Evaristo Baschenis was an Italian Baroque

Baroque

The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...

 painter of the 17th century, active mainly around his native city of Bergamo

Bergamo

Bergamo is a town and comune in Lombardy, Italy, about 40 km northeast of Milan. The comune is home to over 120,000 inhabitants. It is served by the Orio al Serio Airport, which also serves the Province of Bergamo, and to a lesser extent the metropolitan area of Milan...

. He was born to a family of artists. He is best known for still lifes

Still life

A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural or man-made...

, most commonly of musical instruments. This could explain his friendship with a family with notable violin makers from Cremona

Cremona

Cremona is a city and comune in northern Italy, situated in Lombardy, on the left bank of the Po River in the middle of the Pianura Padana . It is the capital of the province of Cremona and the seat of the local City and Province governments...

. Still-life depictiona were uncommon as a thematic among Italian painters prior to the 17th century. Baschenis, along with the more eccentric 16th century painter Milanese Arcimboldo, represents provincial outputs with idiosyncratic tendencies that appear to appeal to the discernment of forms and shapes rather than grand manner themes of religious or mythologic events. For Arcimboldo, the artifice is everything; for Baschenis, the items, man-made musical instruments, have a purpose and a beauty even in their silent geometry. One source for his photographic style of still life could be Caravaggio

Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque...

's early painting of peaches, or alternatively, Dutch paintings. The most faithful imitator of his style is a younger contemporary Bergamese, Bartolomeo Bettera. Baschenis is a contemporary of the Bergamese portrait artist, Carlo Ceresa

Carlo Ceresa

Carlo Ceresa was an Italian painter of the Baroque period active mainly around Bergamo.-Biography:...

, and appears to have been influential for the Modenese artist Cristoforo Munari

Cristoforo Munari

Cristoforo Munari was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque specializing in still life paintings. He was also known as Cristofano Monari....

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Sources

• Dictionnaire Bouillet
• Web Gallery Art biography