"He was poor in invention and composition, which is why his pictures do not have much in the way of foreground and background and everything is strung out virtually on a line, one after the other on the same plane ..."
Biography
This disparaging quote from a 1742 biography of Italian artists derides Luca Forte for his style of still-life painting. Modern scholars credit Forte as the first painter to compose still-lifes with landscape backgrounds, replacing the plain, dark grounds typical of the early 1600s in Italy.
