Alessandro de’ Pesci (attivo fino al 1750)

Alessandro de’ Pesci (active until 1750)

Fish seller

Oil on canvas, 137 x 84 cm

Critical Sheet Prof. Alberto Crispo

The fish-themed still life can be framed chronologically between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century while the school to which we can refer is the Neapolitan one. In fact, the work finds many connections with the treatment of this genre carried out in Naples during the seventeenth century and then continued into the following century, often also through the heirs of families and workshops that had established themselves both in the city and outside, including the De Caros, the De Matteis and the Reccos. In the canvas we can distinguish a piece of still life that stands out from the rest of the work, positioning itself in the lower part and enjoying greater lighting than the seated fisherman who occupies the highest portion with his figure; if we observe the rendering of the scales or carapace of the turtle, another recurring subject in the still lifes of these artists and their other compatriots such as Baldassarre de Caro, there is an application with small light and shimmering touches that we find in the works of the man who, in fact, was long considered the Master of dotted fish. The name of this anonymous artist has been assigned to many still life works featuring fish and crustaceans, which have often been referred to the hand of Elena Recco, daughter of the painter Giuseppe, who in turn was instructed in painting by her father and uncle. This characteristic of his led some critics to develop the aforementioned pseudonym, also used for another personality of the same period, namely Alessandro de’ Pesci, an artist to whom this canvas can be referred and who was active in Rome in the second half of the eighteenth century; few works by him are preserved and his biography is still incomplete for long stretches today.The canvases found today at the Flesh Museum in Ajaccio, an institution created thanks to donations from Corsican Cardinal Joseph Fesh, who amassed an immense collection of works of art during his stay in Rome as a cardinal. In Alessandro's canvases we find the punctiform application of colour, the arrangement and pose of the marine subjects of the work in question, with a firmer and more compact application and with lighter and sharper shades than those of Reco, with whom he has long shared the same pseudonym. Surely both look carefully at the teachings and stylistic features of the Neapolitan school, for the use of an intense chiaroscuro that is suddenly broken by areas of more intense light, for the choice of genre and for a naturalism of remote Caravaggio ancestry; furthermore, the figure of the fisherman also stands out from a stylistic and pictorial point of view from that of still life further down, described with a lenticularism and enhanced by the greater enlightenment, as if to establish a sort of separation between two subjects united in the same work. This peculiarity could recall the collaborations between Giuseppe Recco, father of the aforementioned Elena, and Luca Giordano, one of the greatest Neapolitan painters of the Baroque period; in fact the work can be traced back to that trend in which Giuseppe Recco painted paintings with fish, leaving the creation of human figures to Luca Giordano: this work could derive from those examples.

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