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The Lute Player (Caravaggio)
Encyclopedia
The Lute Player is a composition by the Italian
Baroque
master Caravaggio
. It exists in three versions, one in the Wildenstein Collection, another in the Hermitage Museum
, St. Petersburg and a third from Badminton House
, Gloucestershire, which came to light in 2007.
gives the following description of a piece done by the artist for his patron Cardinal Francesco Del Monte:
The painting exists in three versions. All show 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 Hermitage and Badminton House versions it is bare marble, with a violin on one side and a still life of flowers and fruit on the other. In the Wildenstein version the table is 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 came from Del Monte's personal collection.
The Hermitage and Badminton House versions show madrigal
s 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 Wildenstein version shows songs by a native Florentine (Francesco de 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 Franco-Flemish
composers over native Italians – only Layolle was a native Italian – 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 all versions, the finely rendered fruit and flowers in two versions 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.
The rather androgynous model 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
.
All three versions demonstrate the innovative approach to light that Caravaggio adopted at this time. Caravaggio's method, as described by Caravaggio's contemporary Giulio Mancini
, was to use "a strong light from above with a single window and the 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 itself seems to be the same as that 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 carafe is a "cut-and-paste" motif from another image, where the main light came from a window at more or less the same level as the carafe itself. Such a complex illustration of refracted light is unprecedented in the Cinquecento
, and must be the result of collaboration with scientists in Del Monte’s circle. These included Galileo Galilei
, but more notably Giovanni Battista della Porta, revered as the seer of scientific curiosity at the turn of the century, who was the guiding spirit behind the foundation in 1603 of the Accademia dei Lincei. His multi-volume De Refractione Optices (1593) was particularly concerned with optical matters, the second volume being devoted entirely to the incidence of light on water-filled and glass spheres. The circle of Della Porta was significant for Caravaggio later on in Naples, where the commission for the Seven Acts of Mercy seems to have emanated from Giovanni Batista Manso, Marchese di Villa, whose friend, the alchemist Colantonio Stigliola, was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.
The appearance of second originals is a feature of a new understanding of Caravaggio’s work, and indeed Vincenzo Giustiniani, whose experience was closely related to the artist’s career, describes in his Discorso sulla pittura the painter’s development as beginning with copying others’ work - ‘Proceeding further, he can also copy his own work, so that the replica may be as good, and even sometimes better, than the first’. The procedure for making a second version was, however, substantially different than the sometimes very arduous task of building a group from many separate observations of reality, of figures and objects; it is natural that the ‘second original’ is sometimes more fluent than the first. The anatomical anomalies in the Wildenstein and Badminton House paintings, like the slightly out of line eyes, or the hesitations in the profile of the hand, are resolved in the Hermitage picture. By contrast, the Hermitage version is more cursory in the drapery, less insistent in the detail, and it does not have the magnificent reflections in the carafe, which were specific to the alchemical context of the original. This is also the reason for the jealousy with which the group of pictures was regarded by Caravaggio’s patron Del Monte, and for the misunderstanding that the pursuit of natural philosophy incurred in the Rome of his day.
]
The Wildenstein version was sold by Del Monte's heirs to Cardinal Antonio Barberini
in 1628, when it was described as "Un giovane che sona di clevo" (without an attribution) and included with St Catherine and the Cardsharps (named specifically as by Caravaggio) and various other paintings. The painting is illuminated by a soft chiaroscuro
inspired by the Brescia
masters of the 16th century and characteristic of the early phase of Caravaggio's development. The catalogue to the 1990 exhibition held to mark the identification of the Wildenstein Lute Player - which was already known but thought to be a copy by another hand - commented on the markedly different lighting used for this version, claiming that it "marks a significant step toward the more dramatically lit, highly focused style of Caravaggio's maturity" - i.e., towards the heightened contrast between shadows and light (tenebrism
) that would mark paintings such as The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
. Nevertheless, critic Jason Kaufman felt that the rendition of the boy in the Wildenstein version was aesthetically inferior to the Hermitage, "...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, " and David Van Edwards, noting how the 14-peg lute in the Wildenstein version is a most unusual layout for an Italian lute at this time, concluded that the painting is not by Caravaggio.
The Hermitage version is from the collection of the artist's other important patron of the period, Del Monte's friend and neighbour, Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani
.
The Badminton House
painting came to light at auction in Sotheby's
, New York (January 25, 2001, lot 179). Originally covered in a thick yellow varnish, it corresponds in all details with the description made by Baglione of the work he saw at Cardinal Del Monte’s palace. The flowers are scattered with dewdrops as Baglione remarks, and the carafe of water reflects the window and other features of the room. These elements, and the considerable number of pentimenti (incisions made in the paint with the brush-handle, a mark of Caravaggio's working methods), set the Badminton House painting apart from the Hermitage version. It is slightly larger than the Hermitage work, whose original edge cuts the flowers on the left and the scroll of the violin, and painted with denser brushwork.
This painting would seem to be the one described in the 1627 inventory of Del Monte’s collection. It was not the painting described in 1628 by the heirs as ‘Un giovane che sona di clevo’ (without an attribution) which was sold together with Caravaggio’s 'St Catherine and the 'Cardsharps
(named specifically as by Caravaggio) and various other paintings to Cardinal Antonio Barberini
, which has come down to us in the work in the Wildenstein
collection, at present on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
. But the features of the face, with its slightly out-of-line eye and wide cheek, make it clear that this was the source of the other versions, rather than the Hermitage painting, in which Caravaggio himself introduced modifications to the profile and lined up the eyes.
]
The flowerpiece is of major importance for the still-life tradition, not only in Italy, but also in the Netherlands, and there is a certain link to earlier Flemish painting. But it is interesting as Dr Sam Segal has pointed out (written communication) that this is a real selection of flowers, such as could be assembled in the spring, while many of the Flemish flower painters, from Jan Brueghel
to Ambrosius Bosschaert
and Van der Ast, often waited to study separate specimens in various seasons of the year but include them all in a fictive assembly. Del Monte was much involved, among other interests, in botanical pursuits, both in the study of plants and their use in medicinal products, and he had around him other friends who shared these interests. Fabio Colonna was the author of a work in 1592 that has the first botanically accurate illustrations of plants, and Federico Cesi
, the young son of the Duke of Acquasparta, had a botanical garden attached to his palazzo off the Via dei Coronari. Both were interested in the essences that could be drawn from plants (Fabio Colonna was an epileptic and took valerian as a remedy); they were also joined in the 1590s by Johann Faber
from Bamberg who was a celebrated botanist, later physician to Paul V Borghese. All were indebted to the pharmacist Enrico Corvino, (Hendrick de Raeff) from Delft, who also arrived in Rome in the early 1590s, and whose grand premises ‘All’ Aquila Imperiale’ are still visible at Monte Giordano in Rome, off the Via dei Coronari. The fruits in the Luteplayer, however, are not of the same season as the flowers, and another interesting feature is that they appear to have been originally placed in a bowl or basket with a base, of which the shadow survives on the corner of the partbook and the circumference around the fruit itself.
The flowers correspond with those illustrated by Giovanni Battista della Porta in his Magia Naturale (Naples, 1589) as ones corresponding to vision, from the marigold that looks like the Sun, the yellow cornflower that looks like the eye, to another flower that resembles the eyebright that was since the Middle Ages an ingredient in eye remedies. This would go some way to explaining the nature of the choice of the flowers, which are dominated by the irises at the top, and Iris was not only the messenger of the gods, but in the optical frame stood for the rainbow and the spectrum of colours that the various flowers represent. Once again, Della Porta’s De refractione optices has an entire book devoted to ‘De Iride et colore’, an attempt to arrive at an understanding of the rainbow. But the naturalism of the flowers, including the seedpods of the iris and the shrivelled florets, shows that Caravaggio was observing these from actual specimens, and not improving on what Nature might have arrived at had circumstances been different. The tacit expression of the theory of segnatura, the correspondence of certain forms from the natural world with those in man, is something that links the thinking behind the painting with Paracelsian belief. Del Monte’s interest in this is manifest in the group of portraits that hung in his alchemical Casino, which are of the same seven luminaries who are illustrated in the titlepage of Oswald Croll’s Basilica Chymica (Frankfurt, 1609). We know that the Casino on the Pincio was the centre in Rome of the practice of iatrochymia or chemical medicine, although this kind of natural philosophy was increasing frowned on and may well have played a part in the damnation memoriae that Del Monte was subjected to. But Federico Cesi and his Accademia dei Lincei
were also dedicated followers of what they perceived as Paracelsian disciplines.
It appears likely that the Luteplayer was originally intended as a decoration for the studiolo on the first floor of the Casino on the Pincio that Del Monte had acquired in 1596, and where Guercino would later paint his fresco of Aurora for the Ludovisi. On the ground floor Del Monte did his alchemical work and chemistry; above, on the ceiling of the studiolo, Caravaggio painted the gods Neptune, Jupiter and Pluto, representing the Elements. Apollo would have struck the right chord in representing the harmony of the universe, in a place opposite the single window. Already the strength of his painting style was in painting classical subjects from life around him, like the Bacchus in the painting in the Uffizi, their features were sometimes disguised by their contemporary appearance. Since Giordano Bruno
had written that it was appropriate to represent Apollo
, ever-youthful, playing the lute, as opposed to his more conventional lyre, this may have been Del Monte’s intention in this painting, and the rays of sunlight that are such a feature of the glass sphere have this meaning. Apollo is very much in place in a room devoted to the elements, as is implied in the ceiling painting, for the Stanza degli Elementi that Vasari did in Palazzo Vecchio has Apollo with the Chariot of the Sun in its middle, and Del Monte had this subject as the centrepiece of the ceiling in his new studiolo in Palazzo Avogadro, painted by Andrea Sacchi
. Indeed one of the most copied images in Giulio Romano’s decoration of the Palazzo del Te
is the ceiling with that perhaps Caravaggio may have known from a drawing.
The studiolo had room also for another of Del Monte’s pictures, the Shepherd Corydon
. This work, now in the Capitoline Museum, has long been misconstrued as St. John the Baptist, but apart from the exhibitionist subject of the young boy, the ram (instead of a lamb) is a contradiction for that subject. Instead the work is an emblematic subject: the ram represents the first sign of the Zodiac, Aries, at the period of the spring equinox and the energy of that season. In the combination of themes, the harmony of the spheres is represented figuratively by Apollo the Luteplayer, where the spring equinox and the spring flowers are balanced by the fruits of autumn on the table - from the autumn equinox - under the sign of Libra, when the forces of nature are once again in equilibrium. It is easier to see the effeminate beauty of the shepherd as corresponding to Del Monte’s personal aesthetic taste, than as the work that Ciriaco Mattei
commissioned shortly afterwards for his first-born son, named indeed Giovanni Battista, a painting that is to be sought in one of the many paintings of St John the Baptist that Caravaggio executed. There was such a picture, painted for the Mattei family and later also bought by Cardinal Pio from the Del Monte collection, an oblong composition with St John playing with a lamb, and with a reed cross on his shoulder, that was eventually sold to Gavin Hamilton in 1777.
The idea of "correspondences" that informed so much of contemporary natural philosophy, means that the globe of the carafe with its reflections, like a crystal ball, would have been seen as a parallel with the celestial globe on the ceiling with the Elements above. This feature, described in the painting of the Luteplayer that Baglione saw presumably in situ with Cardinal Del Monte, is absent from the Hermitage version. Elements of the composition of the Apollo Luteplayer are repeated not only in the Hermitage work (with several counterpoint variations), but also in the glass carafe in the lower part of the two paintings A Boy bitten by a Lizard, most especially in the version in the National Gallery, London. There the central rose and white jasmine is quite close to these elements in the present work, while in the Longhi Foundation picture the rose is a white one. The lower daisy in the present work has been repositioned, and in fact a prominent pentiment exists 3 cm above, and that is the position it has in the Hermitage painting of the Luteplayer. It could well be that the original flowerpiece that we know Del Monte owned of Caravaggio’s, which he seems to have bought even before he met him, probably through the local picture dealer Maestro Valentino, could have been the continuing source of these variations. It was a painting described as a carafe of flowers, two palmi high, which was bought at the 1628 sale of the Del Monte collection in a lot that included the Musicians, but it has not been heard of since. It is interesting that he would devote such care to a painting of flowers, as he did also to the Basket of Fruit in the Ambrosiana, and that he was not averse to doing this, as is illustrated by the fact that he introduced the carafe of water with the same reflections into the canvases of the Boy bitten by a lizard, without regard to the position of the figure in front of the light sources. Since the artist spent, according to Bellori, four or five years in Rome doing repetitious devotional images, and copies of portrait heads ‘un grosso l’uno’, it was natural for him to repeat his own inventions when he arrived at this sensational new technique of copying reality, from a virtual image, instead of other people’s compositions. The parabolic mirror, probably the same one that Della Porta had had constructed in Venice in 1580, which had produced some sensational effects and led to the development of the camera obscura, was probably no larger than an eye-glass, but it made it possible to make a mosaic of naturalistic images that was extremely compelling; the technique also explains the shallow focus of Caravaggio’s compositions.
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
Baroque
Baroque
The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...
master Caravaggio
Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque...
. It exists in three versions, one in the Wildenstein Collection, another in the Hermitage Museum
Hermitage Museum
The State Hermitage is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest and oldest museums of the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been opened to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display,...
, St. Petersburg and a third from Badminton House
Badminton House
Badminton House is a large country house in Gloucestershire, England, and has been the principal seat of the Dukes of Beaufort since the late 17th century, when the family moved from Raglan Castle, which had been ruined in the English Civil War...
, Gloucestershire, which came to light in 2007.
Background
Caravaggio's early biographer Giovanni BaglioneGiovanni Baglione
Giovanni Baglione was an Italian Late Mannerist and Early Baroque painter and art historian. He is best remembered for his acrimonious involvement with the artist Caravaggio and his writings concerning the other Roman artists of his time.-Early life:A pupil of Francesco Morelli, he worked mainly...
gives the following description of a piece done by the artist for his patron Cardinal Francesco Del Monte:
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 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.)"
The painting exists in three versions. All show a boy with soft facial features and thick brown hair, accompanying himself on the lute
Lute
Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....
as he sings a madrigal
Madrigal (music)
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six....
about love. As in the Uffizi Bacchus
Bacchus (Caravaggio)
Bacchus is a painting by Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio . It is held in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence....
, the artist places a table-top in front of the figure. In the Hermitage and Badminton House versions it is bare marble, with a violin on one side and a still life of flowers and fruit on the other. In the Wildenstein version the table is covered with a carpet and extended forwards to hold a tenor recorder, while the still life is replaced by a spinetta
Spinetta
Spinetta may refer to*Luis Alberto Spinetta , Argentine singer and songwriter*Spinetta, Italy, a town in Piedmont*Spinetta, a type of Italian virginals*Jean-Cyril Spinetta Spinetta may refer to*Luis Alberto Spinetta (b. 1950), Argentine singer and songwriter*Spinetta, Italy, a town in...
(a small keyboard instrument) and a caged songbird. The musical instruments are valuable and probably came from Del Monte's personal collection.
Madrigal (music)
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six....
s by Jacques Arcadelt
Jacques Arcadelt
Jacques Arcadelt was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in both Italy and France, and principally known as a composer of secular vocal music...
(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 Wildenstein version shows songs by a native Florentine (Francesco de Layolle
Francesco de Layolle
Francesco de Layolle , was an Italian composer and organist of the Renaissance...
) on a text by Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
: 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
Jacquet de Berchem was a Franco-Flemish composer of the Renaissance, active in Italy. He was famous in mid-16th-century Italy for his madrigals, approximately 200 of which were printed in Venice, some in multiple printings due to their considerable popularity...
(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 Franco-Flemish
Franco-Flemish School
In music, the Franco-Flemish School or more precisely the Netherlandish School refers, somewhat imprecisely, to the style of polyphonic vocal music composition in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, and to the composers who wrote it...
composers over native Italians – only Layolle was a native Italian – 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 all versions, the finely rendered fruit and flowers in two versions 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.
The rather androgynous model could be Pedro Montoya, a castrato
Castrato
A castrato is a man with a singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto voice produced either by castration of the singer before puberty or one who, because of an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity.Castration before puberty prevents a boy's...
known to have been a member of the Del Monte household and a singer at the Sistine Chapel
Sistine Chapel
Sistine Chapel is the best-known chapel in the Apostolic Palace, the official residence of the Pope in Vatican City. It is famous for its architecture and its decoration that was frescoed throughout by Renaissance artists including Michelangelo, Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Pinturicchio...
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
Peter Robb
Peter Robb is an Australian author.Robb spent his formative years in Australia and New Zealand, and between 1978 and 1992 he spent most of his time in Naples and southern Italy, interspersed with sojourns in Brazil. At the end of 1992 he returned to Sydney.His first book, Midnight in Sicily, was...
has identified him as Caravaggio's companion Mario Minniti
Mario Minniti
Mario Minniti was an Italian artist active in Sicily after 1606.Born in Syracuse, Sicily, he arrived in Rome in 1593, where he became the friend, collaborator and model of the key Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio...
, the model for several other paintings from this period including Cardsharps
Cardsharps (Caravaggio)
The Cardsharps is a painting by the Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.-History:The work represents an important milestone for Caravaggio...
and one of the two versions of The Fortune Teller
The Fortune Teller (Caravaggio)
The Fortune Teller is a painting by Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It exists in two versions, both by Caravaggio, the first from 1594 , the second from 1595...
.
All three versions demonstrate the innovative approach to light that Caravaggio adopted at this time. Caravaggio's method, as described by Caravaggio's contemporary Giulio Mancini
Giulio Mancini
Giulio Mancini was a noted physician, art collector and writer on a range of subjects.A native of Siena, he came to Rome in 1592 and quickly made a brilliant medical career, becoming personal physician to pope Urban VIII in 1623....
, was to use "a strong light from above with a single window and the 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 itself seems to be the same as that in the Contarelli Chapel
Contarelli Chapel
The Contarelli Chapel, within the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, is famous for housing three paintings on the theme of Saint Matthew the Evangelist by the Baroque master Caravaggio....
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 carafe is a "cut-and-paste" motif from another image, where the main light came from a window at more or less the same level as the carafe itself. Such a complex illustration of refracted light is unprecedented in the Cinquecento
Cinquecento
Cinquecento is a term used to describe the Italian Renaissance of the 16th century, including the current styles of art, music, literature, and architecture.-Art:...
, and must be the result of collaboration with scientists in Del Monte’s circle. These included Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei , was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism...
, but more notably Giovanni Battista della Porta, revered as the seer of scientific curiosity at the turn of the century, who was the guiding spirit behind the foundation in 1603 of the Accademia dei Lincei. His multi-volume De Refractione Optices (1593) was particularly concerned with optical matters, the second volume being devoted entirely to the incidence of light on water-filled and glass spheres. The circle of Della Porta was significant for Caravaggio later on in Naples, where the commission for the Seven Acts of Mercy seems to have emanated from Giovanni Batista Manso, Marchese di Villa, whose friend, the alchemist Colantonio Stigliola, was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei.
The appearance of second originals is a feature of a new understanding of Caravaggio’s work, and indeed Vincenzo Giustiniani, whose experience was closely related to the artist’s career, describes in his Discorso sulla pittura the painter’s development as beginning with copying others’ work - ‘Proceeding further, he can also copy his own work, so that the replica may be as good, and even sometimes better, than the first’. The procedure for making a second version was, however, substantially different than the sometimes very arduous task of building a group from many separate observations of reality, of figures and objects; it is natural that the ‘second original’ is sometimes more fluent than the first. The anatomical anomalies in the Wildenstein and Badminton House paintings, like the slightly out of line eyes, or the hesitations in the profile of the hand, are resolved in the Hermitage picture. By contrast, the Hermitage version is more cursory in the drapery, less insistent in the detail, and it does not have the magnificent reflections in the carafe, which were specific to the alchemical context of the original. This is also the reason for the jealousy with which the group of pictures was regarded by Caravaggio’s patron Del Monte, and for the misunderstanding that the pursuit of natural philosophy incurred in the Rome of his day.
The Wildenstein version was sold by Del Monte's heirs to Cardinal Antonio Barberini
Antonio Barberini
Antonio Barberini was an Italian Catholic cardinal, Archbishop of Reims, military leader, patron of the arts and a prominent member of the House of Barberini. As one of the cardinal-nephews of Pope Urban VIII and a supporter of France, he played a significant role at a number of the papal...
in 1628, when it was described as "Un giovane che sona di clevo" (without an attribution) and included with St Catherine and the Cardsharps (named specifically as by Caravaggio) and various other paintings. The painting is illuminated by a soft chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro in art is "an Italian term which literally means 'light-dark'. In paintings the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted"....
inspired by the Brescia
Brescia
Brescia is a city and comune in the region of Lombardy in northern Italy. It is situated at the foot of the Alps, between the Mella and the Naviglio, with a population of around 197,000. It is the second largest city in Lombardy, after the capital, Milan...
masters of the 16th century and characteristic of the early phase of Caravaggio's development. The catalogue to the 1990 exhibition held to mark the identification of the Wildenstein Lute Player - which was already known but thought to be a copy by another hand - commented on the markedly different lighting used for this version, claiming that it "marks a significant step toward the more dramatically lit, highly focused style of Caravaggio's maturity" - i.e., towards the heightened contrast between shadows and light (tenebrism
Tenebrism
Tenebrism, from the Italian tenebroso , is a style of painting using very pronounced chiaroscuro, where there are violent contrasts of light and dark, and darkness becomes a dominating feature of the image...
) that would mark paintings such as The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew (Caravaggio)
The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew is a painting by the Italian master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It is located in the Contarelli Chapel of the church of the French congregation San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, where it hangs opposite The Calling of Saint Matthew and beside the altarpiece The...
. Nevertheless, critic Jason Kaufman felt that the rendition of the boy in the Wildenstein version was aesthetically inferior to the Hermitage, "...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, " and David Van Edwards, noting how the 14-peg lute in the Wildenstein version is a most unusual layout for an Italian lute at this time, concluded that the painting is not by Caravaggio.
The Hermitage version is from the collection of the artist's other important patron of the period, Del Monte's friend and neighbour, Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani
Giustiniani
Giustiniani is the name of a prominent Italian family which originally belonged to Venice, but also established itself subsequently in Genoa, and at various times had representatives in Naples, Corsica and in the islands of the Archipelago, where they had been the last Genoese rulers of the Aegean...
.
The Badminton House
Badminton House
Badminton House is a large country house in Gloucestershire, England, and has been the principal seat of the Dukes of Beaufort since the late 17th century, when the family moved from Raglan Castle, which had been ruined in the English Civil War...
painting came to light at auction in Sotheby's
Sotheby's
Sotheby's is the world's fourth oldest auction house in continuous operation.-History:The oldest auction house in operation is the Stockholms Auktionsverk founded in 1674, the second oldest is Göteborgs Auktionsverk founded in 1681 and third oldest being founded in 1731, all Swedish...
, New York (January 25, 2001, lot 179). Originally covered in a thick yellow varnish, it corresponds in all details with the description made by Baglione of the work he saw at Cardinal Del Monte’s palace. The flowers are scattered with dewdrops as Baglione remarks, and the carafe of water reflects the window and other features of the room. These elements, and the considerable number of pentimenti (incisions made in the paint with the brush-handle, a mark of Caravaggio's working methods), set the Badminton House painting apart from the Hermitage version. It is slightly larger than the Hermitage work, whose original edge cuts the flowers on the left and the scroll of the violin, and painted with denser brushwork.
This painting would seem to be the one described in the 1627 inventory of Del Monte’s collection. It was not the painting described in 1628 by the heirs as ‘Un giovane che sona di clevo’ (without an attribution) which was sold together with Caravaggio’s 'St Catherine and the 'Cardsharps
Cardsharps (Caravaggio)
The Cardsharps is a painting by the Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.-History:The work represents an important milestone for Caravaggio...
(named specifically as by Caravaggio) and various other paintings to Cardinal Antonio Barberini
Antonio Barberini
Antonio Barberini was an Italian Catholic cardinal, Archbishop of Reims, military leader, patron of the arts and a prominent member of the House of Barberini. As one of the cardinal-nephews of Pope Urban VIII and a supporter of France, he played a significant role at a number of the papal...
, which has come down to us in the work in the Wildenstein
Wildenstein
Wildenstein is a commune in the Haut-Rhin department in Alsace in north-eastern France.-References:*...
collection, at present on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
. But the features of the face, with its slightly out-of-line eye and wide cheek, make it clear that this was the source of the other versions, rather than the Hermitage painting, in which Caravaggio himself introduced modifications to the profile and lined up the eyes.
The flowerpiece is of major importance for the still-life tradition, not only in Italy, but also in the Netherlands, and there is a certain link to earlier Flemish painting. But it is interesting as Dr Sam Segal has pointed out (written communication) that this is a real selection of flowers, such as could be assembled in the spring, while many of the Flemish flower painters, from Jan Brueghel
Jan Brueghel the Elder
Jan Brueghel the Elder was a Flemish painter, son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and father of Jan Brueghel the Younger. Nicknamed "Velvet" Brueghel, "Flower" Brueghel, and "Paradise" Brueghel, of which the latter two were derived from his floral still lifes which were his favored subjects, while the...
to Ambrosius Bosschaert
Ambrosius Bosschaert
Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder was a still life painter of the Dutch Golden Age.-Biography:He was born in Antwerp, where he started his career, but he spent most of it in Middelburg , where he moved with his family because of the threat of religious persecution...
and Van der Ast, often waited to study separate specimens in various seasons of the year but include them all in a fictive assembly. Del Monte was much involved, among other interests, in botanical pursuits, both in the study of plants and their use in medicinal products, and he had around him other friends who shared these interests. Fabio Colonna was the author of a work in 1592 that has the first botanically accurate illustrations of plants, and Federico Cesi
Federico Cesi
Federico Angelo Cesi was an Italian scientist, naturalist, and founder of the Accademia dei Lincei. On his father's death in 1630, he became briefly lord of Acquasparta.- Biography :...
, the young son of the Duke of Acquasparta, had a botanical garden attached to his palazzo off the Via dei Coronari. Both were interested in the essences that could be drawn from plants (Fabio Colonna was an epileptic and took valerian as a remedy); they were also joined in the 1590s by Johann Faber
Giovanni Faber
Giovanni Faber was a German papal doctor, botanist and art collector, originally from Bamberg in Bavaria, who lived in Rome from 1598. He was curator of the Vatican botanical garden, a member and the secretary of the Accademia dei Lincei. He acted throughout his career as a political broker...
from Bamberg who was a celebrated botanist, later physician to Paul V Borghese. All were indebted to the pharmacist Enrico Corvino, (Hendrick de Raeff) from Delft, who also arrived in Rome in the early 1590s, and whose grand premises ‘All’ Aquila Imperiale’ are still visible at Monte Giordano in Rome, off the Via dei Coronari. The fruits in the Luteplayer, however, are not of the same season as the flowers, and another interesting feature is that they appear to have been originally placed in a bowl or basket with a base, of which the shadow survives on the corner of the partbook and the circumference around the fruit itself.
The flowers correspond with those illustrated by Giovanni Battista della Porta in his Magia Naturale (Naples, 1589) as ones corresponding to vision, from the marigold that looks like the Sun, the yellow cornflower that looks like the eye, to another flower that resembles the eyebright that was since the Middle Ages an ingredient in eye remedies. This would go some way to explaining the nature of the choice of the flowers, which are dominated by the irises at the top, and Iris was not only the messenger of the gods, but in the optical frame stood for the rainbow and the spectrum of colours that the various flowers represent. Once again, Della Porta’s De refractione optices has an entire book devoted to ‘De Iride et colore’, an attempt to arrive at an understanding of the rainbow. But the naturalism of the flowers, including the seedpods of the iris and the shrivelled florets, shows that Caravaggio was observing these from actual specimens, and not improving on what Nature might have arrived at had circumstances been different. The tacit expression of the theory of segnatura, the correspondence of certain forms from the natural world with those in man, is something that links the thinking behind the painting with Paracelsian belief. Del Monte’s interest in this is manifest in the group of portraits that hung in his alchemical Casino, which are of the same seven luminaries who are illustrated in the titlepage of Oswald Croll’s Basilica Chymica (Frankfurt, 1609). We know that the Casino on the Pincio was the centre in Rome of the practice of iatrochymia or chemical medicine, although this kind of natural philosophy was increasing frowned on and may well have played a part in the damnation memoriae that Del Monte was subjected to. But Federico Cesi and his Accademia dei Lincei
Accademia dei Lincei
The Accademia dei Lincei, , is an Italian science academy, located at the Palazzo Corsini on the Via della Lungara in Rome, Italy....
were also dedicated followers of what they perceived as Paracelsian disciplines.
It appears likely that the Luteplayer was originally intended as a decoration for the studiolo on the first floor of the Casino on the Pincio that Del Monte had acquired in 1596, and where Guercino would later paint his fresco of Aurora for the Ludovisi. On the ground floor Del Monte did his alchemical work and chemistry; above, on the ceiling of the studiolo, Caravaggio painted the gods Neptune, Jupiter and Pluto, representing the Elements. Apollo would have struck the right chord in representing the harmony of the universe, in a place opposite the single window. Already the strength of his painting style was in painting classical subjects from life around him, like the Bacchus in the painting in the Uffizi, their features were sometimes disguised by their contemporary appearance. Since Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
had written that it was appropriate to represent Apollo
Apollo
Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...
, ever-youthful, playing the lute, as opposed to his more conventional lyre, this may have been Del Monte’s intention in this painting, and the rays of sunlight that are such a feature of the glass sphere have this meaning. Apollo is very much in place in a room devoted to the elements, as is implied in the ceiling painting, for the Stanza degli Elementi that Vasari did in Palazzo Vecchio has Apollo with the Chariot of the Sun in its middle, and Del Monte had this subject as the centrepiece of the ceiling in his new studiolo in Palazzo Avogadro, painted by Andrea Sacchi
Andrea Sacchi
Andrea Sacchi was an Italian painter of High Baroque Classicism, active in Rome. A generation of artists who shared his style of art include the painters Nicolas Poussin and Giovanni Battista Passeri, the sculptors Alessandro Algardi and François Duquesnoy, and the contemporary biographer Giovanni...
. Indeed one of the most copied images in Giulio Romano’s decoration of the Palazzo del Te
Palazzo del Te
Palazzo del Te or Palazzo Te is a palace in the suburbs of Mantua, Italy. It is a fine example of the mannerist style of architecture, the acknowledged masterpiece of Giulio Romano...
is the ceiling with that perhaps Caravaggio may have known from a drawing.
The studiolo had room also for another of Del Monte’s pictures, the Shepherd Corydon
Corydon (character)
Corydon is a stock name for a shepherd in ancient Greek pastoral poems and fables, such as the one in Idyll 4 of the Syracusan poet Theocritus . The name was also used by the Latin poets Siculus and, more significantly, Virgil...
. This work, now in the Capitoline Museum, has long been misconstrued as St. John the Baptist, but apart from the exhibitionist subject of the young boy, the ram (instead of a lamb) is a contradiction for that subject. Instead the work is an emblematic subject: the ram represents the first sign of the Zodiac, Aries, at the period of the spring equinox and the energy of that season. In the combination of themes, the harmony of the spheres is represented figuratively by Apollo the Luteplayer, where the spring equinox and the spring flowers are balanced by the fruits of autumn on the table - from the autumn equinox - under the sign of Libra, when the forces of nature are once again in equilibrium. It is easier to see the effeminate beauty of the shepherd as corresponding to Del Monte’s personal aesthetic taste, than as the work that Ciriaco Mattei
Ciriaco Mattei
Ciriaco Mattei was an Italian nobleman of Rome and of the House of Mattei and one of the most prolific art collectors of his time.-Family:...
commissioned shortly afterwards for his first-born son, named indeed Giovanni Battista, a painting that is to be sought in one of the many paintings of St John the Baptist that Caravaggio executed. There was such a picture, painted for the Mattei family and later also bought by Cardinal Pio from the Del Monte collection, an oblong composition with St John playing with a lamb, and with a reed cross on his shoulder, that was eventually sold to Gavin Hamilton in 1777.
External links
- Discovery of the Wildenstein version
- http://www.tesorimusicali.com/eng/caravaggio.html A cd devoted to the lute music during Caravaggio time, with an intabulation of the madrigals in Caravaggio paintings made by Joanmaria da Crema.
- http://www.tesorimusicali.com/eng/img_tesori_roma/pdf/Caravaggio.pdf Link to the booklet of the cd containing a small essay.