ANTONIO MERCURIO AMOROSI | AN ALLEGORY OF SMELL

Private collection, California;

Private collection, Paris, by 1997. 

L. Laureati, "Dal Maestro della natura morta Acquavella a Michelangelo Cerquozzi. Un’ipotesi di lavoro," in La natura morta di Federico Zeri, Bologna 2015, p. 175.

This allegorical depiction of the sense of smell is typical of the work of Antonio Mercurio Amorosi, an artist active in Rome in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His mature genre scenes like the present, characterized by simplicity and an appreciation for nature and displaying the influence of Bernhard Keil, called Monsù Bernardo, were much sought after among collectors. A close precedent for the present composition is Pietro Paolo Bonzi's Boy with a Melon (circa 1620), formerly in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin,¹ and the melon resting on the ledge in the lower left compares closely to Amorosi's Still Life with a Melon in a private collection, Urbino.² 

1. Oil on canvas, 74 by 61 cm, destroyed in 1945. See The Genius of Rome: 1592-1623, London 2001, p. 76, reproduced fig. 27.  

2. Oil on canvas, 34 by 43.5 cm. See C. Magini, Amorosi, Rimini 1996, pp. 164-165, cat. no. 74, reproduced plate XXV.