The Galerie Canesso is primarily focused on artists born or active in Italy between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century. Its selection of works, mostly unpublished, ranges from genre painting to historical subjects, with special emphasis on portraits and still lifes. The Gallery’s institutional clients include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, the Musée du Louvre, the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The Galerie Canesso also caters to a passionate and demanding international private clientele. Initially located in Paris in Rue Rossini (in the Drouot district), the Gallery moved to a larger space in 2005, in Rue Laffitte (9th arrondissement). In 2021 Maurizio Canesso – a native of Lombardy – launched a new gallery in Via Borgonuovo 24, Milan.
The stylistic features and the rigorous description of the animal, worthy of an artist certainly versed in the naturalistic pictorial genre related to scientific documentation, make it possible to refer the work with certainty to the autograph catalog of Bartolomeo Bimbi, a leading figure of Florentine still-life painting in the late Baroque period. Bimbi started studying painting in Florence. In Rome, he was then a pupil of Mario de' Fiori and specialized in still life. His careful and guarded description of reality combined with his impeccable painting skills fostered demand for the artist's paintings: not only for the local nobility but also for members of the Medici grand ducal family, particularly Cosimo III, for whom he was engaged mainly as a scientific documentarian. In close contact with scholars and scientists, the artist worked for several decades on the execution of canvases, with an almost hyperrealist rigor, depicting flowers, fruit, vegetables, and animals.
The painting stands as a magnificent example of the Lombard figurative culture between 1620 and 1630. There is a strong relationship with the properly Milanese "archaic" still life, represented by the Silver Plate with Peaches (private collection) by Giovanni Ambrogio Figino (1553-1608), painted between 1591 and 1594. Compared with the Lombard tradition, the composition is here developed in a larger dimension, with an arrangement of several planes and a light background. The vine shoot with the crumpled leaves is then an obvious reference to Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit, in the collection of Cardinal Federico Borromeo as early as 1607. The lenticular precision with which the reflections of the window on the glass vase are rendered, like the many other realistic annotations that connote the painting, seems to show knowledge of Nordic painting and in particular of Francesco Codino’s compositions.
