Our knowledge of Pietro Navarra comes only from a mention by Leone Pascoli, who includes him among the pupils of Franz Werner von Tamm (Hamburg 1658–Vienna 1724), who worked in Rome between 1685 and 1695 (L. Pascoli: Vite de’Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti moderni, II, Rome 1736, p. 378). The only paintings known to be by Navarra are two small canvases of dead animals which are in the collection of the Galleria Pallavicini in Rome, but there is no doubt that he must be identified as the painter who signed his works with the initials P. N., many of whose paintings have survived (in the Vatican Pinacoteca and the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, etc.). Up to the present this painter had not been connected with Pietro Navarra (see the catalogue to the exhibition La Natura Morta Italiana, Naples 1964, p. 71), but there is no doubt that the group of paintings signed with the initials P. N. represents the period when Navarra was under the influence of Christian Berentz and Giovanni Paolo Spadino.
Lit.: La natura morta in Italia, Vol. II, Milano 1989 (Text: Ludovica Trezzani).