This splendid painting, which came from the Buen Retiro Palace, Madrid (where it was cited in a 1794 inventory), was until recently attributed to Giovanni Battista Ruoppolo (1626-1693), based on the hypothesis proposed by Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez in 1967. Now, however, it represents one of the most important recent additions to the corpus of known works by the mysterious Master S.B., the still-unknown artist most likely active in Naples and Rome between 1633 and 1655, as suggested by the legible dates on a painting sold at Christie’s in Mallorca in May 1999, and on a canvas formerly at the Canelli Gallery, Milan.

The pseudonym Master S.B. was coined by Giuseppe De Vito in his 1990 essay Un diverso avvio per il primo tempo della natura morta a Napoli (A fresh start for the first phase of stilllife painting in Naples). His examination was aimed at reconstructing the activity of the major Neapolitan still-life painters in the first half of the seventeenth century, and to strike from the Luca Forte catalogue a canvas in the Lodi collection ascribed to him by Luigi Salerno in 1984.

In his study, De Vito noted the presence of the monogram SB on one of the two paintings in the Canelli Gallery, presented at the Florence Biennale of Antiques in 1985 as works by Forte.

De Vito’s theory found critical favour and separated the newly discovered anonymous artist from the work of Forte, noting their shared characteristics and points of divergence. Invaluable additions to the extremely small body of autograph works by the Master S.B. in the years since has contributed to an understanding of this painter -who in this writer’s opinion was likely to be Neapolitan, as evidenced by the foodstuffs he regularly chose to paint.

The well-preserved Prado canvas beautifully illustrates the imaginary setup of the majority of still-life paintings by Master S.B. Carefully arranged on descending levels of stone slabs, as if placed in slots, are a variety of foods, straw-covered flasks and terracotta pots. The artist displays a commanding skill in presenting a highly refined and naturalistic pictorial language, with clever use of a piercing light resulting in a Caravaggesque play of chiaroscuro in the foreground and half-tones in the background. Among the leitmotifs of the unmistakable iconographic repertoire of the Master S.B. are the straw-covered flask tied up with string, the salami cut open on the plate to the right (an almost identical feature was found on a painting in the Lechi collection, Brescia, recently attributed to the artist by the present author), and the wedge of cheese resting on the sheet of music, which sits precipitously over the edge of the main stone slab. It is worth noting that in autograph works by the Master S.B. the re-use of particular motifs is not repetitious, because time and again the artist deploys fresh compositional schemes and culinary combinations, always characterised by a surprising air of creativity and invention. In this particular example the element of novelty is provided by two large fowl: a turkey hanging from a nail and a duck placed centrally on the stone table.

The formal and stylistic elements that this painting shares with the canvas in the Lechi collection, as well as with three other newly attributed paintings in the Pinacoteca Mus’a in Sassari (also by the present author), in which we see the reappearance of the traditional Neapolitan pie, the straw-covered flask and the wedge of cheese on the sheet of music, suggests a date of execution at some time during the 1640s (Text drawn from Dotti, D.: Italian Masterpieces. From Spain´s Royal Court, Museo del Prado, 2014, p. 186).