Giacomo Nani Lot n° 10

(Porto Ercole, 1698 - Naples, 1755) Still life with flowers and fruit Oil on canvas, 103X137 cm A pupil of Andrea Belvedere and Gaspare Lopez, Giacomo Nani created still lives with a naturalistic soul, in affinity with Tommaso Realfonso (Naples, circa 1677 - post 1743), building his compositions on compositional and aesthetic modules taken from the works of Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo (Naples 1629-1693) and Giuseppe Recco (Naples 1634 - Alicante 1695). According to De Dominici, the artist was Belvedere's best pupil: 'a universal painter in all that a professor can paint'. The most conspicuous and valuable nucleus of his catalogue is made up of still lifes of flowers, executed in a style close to that of Gaspare Lopez (Naples 1650 - Florence 1740), following a tendentially Rococo development, in similarity to Nicola Casissa, and then developing a naturamortistic genre of animalier and neo-naturalist taste that is typically seventeenth-century. Reference bibliography: N. Spinosa, Pittura napoletana del Settecento. Dal Barocco al Rococò, Naples 1988, pp. 65-69; 96, figs. 196-199 A. Tecce, Giacomo Nani, in La Natura morta in Italia, Milan 1989, vol. II, p. 960 M. Santucci, in Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte. Paintings of the 18th century, the Neapolitan school. Le collezioni borboniche e postunitarie, Naples 2010, p. 130, n. 99 a-b, with previous bibliography