PAOLO PORPORA | Still life of a forest floor;Still life with a european quail

Both canvases are lined, both paint surfaces are slightly dirty, and both varnishes are thick, shiny and slightly discoloured. There is a degree of visible wear throughout both, and the weave of the canvas has become slightly more visible particularly in the dark tones. The stretcher mark is very visible in the former. Inspection under ultraviolet light is impeded by the opaque varnish, but in raking light it is possible to see retouchings in the former: in the background upper centre, in the left foot of the lizard, along the left margin, to a little restoration in the centre of the upper margin, and in the background just to the left of the lizard's left arm. There also appear to be a handful of fine lines of retouching to superficial surface scratches in the latter painting, one in the back of the frog, and two in the foliage just above it, the longest of which measures approx. 5 cm. There is also a small area of loss below the eye of the left-most frog 0.5 cm. long. There is also a fine line of retouching to a possible old T-shaped tear or surface scratch below the body of the quail which extends into its legs and the body of the frog, approx. 4 x 10 cm. long. Any further intervention is impossible to discern beneath the varnish. Both paintings are in overall fair condition.
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Hitherto unknown and unpublished, this pair of Neapolitan sottobosco still lifes embody the artist's fascination with earthy elements and creatures – portraying them with all the sheen, viciousness, moistness and full-bodied sensuousness of the damp and crawling undergrowth. Porpora trained in the workshop of Giacomo Recco, and was certainly acquinted with Otto Marseus van Schrieck. He moved to Rome after his marriage in 1654 and spent much of the rest of his career there having turned his focus from forest floors to still lifes of flowers and fruits. As Luigi Salerno writes in his seminal Natura Morta in Italiana, even when in Rome, Porpora never lost his 'feeling for the materials rendered with an intensity of colour, a density, and a tactile feeling for form typical of Neapolitan sensibility.'¹ Salerno published one particularly close comparable sottobosco from a private collection that features foliage, a coiled snake lunging at a butterfly, lizards and snails, that also demonstrates Porpora's technique of portraying the mossy floor using stippling with the end of his brush – clearly visible here.²

1 L. Salerno, Natura morta in Italiana, Rome 1984, p. 202.
2 Salerno 1984, p. 206, fig. 50.5.