The Lute Player (Caravaggio)
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The Lute Player is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It exists in two versions, both authenticated as original, one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the other in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. The New York version (on loan from a private collection) has been traced to the collection of Caravaggio's patron Cardinal Francesco Del Monte - Caravaggio had been living in the Cardinal's Palazzo Madama as a member of his household since 1595 - while the Saint Petersberg version is from the collection of the artist's other important patron of the period, Del Monte's friend and neighbour, Vincenzo Giustiniani. The Giustiniani version appears to be the earlier of the two, based on x-ray examination.
The two pictures and figures are of almost the same dimensions, which suggests that Caravaggio traced a base on oil-paper, completing only the Hermitage version from a live model. It shows a boy with soft facial features and thick brown hair, accompanying himself on the lute as he sings a madrigal about love. As in the Uffizi Bacchus, the artist places a table-top in front of the figure. In the St. Petersburg version it is bare marble, with a violin on one side and a still life of flowers and fruit on the other. The second, Del Monte, version shows the table covered with a carpet and extended forwards to hold a tenor recorder, while the still life is replaced by a spinetta (a small keyboard instrument) and a caged songbird. The musical instruments are valuable and probably come from Del Monte's personal collection. The first version is illuminated by a soft chiaroscuro, inspired by the Brescia masters of the 16th century, characteristic of the early phase of Caravaggio's development. The catalogue to the 1990 exhibition held to mark the identification of the New York Lute Player - which was already known but thought to be a copy by another hand - commented on the markedly different lighting used for this second version, claiming that it "marks a significant step toward the more dramatically lit, highly focused style of Caravaggio's maturity" - i.e., towards the hightened contrast between shadows and light (tenebrism) that would mark paintings such as The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew.
The two versions show musical scores by French or Franco-Flemish composers. The St Petersburg (Giustiniani) version reproduces madrigals by Jacques Arcadelt (1515–1568), and the visible text reads in part: "Vous savez que je vous aime et vous adore...Je fus vôtre." ("You know I love you and adore you...I was yours"). The New York (Del Monte) version shows songs by Francesco Layolle on a text by Petrarch: Laisse le voile ('Let go the veil') and Pourquoi ne vous donnez-vous pas? ('Why do you not give yourself?') by Giachetto Berchem (Jacquet de Berchem). The flowers and damaged fruit, and the cracked body of the lute, suggest the theme of transience: love, like all things, is fleeting and mortal. The choice of French composers over native Italians no doubt reflects the cultural (and political) affiliations of the pro-French Del Monte-Giustiniani circle.
The still life elements are of an extremely high standard in both versions, the finely rendered fruit and flowers of one equalled by the textures of spinetta and flute in the other, and the artist has reproduced the initial notes of the madrigals so exactly that one can recognize the Roman printer, Valerio Dorica. Nevertheless, critic Jason Kaufman felt that the rendition of the boy in the Del Monte (the second) version was aesthetically inferior to the Giustiniani, "...the face...hard and the expression less sweet than bovine...[t]he features...more sharply defined, the eyebrows severely geometrized, and the complexion pink, rather than fleshtone."
It has been suggested that the rather androgynous model (who has been taken by some observers to be a woman) could be Pedro Montoya, a castrato known to have been a member of the Del Monte household and a singer at the Sistine Chapel at about this time - castrati were highly prized and the Cardinal was a patron of music as well as of painting. More recently Caravaggio biographer Peter Robb has identified him as Caravaggio's companion Mario Minniti, the model for several other paintings from this period including Cardsharps and one of the two versions of The Fortune Teller, both dating from before the artist joined Del Monte's household. There is certainly a strong resemblance beteen this boy and the one who modelled for Bacchus and other works done for the Cardinal.
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“E dipinse [per il Cardinale Del Monte]… anche un giovane, che sonava il Lauto, che vivo, e vero il tutto parea con una caraffa di fiori piena d’acqua, che dentro il reflesso d’ua fenestra eccelentemente si scorgeva con altri ripercotimenti di quella camera dentro l’acqua, e sopra quei fiori eravi una viva rugiada con ogni esquisita diligenza finta. E questo (disse) che fu il piu bel pezzo, che facesse mai” (He also painted [for the Cardinal Del Monte] a young man, playing the Lute, who seemed altogether alive and real with a carafe of flowers full of water, in which you could see perfectly the reflection of a window and other reflections of that room inside the water, and on those flowers there was a lively dew depicted with every exquisite care. And this (he said) was the best piece that he ever painted)
Giovanni Baglione, Le Vite de’ Pittori, scultori et archtietti, Roma, 1642, p.136
Another painting came to light at auction in Sotheby's, New York, January 25, 2001, lot 179. This painting corresponds in all details with the description made by Baglione of the work he saw at Cardinal Del Monte’s, and of which he reported Caravaggio’s pride - “the most beautiful work he ever painted”. The details he described of dewdrops on the flowers, and the reflections in the carafe of water - absent from the Hermitage version of the same subject - are essential ingredients of the subject, and together with its extensive pentiments and incisions show that this is the prime version. Dispersed after the Del Monte sale in 1627, it remained out of sight probably outside of Rome, before being acquired by the 3rd Duke of Beaufort in 1726 and taken to Badminton House. Since its rediscovery in 2001 it has been recognized as by Caravaggio by Sir Denis Mahon, Mina Gregori, Maurizio Marini, Martin Kemp & Claudio Strinati.
It is the prime example of Caravaggio’s concentrated lighting from above, and it is appropriate that the underlying theme is one associated with light and vision. This ‘lume unito’ is described by Mancini as ‘a strong light from above with a single window and walls painted black, so that having the lights bright and the shadows dark, it gives depth to the painting, but with a method that is not natural nor done or thought of by any other century or older painters like Raphael, Titian, Correggio and others’. The room seems to be the same, with the light source on the left as opposed to the right, as in the Contarelli Chapel Calling of Saint Matthew, and the beam of light across the rear wall has an upper limit that would appear to be the shutter of the window above the table (in the Calling). The fascination with refraction, illustrated in the carafe, was the subject of much attention in the circle of the admired natural philosopher Giovanni Battista della Porta from Naples, author of the famous Magiae Naturalis (2nd ed. 1589) and De refractione optices published in (1593). The flowers, all of the early spring, make a another link with Della Porta, for they are those illustrated in the Magiae Naturalis as ones corresponding to vision. The marigold has the radiating shape of the sun, the yellow cornflower resembles the eye itself, and the iris stands not only for the goddess who was the messenger of the Gods, but also for the rainbow, the eye and the spectrum of colours. Underlying this is the idea of segnatura - the correspondence of forms in the natural world with those in man himself - which links this work with the ideas of Paracelsus, reminding us that Del Monte himself was an alchemist. The musician can be seen as Apollo, as much the god of harmony and music as of light and the Sun, and the seasons he presides over between the flowers of spring and the fruit of autumn represent the moments of equinox when the world is in balance.
The work described by Baglione was done for Del Monte among the first things that Caravaggio undertook for the Cardinal, and it coincided with the studiolo in the Palazzetto (now the Casino Ludovisi) where the artist did the ceiling painting in oil with the Gods, Pluto, Jupiter and Neptune around the globe of the sun in conjunction with the moon. These three gods represent the elements of Earth, Air and Water. The absence of Fire in this setting is to be explained by the presence, in the same space, of Apollo as the god of the Sun and light, and the numerous reciprocal references will be discussed in a forthcoming study. It is easy to see Apollo’s relevance to music, but it is not so familiar to think of music as a branch of mathematics, and so of direct relevance to the natural philosophy that Del Monte and his colleagues pursued. Classical example was keenly followed, and it was Boethius (c 480-524) who established the appellation quadrivium to describe the four mathematical disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. The subject of the Luteplayer is more to do with the harmony of the the elements than any reference to an actual musician or even music, although the madrigals have been identified as the work of Archadelt.
The technique is a kind of mosaic of observed detail, betraying underlying juxtaposition of positions with characteristic distortions because of the changes of focus. There are numerous pentiments, especially in the flowers, (for example the central daisy is visible in a different position), but also around the hand and fingers of the lutanist, the shirt sleeve, the ear (the infrared image shows a different position), and the outline of the shoulder shows Caravaggio’s habit of painting up to the edge rather than making a linear definition. The powerful sense of volume is created by the close attention to the values of light and shade from the single source of light in the upper left of the picture, and the values of light are due to elements like the white shirt being painted an a darker ground, so the folds display that foundation colour. Further detailed shadow is added, as for example in the tip of the nose, from a meticulous observation of the dark area formed, with a black gel glaze. At the same time, the flowerpiece itself is an element that has a different lighting, both on the flowers and the carafe itself, which seems to have been transposed from another setting. Apart from the similarity of the glass to those in the two known versions of the Boy bitten by a Lizard, the ‘variation on a theme’ of the flowers in the Hermitage version of the subject suggests that the original (and missing) ‘Carafe of Flowers’ that originally belonged to Del Monte, last mentioned in 1628 among the pictures sold from the collection, provided some of the invention; the scale of this missing work, 2 palmi or about 45 cms high, is about that of this feature in the Luteplayer. The sensational realism of the flowers, and the accurate recording of the appearance of the glass (as seen from a single viewpoint), are testimony to the idea recorded from Caravaggio’s lips by Vincenzo Giustiniani, that it was just as much effort to make a good painting of flowers, as of figures. The word that Giustiniani uses ‘ritrarre’ is deceptive, because of its association with portraiture; instead this is a reference to the faithful copying of detail ‘il saper ritrarre fiori, ed altre cose minute’ a technique that demanded, in his words, extraordinary patience. Cardinal Borromeo’s assistant remembered in 1619 that ‘...Caravaggio was such a diligent imitator of Nature, what other painters merely promise, he actually accomplished’.
This optical process relied on a two-dimensional reflected image that was very small in area, and had limited focal depth (a characteristic that is also evident from the shallow depth of the composition as a whole). It seems as though some details like the music itself were painted with the canvas upsidedown (from the character of the ductus of the brushwork of the musical lines). Likewise, the complicated capital letter B of Bassus on the part book has been observed in a real image, while the rest of the letters are copied from a printed page and have a different perspective.
The relationship between this work and the Hermitage version is fascinating, because it shows clearly the process of correction that Caravaggio adopted, a kind of editing of the errors that result from the optical observation process. The out-of-line eyes are straightened, the cheek slightly reduced, the fruit laid on the marble without the hint of the basket or bowl. The process of making a second original was different, and hard to contain - the edge of the canvas bisects important details like the head of the violin and the flowers of the still-life. The music is transferred directly without inverting the canvas, and the anomaly of perspective in the Bassus is reduced. It seems an optical transfer, in the sense that the outlines do coincide area by area, but the replication is not based on a cartoon or a similar mechanical method.