It is believed to predate more complex works from the same period (also featuring Minniti as a model) such as The Fortune Teller and the Cardsharps (both 1594), the latter of which brought Caravaggio to the attention of his first important patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte.

[2] As he writes, "the result is an emphasis on the tangibility of objects in the delicately veiled space, which confirms the visual illusion and at the same time the authenticity of the episode, which is no longer a creation of the painter's imagination but a transcription of his experience".

According to Gregori, "the artwork's subject is exactly that which appears to the viewer's eye: a young seller, with a basket, full of fruit mixed with still fresh leaves, the truth of which is exalted by the marvelous brilliance of the colors".

[4] According to Bologna, Caravaggio takes all of nature—flowers, fruits, figures—as "the object of his brush," performing a wholly advanced operation: that of direct observation, the same that new scientists like Galileo "were conducting on the manifestations and structure of the natural world".

[7] Still life in Rome, at the time of Caravaggio's activity, grafted onto Northern European and Lombard experiences; the first significant Roman painting of the kind was Vegetables, Fruits and Flowers, attributed to the so-called Master of Hartford.

A different use of horticultural motifs, however, has been achieved by Giovanni Ambrogio Figino in his Metal Plate with Peaches and Vine Leaves, datable to the late 1500s; similarly, the fruit presented on the painting is used to construct an allegory, but of a non-erotic quality.

Rather, Figino explores theme of Vanitas, where next to vine leaves that are yellowing, the peaches seem to remain eternally ripe, maintaining a consistency that defies time and competes with the harder, indestructible material of the metal tray.

The erotic motifs are not foreign to the Boy with a Basket either: the young man has a languid and feminine expression, his mouth half-open, red lips, his face tilted to the left, flushed cheeks, the shoulder bare and exposed.

[13] But here too, the sign of time, of transience, is equally present: the fruits offered as gifts (and in this sense the young man himself) are transient, destined to end, like the yellowing leaf that bends down outside the basket.