(Rome 1659 - circa 1730)
An anthropomorphic allegory of Spring,
oil on canvas, 131 x 94 cm, framed

A series of Anthropomorphic still-life paintings of the seasons

We are grateful to Alberto Cottino for confirming the attribution to Giovanni Paolo Castelli, called lo Spadino.
We are also grateful to Andrea G. De Marchi for independently confirming the attribution and for his help in cataloguing the present paintings.

The present series of the Four Seasons was painted by Giovanni Paolo Castelli, called lo Spadino, one of the leading still-life painters working in Rome in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The style of painting suggests that the series of pictures were produced in the middle of the artist‘s career, around the last decade of the seventeenth century. However, the compositional format of the present series of highly theatrical anthropomorphic Seasons reflects earlier iconographic and compositional models derived from the celebrated proto-surrealist paintings of heads created by the Mannerist artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–1593), who worked in the Habsburg court. Arcimboldo was a Milanese painter, poet, musician, costume and theatre designer, who painted fantastic heads, composed of fruits, such as the present paintings for Emperor Rudolf II and his father Emperor Maximilian in the late sixteenth century. In fact, from 1562 Arcimboldo was court painter in Vienna and Prague to successive Habsburg rulers. The rich and erudite symbolism of his heads, which glorified Habsburg power, appealed to a courtly Mannerist taste for the rare and curious, and Rudolf II commissioned him to collect objects for his Kunstkammer. In the 1560s Arcimboldo was commissioned by Maximilian to paint a series of heads composed of still-life elements emblematic of the Seasons (Louvre, Paris) and the Elements (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). The idea was reprised in Arcimboldo’s famous anthropomorphic portrait of Rudolf II as Vertumnus, God of the Seasons, which was composed of fruit and flowers (1590, Skokloster Castle, Sweden).

As far as we know, the renewal in interest in courtly Mannerist painting traditions seems to have occurred in Rome around 1600 or just after, in works by the Florentine artist Francesco Zucchi (1566–1612), who some scholars have identified as the so-called Master of Hartford. The painter and biographer Giovanni Baglione, in Le vite de’ pittori, scultori & architetti of 1642, credited Zucchi with the invention of a ‘way of composing and colouring the heads of the Four Seasons with their fruits, flowers, and other things which in the time of those seasons nature customarily brings forth’ (see: L. Salerno, La Natura Morta Italiana, 1560–1805, Rome 1984, p. 54). One such work by Zucchi is Spring (Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut). It is possible that Zucchi was introduced to Arcimboldo’s works by Caravaggio, during the period when both artists were in the studio of Cavaliere d’Arpino.

Such anthropomorphic compositions are known in the work of another Roman artist, and Maria Silvia Proni has suggested that the subject was popularized by Giovanni Stanchi (1608 – after 1673), even if Zucchi was responsible for this specific type of figural group (see: G. & U. Bocchi, eds., Pittura di natura morta a Roma, artisti italiani 1630–1750, Viadana 2005, pp. 273-276).

Andrea G. De Marchi points out that this revival of the ideas of international Mannerism, carried out in a triumphant Baroque style was highly usual, and the present four paintings by Spadino are of great interest especially because of their pictorial quality. Given the very high quality of execution of the present works, it is tempting to speculate that they may be the prototypes from which other artists worked.

The figure of Spring, composed of seasonal flowers, is set like a statue in an elegant garden setting with courtly figures in the background, while Summer, composed of fruit and flowers with a wreath of corn in its head, is set in a more rustic landscape with figures harvesting the corn in the background. Autumn by contrast is represented by a much more dynamic and bucolic figure who raises a bunch of grapes to his mouth while in the background dancing peasants celebrate the harvesting of the grapes. Winter is a figure in profile, composed of cabbages, leeks, citrus fruits and other seasonal elements, while in the background, under a stormy sky, some people by a hut are lighting a fire. The motif of the sliced watermelon in the present Summer is very similar to the The elegant refreshment, signed and dated 1701, in the Roccamadoro Ramelli Collection, Fermo. The melon is almost identical to that in the present Summer, while the figures are also very close to those in the background of Spring and the still life of a Split watermelon, fruit and a parrot in the Musée Fesch, Ajaccio (see: M. Gregori, La Natura Morta Italiana da Caravaggio al Settecento, Milan 2003, p. 379, ill.). The courtly figures in the background, meanwhile, are also found in Spadino’s Still life with fruit and a vase of flowers, a parrot and a rabbit in a garden setting (Palazzo Reale, Naples, see: F. Zeri, La natura morta in Italia, Milan 1989, vol. II, p. 841, fig. 1001), and are similar to those in the present Spring.

Giovanni Paolo Castelli, called Lo Spadino, was born in Rome on 8 April 1659 and died around 1730. He received his initial training from his elder brother Bartolomeo, who also specialised in still-life painting. Between 1671 and 1674 he was a neighbour of Abraham Brueghel, to whom he was possibly apprenticed as he was strongly influenced by the Flemish master’s still-life paintings of flowers and fruit, which are painted in a similar brilliantly coloured, bravura, painterly style. In fact, Spadino played an important role in developing some of the ideas and techniques of the northern still-life painters who were his contemporaries in Rome, such as Abraham Brueghel, Frans Werner Tamm, David de Koninck (who was resident in the same parish) and Christian Berentz. in evolving a theatrical late baroque style featuring tumbling arrangements of lush fruit painted with vivid colouring and virtuoso brushwork. On his brother’s death in 1686, Spadino inherited his unfinished canvases and his clientele. In July of the following year, the notable Florentine collector Prince Filippo Corsini, bought one of his paintings and in 1689, one of his pictures was acquired by another illustrious collector, Cardinal Flavio Chigi. His fame was also spread through the exhibitions at San Salvatore in Lauro in which he participated from 1693. On 28 March 1690, by which time his career was evidently well established, Castelli married Apollonia De Marchis and their son the younger Bartolomeo became a painter working in the manner of his father.

Spadino’s work was clearly admired outside Rome because an inventory taken in 1715 of the collection of Prince Giacomo Capece Zurlo in Naples recorded no fewer than eight small canvases by Spadino (see: L. Salerno, Ibid., 1984, p. 265). His most noted works comprise a group of twenty-one pictures in The elegant refreshment (Roccamadoro Ramelli Collection, Fermo) and another notable group, formerly attributed to Mario dei Fiori, in the City Museum at Montefortino (Ascoli- Piceno). Spadino is also represented by two still lives signed and dated 1703, in the Capitoline Gallery, Rome, which came from the Massimo collection. He has six small pictures in the Galleria Spada, Rome, which were recorded there in an inventory of 1759, as well as in the Musée Fesch, Ajaccio and in the Palazzo Reale, Naples.