With its lively attention to fauna and flora and sharply contrasting areas of light and shade, this painting exemplifies the originality of Porpora’s still lifes. The formal complexity lavished on the present work places it among the most ambitious examples of Porpora’s production. Not far from a coastline dotted with white sails, a wide array of species is assembled beside a freshwater stream. Gathered here are birds, including a heron, partridges and a pair of quails; frogs engaged in all manner of amphibian activity – one even caught eating a butterfly; and wild plants such as bindweed, thistles and poppies. All are depicted in a pictorial space that centres around an animated encounter between a tortoise and a hedgehog, who bites its hind foot and whose vociferous companion calls out from a nearby rock. As Riccardo Lattuada points out in his essay on the picture, the artist has here depicted a sample of wild nature in an image that borders between naturalistic treatise and the virtuosic assembly of elements posed and captured.¹ This impressive and well-preserved painting, whose surface retains the rich texture of Porpora’s brushwork, is datable between 1655 and his final years of activity before his death in 1673.

Trained in Naples in the workshop of Giacomo Recco (b. 1603; d. before 1653), a specialist still-life painter whose production has yet to be properly defined, Porpora is said less plausibly to have also been the pupil of Aniello Falcone (1607–1656), an artist famed for his battle scenes. Be that as it may, it is in Rome in the realm of still-life painting that Porpora’s career flourished and where, apart from occasional trips back to the city of his birth, he resided until his death. Documented in Rome from 1650, he encountered there northern European artists Otto Marseus van Schrieck (1619/20–1678) and Matthias Withoos (1627–1703), who as the leading innovators in the genre of forest floor (sottobosco) still lifes were to leave a lasting impact on his work. In 1656 he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca, and a decade later in 1666 he joined the congregation of the Virtuosi al Pantheon, a society founded in Rome in the sixteenth century, whose artist.mes mbers were painters, sculptors and architects, indicative of the prestige he had achieved.²

Amid growing interest in natural history, collects ors favoured compositions such as this one depicting facets of nature in the open air with wild creatures caught in close focus. In terms of subject and style, Porpora’s scenes stand out from contemporary Italian still-life painting. Unrivalled in its dimensions, this painting is comparable to two of the best examples of their kind in the artist’s entire corpus: a canvas today in the collects ion of the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the celebrated Forest floor still life with wild roses, quails, an owl, a stilt and frogs (fig. 1),³ which includes a close counterpart to the quail seen here at the lower right (likely drawn from the same cartoon); and another (one of a pair) in the Gallerie d'Italia, Naples, featuring a crab, tortoise and fungi, as well as frogs – a recurring motif also found here (fig. 2).⁴

¹ Dated 14 July 2022, available on request.
² For his biography see A. Tecce in La natura morta in Italia, F. Zeri and F. Porzio (eds), Milan 1989, vol. II, pp. 893–99; G.–U. Bocchi, Pittori di natura morta a Roma. Artisti italiani 1630–1750, Viadana 2005, pp. 337–55; D.M. Pagano in Ritorno al Barocco, da Caravaggio a Vanvitelli, Naples 2009, vol. I, pp. 370–78; on Van Schrieck and Withoos, see G.–U. Bocchi, Pittori di natura morta a Roma. Artisti stranieri 1630–1750, Viadana n.d. [2000], pp. 23–36, and pp. 49–65.
³ Inv. RF 1969-1; oil on canvas, 74 x 100 cm.; Zeri and Porzio (eds) 1989, vol. II, reproduced in colour p. 896, fig. 1076.
⁴ Oil on canvas, 37.5 x 66 cm.; Zeri and Porzio (eds) 1989, vol. II, reproduced in colour p. 895, fig. 1075.