Caravaggio - Michelangelo Merisi - Oil A number of paintings have been attributed from time to time to the Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), but are no longer generally accepted as genuine. Immensely popular in his own lifetime, he fell into neglect almost immediately upon his death, with the result that now, four hundred years later, it's often extremely difficult to distinguish works by the master from copies or from original creations by his most gifted followers. According to tradition Caravaggio painted flowers and fruit when he first came to Rome. Individual pieces of this Still Life with Flowers and Fruit are brilliantly painted and call to mind the mastery of such subjects that Caravaggio showed in early works such as Boy with a Basket of Fruit, as well as his reported comment that it took as much trouble to paint a flower as it did to paint a man. Nevertheless, the overall composition is awkward and it is not accepted as genuine. The painting is ascribed to an artist known as the Painter of the Wadsworth Atheneum Still-Life, after a work in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.