(Bergamo 1639 – after 1688)
A globe, musical instruments and music sheets on a piano with Oriental tapestry,
oil on canvas, 118 x 156.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Collection Wertheimer, Paris;
Mortimer Brandt Gallery, New York, in 1967;
art market, Florence,
where acquired by the present owner

Literature:
The Art Journal XXVI, 1966-67, 2, illustrated (as Evaristo Baschenis);
M. Rosci, Baschenis, Bettera & Co. Produzione e mercato della natura morta del Seicento in Italia, Milan 1971, pp. 61, 63, note 15, and p. 152, fig. 148 (as Bartolomeo Bettera);
M. Rosci, Bartolomeo e Bonaventura Bettera, in: I Pittori Bergamaschi dal XIII al XIX secolo. Il Seicento, III, Bergamo 1985, p. 164, n. 19; p. 178, fig.1 (as Bartolomeo Bettera)

This painting, which was formerly attributed to Evaristo Baschenis, was restored during the early 1970s to Bartolomeo Bettera by Marco Rosci.

The composition of the present painting is framed by a rich drape, ornamented with gilt motifs, thereby distancing the artist’s work from Evaristo Baschenis’ rigorous and essential abstract spatial geometries, in which any abundance of decorative elements is eliminated. Moreover, in the present canvas, the passage describing the oriental carpet, on which various musical instruments and other objects are laid out, is extremely realistic, and the rose reflections playing off their worn wood surfaces, warm the composition, which is largely played out in a palette of ochre-browns and greys. Among these, the globe is especially prominent being the composition’s brightest focal point.

Owing to its characteristic play of light and colour this painting would appear to belong to the artist’s late maturity. Indeed, this work was compared by Rosci to the canvases in the Venino collection, Varese, which are considered among the finest of Bettera’s maturity (see op. cit. Rosci, 1971, figs. 146, 147). Another pair, from the Festa collection in Vicenza, is also illustrated by Rosci and can be compared in terms of subject matter and composition to the present work (see op. cit. Rosci, 1971, figs. 151, 152).

Bartolomeo Bettera was a native of Bergamo and was active in Lombardy during the second half of the seventeenth century, but little of his biography is known. He left Bergamo at an uncertain date to spend some time in Rome; by 1687 he was in Milan, where it is thought he spent the rest of his life. In his work on the Illustri bergamaschi of 1869, Pisano Locatelli (II, pp. 94-95) reports discovering the artist’s signature on two paintings then in the possession of Giovanni Secco Suardi, who later bequeathed them to the Accademia di Carrara, Bergamo (inv. nos. 760, 761). Although it is uncertain whether Bettera was an apprentice to Evaristo Baschenis, he certainly absorbed this master’s influence as a still-life painter, especially of musical instruments, abundant draperies and rich oriental table carpets.

Bettera’s works share a similar range of subject matter with the late mature works of Baschenis together with a dark palette with warm tones. Bettera’s preferred subjects however tend to the more ornamental items such as intarsia coffers, strange instruments and Spanish guitars decorated with intarsia. Bettera elaborated on the traditional compositions of the elder master from Bergamo’s work, in an eclectic and personal manner, making compositional decisions of arrangement and lighting to generate a differing distribution of filled and void spaces. Indeed, Bettera’s space tends to be filled with objects arranged for spectacular effect in contrast to Baschenis’ which, on the contrary, are fundamentally built on the essential principal of the exaltation of the void.