Angelo Maria Rossi, known as Il pittore di Carlo Torre or Lo pseudo-Fardella (documented between 1665 and 1701) Still Life with Fruit and Morels Oil on canvas, 66 x 53 cm Published in G. Cirillo, G. Godi, Le Nature Morte del «Pittore di Carlo Torre» (Pseudo Fardella) nella Lombardia del secondo Seicento, in Pittura e Arti Decorative, Parma, 1996, TAV 75 This elegant fruit composition should be included within the interesting body of still lifes by the painter Angelo Maria Rossi, a still life artist active in Lombardy in the second half of the 17th century. For a long time he was known as Pseudo-Fardella and was first identified in 1996 as the "Painter of Carlo Torre": this name comes from a dedication to the well-known scholar author of the Portrait of Milan discovered on one of his paintings. Giuseppe Cirillo's discovery of a monogram ('A.M.R.') on another canvas made it possible to identify the artist as Angelo Maria Rossi, documented in Lombardy approximately around the mid-17th century (see G. Cirillo, 'Angelo Maria Rossi alias Pittore di Carlo Torre', in 'Parma per l'Arte, 2003, pp. 77-80). It is evident that the high quality of his art significantly influenced contemporary and subsequent still life production, by virtue of the refined twilight settings, the luminosity that ignites, accentuating the colors of deep tones, which seem to compete with the well-known Caravaggesque examples. Between 1665 and 1701 this artist painted paintings that are reported in numerous inventories of Milanese and Turin collections. The calm and delicate compositional elegance seem to constitute the distinctive traits of the master's manner: such suggestions appear in fact to be found in all the works attributed to him. The style of our painting, published by G. Cirillo and G. Godi in the catalog Le nature morte del 'Pittore di Carlo Torre' (Pseudo-Fardella) nella Lombardia del secondo Seicento (Parma 1996, plate 75) finds many similarities with a large contingent of canvases also present in the volume (plates 5, 20, 21 and 35) and in Angelo Maria Rossi alias 'Pittore di Carlo Torre' (in Parma per l'Arte, vol. IX, Issue 1-2, 2003, pp. 77-79), in which similar subjects, drafts and treatment of perspective planes can be found. Particularly close to the painting in question is a work that passed through a Finarte auction and currently in a Milanese collection presenting a Basket of Apricots and plate with wild strawberries and a Still Life of Fruit from the Ferrari collection in Modena. Our canvas, which stands out for its technical-executive skill and the lenticular rendering of the various types of fruit, is characterized by a marked luminism and by a chiaroscuro that echoes the tests of Caravaggio and the members of his circle in the context of still life. The extreme and harsh realism in the rendering of the individual elements that take part in the composition also looks to Caravaggesque models, with particular reference to the so-called fiscella of the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan.