Northern Italian school; second half of the 17th century.

Northern Italian school; second half of the seventeenth century.
"Still life of hunting with cat".
Oil on canvas. Relined.
Presents faults.
Measurements: 101 x 81,5 cm.
The composition presents a set of hunting pieces, a slaughtered rabbit, birds of different species, arranged in a somewhat disorderly manner on a dark background, along with the unexpected presence of a cat lurking among the prey. The tension between the inert and the living, between what has been hunted and what is still moving in the scene, gives the work a particular dynamism within a genre usually associated with immobility.
The background, barely suggested and of ochre and earth tones, contributes to focus the attention on the volumes of the animals, treated with great attention to texture: the fur of the rabbit, the shiny plumage of the bird, or the brightness of the feline's eyes. This technical mastery reveals the ability of northern Italian Baroque painting to combine realism and drama, exploring the expressive possibilities of chiaroscuro in the representation of still lifes.
The hunting still life acquired in northern Italy a remarkable relevance throughout the 17th century, influenced both by the Flemish tradition and by the local Baroque sensibility. These works not only responded to the aristocratic taste for the evocation of hunting as a social activity and symbol of prestige, but also posed a reflection on the transience of life and the imminence of death, in tune with the moralizing current of the time.
In this Still Life of Hunting with a Cat, the contrast between the drama of the slaughtered bodies and the lively gaze of the feline introduces an unusual narrative element in the genre, revealing both the painter's inventiveness and the richness of the pictorial tradition of the Northern Italian school, capable of transforming an everyday subject into a scene charged with symbolic and aesthetic resonances.