#italian

I couldn't dig up much on this one — no name for her, nothing about why it was painted. If anyone knows, I'd take the story.

Supposedly Marinetti's Futurist manifesto singled out exactly this kind of quiet, moonlit mood as something painters needed to get over — funny seeing the movement's own future star drawing it a few years earlier.

Nobody actually knows who she is. She gets called Venus by tradition, from what I can find, but there's no story attached — just a young woman on a bed in a grand house, a sleeping dog, and two maids in the back digging through a chest like it's any other afternoon. It sat finished for years before anyone bought it, apparently.

Apparently the colours aren't random: her pale blue and his red were meant to echo the flags of the alliance fighting Austria at the time this was painted. Some readings even spot a dagger half-hidden in his cloak — less a lover saying goodbye, more someone about to go do something dangerous.

They say the cardinal who commissioned this kept Caravaggio living in his own household — patrons like that collected talented people the way others collected art.

The story goes that he kept this one — it was still in his studio when he died, and his sons sold it off to clear what he owed. No one's settled on when he painted it either; the guesses spread across a couple of decades.

Putting fruit on its own, with no story around it, was apparently a fairly new thing to do — fruit usually turned up in the corner of a picture about something else. People also point out that the leaves are blotchy and one apple has a wormhole; nobody seems sure whether that was deliberate or just what happened to be on the table that day.

This one only really got talked about after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 — apparently investigators even brought Picasso in for questioning during the search.

They say Boccioni studied under Giacomo Balla in Rome around this time — another future Futurist — and you can see the dabbed, Divisionist brushwork they were both practicing before either of them started smashing forms apart for speed.

It's the doubting Thomas story — the apostle who said he wouldn't believe the resurrection until he'd put his hand in the wound himself. A rich Roman collector paid for it, apparently, and it later bounced through a royal collection and somehow came through the Second World War without a scratch.

Caravaggio painted the fruit with real bruises and worm holes, they say, instead of prettying it up like most painters did then — some think that basket's actually the point, not the boy.

According to Wikipedia, nobody's fully sure who this is — it's the only male portrait he's known to have painted, and historians still argue over the sitter's identity.

Apparently this is from before Boccioni signed onto Futurism in 1910 — a movement that made a point of rejecting quiet domestic scenes just like this one.

This is from years before Boccioni co-signed the Futurist manifesto and started painting industry as speed and noise instead of smoke drifting over a quiet field.

This was commissioned for a Naples charity that apparently still exists today, and instead of splitting the seven acts of mercy into separate scenes like usual, all seven got crammed into one dark room.

According to the myth this comes from, he fell for his own reflection and couldn't tear himself away — stared until he wasted away by the water. Apparently there's been debate for years over whether this one's actually by Caravaggio at all.