(Frankfurt am Main 1590 – after 1621 Lombardy)
A still life with a basket of grapes, a peach, and birds nearby,
oil on panel, 37 x 51 cm, framed

Provenance:
Collection Francois (1927–2015) and Jacques Subes (1824–2002), Château des Évêques, France;
their sale, Coutau-Bégarie, Paris, 23 July 2016, lot 153;
Private collection, Germany

This small panel appears to be unpublished. It represents a wicker basket containing black and white grapes resting on a table. Beside the basket, a peach is placed on the left, and positioned symmetrically on the right, there is a bird (perhaps a quail). To the right and perched on a vine stem, a small bird of the passerine family called a wheatear (in Italian popularly called culbianco or codino) pecks at a grape. The crystalline radiant light falls from the left and is concentrated in the foreground, expressively leaving the background in shadow, whilst drawing attention to every detail; from the almost glass-like grapes, to the soft skin of the peach and the bird’s delicate plumage. Through this engagingly complex modulation of shade the material substance of the subjects is underscored. The result is a silent and contemplative scene, apparently suspended in space and time, and of rare visual poignancy.

The composition is typical of an artist of German origin who was also active in Italy (probably in Milan and Lombardy): Franz Godin, known by the Italianised name Francesco Codino. The presence of the small bird in Italian called culbianco or codino can be interpreted as a signature motif of the artist, even though it does not always occur in his pictures. Francesco Codino frequently repeated parts of his compositions in different paintings, applying an interesting procedure of deconstruction and reconstruction, typical of various still-life painters of the early Seicento, who, rather than working from life, more frequently used models and cartoons. Indeed, this composition is revisited in various panels (at least five), which represent the same principal motif of the basket full of grapes with the wheatear pecking at a grape, while they show variants in the fruit resting on the table. Among them, one example in the Museo Civico di Padova replaces the peach shown in the present painting with a medlar fruit. These are autograph variants of a subject that evidently met with a certain success.

There is limited knowledge of Franz Godin’s life. He was a protestant, born in Frankfurt, but he was active in Italy probably from 1620 to 1624 (or perhaps to 1631). There are no documents to verify his Lombard sojourn, but almost all of his known works once belonged to Italian collections, particularly from the North (today we know of about thirty of his works). We owe the identification of his place of birth and family name to the careful research of Gerhard Bott: he has also illuminated various aspects concerning the studio of Isaak Soreau and Peter Binoit in Hanau, where the artist worked before travelling to Italy, as well as the cultural and artistic exchanges Franz Godin might have had with these painters. In Italy Godin certainly shared a rich exchange of ideas with Panfilio Nuvolone, who was his almost exact contemporary, and this likely qualifies him as an important source for disseminating knowledge of northern painting in Lombardy (in addition to Jan ‘Velvet’ Brueghel who was well known in Milan because his work was collected by Federico Borromeo).

We are grateful to Alberto Cottino for confirming the attribution and for his help in cataloguing the present painting.