Basket of Fruit (c.1599) is a still life painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), which hangs in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Ambrosian Library), Milan.

Beneath it is a single bicolored apple, shown from a stem perspective with two insect entry holes, probably codling moth, one of which shows secondary rot at the edge; one blushed yellow pear with insect predations resembling damage by leaf roller (Archips argyospita); four figs, two white and two purple—the purple ones dead ripe and splitting along the sides, plus a large fig leaf with a prominent fungal scorch lesion resembling anthracnose (Glomerella cingulata); and a single unblemished quince with a leafy spur showing fungal spots.

[2] Scholars have had more than their usual level of disagreement in assigning a date to the painting: John T. Spike places it in 1596; Catherine Puglisi believes that 1601 is more probable; and practically every year in between has been advanced.

Puglisi's reasoning seem solid, (the basket in this painting seems identical with the one in the first of Caravaggio's two versions of Supper at Emmaus - even the quince seems to be the same piece of fruit), but no consensus has emerged.

But the single element that no doubt attracted its original owner, and still catches attention today, is the extraordinary quasi-photographic realism of the observation which underlies the illusionism.