Caravaggio’s known works from this period, besides…

Caravaggio’s known works from this period, besides Boy Peeling a Fruit, his earliest known painting, include a Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and the Young Sick Bacchus, supposedly a self-portrait done during convalescence from a serious illness that ended his employment with Cesari.

All three demonstrate the physical particularity—one aspect of his realism—for which Caravaggio is to become renowned: the fruit-basket-boy's produce has been analyzed by a professor of horticulture, who was able to identify individual cultivars right down to "... a large fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose (Glomerella cingulata)."