The Lute Player (Caravaggio)
The Lute Player | |
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Italian: Suonatore di liuto | |
Artist | Caravaggio (controversial attribution) |
Year | c. 1596 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Dimensions | 100 cm × 126.5 cm (39 in × 49.8 in) |
Location | Wildenstein Collection |
The Lute Player is a composition by the
Background
Caravaggio's early biographer
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.)" [1]
The painting exists in three versions. All show a boy with soft facial features and thick brown hair, accompanying himself on the
The Hermitage and Badminton House versions show
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
All three versions demonstrate the innovative approach to light that Caravaggio adopted at this time. Caravaggio's method, as described by Caravaggio's contemporary
The Lute Player (Hermitage version) | |
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Artist | Caravaggio |
Year | c.1600 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Dimensions | 94 cm × 119 cm (37 in × 47 in) |
Location | Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg |
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 from 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 apparent mistakes in the depiction of the lute in the Wildenstein version, the secondary light source and the inconsistent perspectives of table and sitter, concluded that the painting is not by Caravaggio.[3]
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.
It was purchased in 1808 at the Paris auction by Russian emperor Alexander I through his personal art adviser Valily Rudanovsky. Purchasing was supported by Dominique Vivant Denon.
Badminton House version
The Badminton House painting came to light at auction in Sotheby's, New York (January 25, 2001, lot 179); the painting was sold attributed to the circle of Caravaggio, possibly by Carlo Magnone. Clovis Whitfield, an art-dealer based in London, has questioned the attribution and suggested the Badminton House painting may actually be by Caravaggio.[4] This conclusion was subsequently confirmed by several investigations and analyses.
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), 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
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; for example, 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. The fruits in the Luteplayer, however, are not of the same season as the flowers, suggesting a similar cross-seasonal approach as Brueghel and Bosschaert.
Apollo the Lute Player | |
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Artist | Caravaggio |
Year | c.1596 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Dimensions | 96 cm × 121 cm (38 in × 48 in) |
Location | Ex-Badminton House, Gloucestershire |
The flowers correspond with those illustrated by
It appears likely that the Lute Player was originally intended as a decoration for the
The studiolo had room also for another of Del Monte's pictures, the Shepherd
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 Lute Player 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 A 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.
See also
Footnotes
- ^ Giovanni Baglione, Le Vite de’ Pittori, scultori et archtietti, Roma, 1642, p. 136
- ^ Prof. Martin Kemp (Nature, Nov. 2002, p. 364).
- ^ D. Van Edwards “A Caravaggio re-discovered?” Lute News, n. 50, June 1999 pp. 5–7
- )
- ^ Clovis Whitfield “The Camerino of Cardinal del Monte” Paragone, LIX, n. 77, 2008, pp. 3–38
References
- V. Giustiniani, Discorsi sullearti e sui mestieri. ca. 1620 & ca. 1628 [1981], edited by A. Banti, Milan
- G. Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura, 1620 [1956], 2 vols. Edited by A. Marucchi, Rome p. 108
- G. B. Baglione, Le vite de’ pittori scultori et architetti, dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572; in fino a’ tempi di Papa Urbano Ottavo nel 1642. (Manuscript written c. 1625, cf. Marini 1987), Edited by V. Marini. Rome p. 136
- G. P. Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, Rome 1672
- C. C. Malvasia, Felsina pittrice: Vite de’ pittori Bolognesi, Bologna 1678, 2 vols.
- O. Sitwell, “The Red Folder. Parts I & II”, The Burlington Magazine, vol. LXXX, May 1942, pp. 85–90, 115–118
- R. Longhi, Il Caravaggio, Milan 1952
- L. Salerno, “The picture gallery of Vincenzo Giustiniani.”, The Burlington Magazine 102, pp. 21–27, 93–104, 135–148
- C. L. Frommel, “Caravaggios Fruhwerk und der Kardinal Francesco Maria del Monte”, Storia dell’arte 9–12, 1971
- W. Chandler Kirwin, “Addendum to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte’s Inventory: the Date of the sale of Various notable Paintings”, Storia dell’arte 9–12, 1971
- L. Spezzaferro, “Lacultura del cardinal Del Monte e il primo tempo del Caravaggio”, Storia dell’arte 9–12, 1971
- M. Lavin, Seventeenth Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art, New York
- A. Moir, Caravaggio and his Copyists, New York 1976, under appendix I, p. 85, no. 8g, illus. Fig. 20
- F. T. Camiz, “Due quadri musicali di scuola caravaggesca”, Musica e filologia, 1983 pp. 99–105
- F. T. Camiz and A. Ziino, “Caravaggio: Aspetti musicali e committenza” Studi Musicali 12, 1983, pp. 67–83
- M. Cinotti, Caravaggio. Tutte le opere, Bergamo 1983, pp. 447–450
- H. Hibbard, Caravaggio, New York 1983
- F. T. Camiz, in Cinque secoli di stampa musicale in Europa. Exhib.cat., Palazzo Venezia, Rome. Naples. 1985
- K. Wolfe, “Caravaggio: another Lute Player”, The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXVII, July 1985, p. 452 (footnote), illus. p. 450, fig. 28
- P. Giusti Maccari, Pietro Paolini, pittore lucchese, 1603–1681, Lucca 1987
- G. de Marchi, “Guiseppi Ghezzi mostre di quadri a San Salvatore in Lauro 1628–1725”, Miscellanea della soietà Romana di Storia Patria, vol. 27, 1987
- M. Marini, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ‘pictor praestantissimus’, 1987, p. 378
- F.Trinchieri Camiz, The Castrato Singer: From Informal to Formal Portraiture”, Artibus et Historiae, vol. 18, 1988, pp. 171–186
- F. Trinchieri Camiz, “La ‘Musica’ nei dipinti di Caravaggio.” Quaderni di Palazzo Venezia, no. 6, pp. 151–176
- B. Nicolson, Caravaggism in Europe, vol. I, 1989, p. 82
- D. Mahon, “The singing Lute Player by Caravaggio from the Barberini Collection, painted for Cardinal del Monte”, The Burlington Magazine, vol CXXXII, no. 1042, January 1990, pp. 7 (footnote 25), 13 (footnote 63), 20 (footnote 112), illus. p. 14, fig. 6
- K. Christiansen, “Some Observations on the relationship between Caravaggio’s two treatments of the Lute-Player”, The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXXXII, no.b1042, January 1990
- K. Christiansen, in “Caravaggio Rediscovered: The Lute Player”, Exh. Cat., Metropolitan Museum, New York 1990
- M. Calvesi, “La caraffa di fiori e I fiflessi di luce nella pittura del Caravaggio”, in Atti del Convegno Int. di Studi M.M. da Caravaggio 1995, pp. 227–247
- S. D. Squarzina, “Caravaggio e i Giustiniani”, in Atti del Convegno Int. di Studi M.M. da Caravaggio 1995 pp. 94–111
- C. L. Frommel, “Caravaggio, Minniti e il Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte”, in Caravaggio. La Vita e le Opere attraverso I documenti. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di studi. Rome 1996, pp. 18–41
- D. Van Edwards “A Caravaggio re-discovered?” Lute News, no. 50, June 1999 pp. 5–7
- L. Buaer & S. Colton, “Tracing in some works by Caravaggio”, The Burlington Magazine, vol. CXLII, no. 1168, July 2000, p. 426, footnote 18, illus. Fig. 23
- M. Kemp, ‘The cut-and-paste Carafe’, in Nature, Vol. 420, 28 Nov. 2002, p. 364
- M. Gregori, La Natura Morta Italiana. Da Caravaggio al Settecento, exh. cat., Munich & Florence 2003, pp. 138–139
- W. Bennett, “Picture sold for £75,00 is a Caravaggio worth millions” Daily Telegraph, July 14, 2004, p. 7
- J. Harten & Jean-Hubert Martin, Caravaggio. Originale und Kopien im Spiegel der Forschung, exh. cat. Düsseldorf 2006, cat. 33
- C. Whitfield, Caravaggio, exh. cat., New York, 2007, pp. 48–56 (ISBN 1-58821-157-6)
External links
- Discovery of the Wildenstein version
- [2] A cd devoted to the lute music during Caravaggio time, with an intabulation of the madrigals in Caravaggio paintings made by Joanmaria da Crema.
- [3] Link to the booklet of the cd containing a small essay.
- A Caravaggio Rediscovered, The Lute Player, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF)
- Painters of reality: the legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on this painting (see index)
- Media related to The Lute Player by Caravaggio at Wikimedia Commons