Giovanni Battista Recco

GIOVANNI BATTISTA RECCO (Naples, 1610 - 1660).
"Interior of a Kitchen", c. 1630.
Oil on canvas. Re-coloured.
It has a report of spertization by Don Nicola Spinosa.
Measurements: 118 x 176 cm; 139 x 195 cm (frame).
According to the report made by Don Nicola Spinosa, director of the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte: "The painting, unpublished and in good condition, in spite of bearing the initials D I on the spoon supported by two forks on the stone table, in allusion to its presumed author, but more probably to the name of the client, is certainly the work of Juan Bautista around 1630-1635. The canvas in question presents on a stone table, almost as if it were an 'exhibition', a remarkable set of several wrought copper pots, a typical product of Neapolitan craftsmanship which, enduring until the beginning of the 20th century, was concentrated above all in numerous 'shops' active in the port area and, in particular, in the so-called Rua Catalana, known since the time of Giovanni Boccaccio, who mentions it in one of his tales - that of Andreuccio da Perugia - included in the Decameron. The transfer of the painting in question to Giovan Battista, also mentioned in the sources as Titta Recco, brother of Giacomo and father of Giuseppe, both known still-life painters and belonging to a well-known family that also included majolica experts. The piece is based on the strict stylistic affinities with some "posed nature" compositions that have long been assigned to it by modern and contemporary critics. As in the case of the two canvases with goat heads in the Museo Capodimonte, the kitchen interior in the Museo Regionale del Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo or two other kitchen interiors belonging to two different Neapolitan private collections (for these paintings and for other compositions by Giovan Battista Recco, see R.
Middione in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli, exhibition catalogue edited by N. Spinosa, vol. i, pp. 386 ff., Naples 1984): paintings in which, as in other canvases by Titta Recco with similar themes, there are carved copper pans identical or almost identical, in terms of pictorial representation, to those painted, after the middle of the century, also by his son Giuseppe, albeit on smaller canvases. However, what distinguishes Giovan Battista from both his brother Giacomo, known above all for his vases with floral compositions, and his son Giuseppe, as well as from other Neapolitan "generists" of the early 17th century, such as Luca Forte or the young Paolo Porpora, is in particular the adherence to the vigorous naturalism of Caravaggio's matrix imported to Naples from Rome, where he was trained at a very young age after leaving Valencia, by Jusepe de Ribera from mid-1616, when he moved definitively to the capital of the southern viceroyalty.
Furthermore, in confirmation of Giovan Battista Recco's attention to Ribera's naturalistic examples, it has also been pointed out how his 'still lifes' summarise almost literally, as in the case of the very canvas in question here, some remarkable insertions by nature in pose' painted by the painter of Spanish origin in his numerous compositions of both sacred and profane subject matter, dating from the years of his youthful stay in Rome to his advanced maturity around 1640.
Furthermore, as confirmation of Giovan Battista Recco's relationship with the most important exponents of the trends of naturalism in Naples, it should be noted that the two figures of presumed artisans in the composition in question can certainly be attributed to the hand of Giuseppe di Guido: a painter stylistically close to the known examples of Giovan Battista Caracciolo after 1610 and in whom the so-called Master of Fontanarosa, from the town of Beneventano in whose parish church it is kept, has been identified".