman sojourn in the 1660s, the limpid naturalism being comparable with other works of that period, such as the Basket of Flowers in the Galleria di Parma.