GIUSEPPE RECCO (Naples, 1634 - Alicante, 1695) Flora and boy in the garden of a villa with fountain, floral and fruit compositions Signed and dated 1686 lower right Oil on canvas, 153X162 cm Bibliography: N. Spinosa, Pittura del Seicento a Napoli da Mattia Preti a Luca Giordano. Natura in posa, Naples 2011, pp. 288-289, no. 334 The date 1686 proves that the painting is one of the artist's last Neapolitan creations before his move to Spain at the invitation of Charles II of Habsburg. The scene presents a sumptuous presence of floral elements and fruit, testifying to the full adherence to the modern Baroque emphasis undertaken by the artist from the seventh decade onwards. This new spatiality offers the opportunity to create more complex and airy narrative contexts in which to insert large-scale figurative pieces. In this regard, the artist's collaborations with Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena are well known, but in this case, as Nicola Spinosa suggests, the painter seems to have made use of the hand of Angelo Solimena, so that the work bears witness to a new and very important piece of evidence to our knowledge of the frequent but still nebulous relations between figure and still life painters during the late 17th century. It is, however, significant that this openness to new scenes precedes a production of figurative works made in Spain around 1695, such as the Death of St. Joseph and the Assumption of Mary, belonging to the Arenaza collection in Malaga, but coming from the Apostolic Nunciature where, according to Pérez Sánchez (1965, p. 426), other religiously themed paintings of his are preserved. However, this Baroque opening is certainly due to Giordano's influence, even if the artist seems to reject the softening of tonalism, the gilding of the surfaces, the playfulness of the chromatic vibration of the whole, so distant from the heroic models of so many illustrious predecessors (Causa), but we see him nonetheless yielding to the conspicuous innovations, as if aware of his career and the changing times, he required a further step forward and the need to measure himself against himself and modernity. Reference bibliography: N. Spinosa, La natura morta a Napoli, in La natura morta in Italia, edited by Federico Zeri and Francesco Porzio, Milan 1989, vol. II, pp. 852-963 R. Middione, Giuseppe Recco, in La natura morta a Napoli, in La natura morta in Italia, edited by Federico Zeri and Francesco Porzio, Milan 1989, vol. II, pp. 903-911 D. M. Pagano, in Ritorno al Barocco, da Caravaggio a Vanvitelli, exhibition catalogue edited by Nicola Spinosa, Naples 2009, pp. 398-407, with previous bibliography