Boy with a Basket of Fruit

Boy with a Basket of Fruit, early oil painting by Italian artist Caravaggio, created about 1593. At the time of the painting, Caravaggio was an apprentice in the workshop of Mannerist artist Cavaliere D’Arpino in Rome.

The model for the boy in the painting was Caravaggio’s friend, Sicilian painter Mario Minniti, when he was about 16 years old. The sensuality of the image is accentuated by the steep light, which picks out Minniti’s bare shoulder, face, and hand. The sultry, provocative gaze distract the viewer’s attention from the fruit overflowing from the large basket in the boy’s arms. Though Caravaggio was known for painting fruit with all its imperfections, in this painting the fruit is almost perfect. The collection of grapes, apples, apricots, and figs, so freshly picked that they are still attached to the leaves from their trees, are lusciously rendered in a way that makes them almost seem to have a scent. Caravaggio’s purpose in creating this painting has been described variously as a depiction of the tactile essence of nature, a portrayal of eroticism, a reference to the biblical Song of Solomon, or a demonstration that he was capable of more than the merely decorative work that Cavaliere D’Arpino assigned him to do.

Boy with a Basket of Fruit remained in the workshop of Cavaliere D’Arpino long after Caravaggio left his employment there. It was one of the works that Cardinal Scipione Borghese confiscated in 1607 for Pope Paul V, and it remains in the Borghese Gallery in Rome.