Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [74]
‘IF MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE’
Painted around the end of 1595, The Musicians is one of the artist’s most puzzlingly unorthodox creations. Four young men wearing classical drapery have been crowded into an airless interior. The central figure meets the spectator’s gaze with a languorous, distracted look, absent-mindedly fingering the strings of the lute that he cradles in the crook of his right arm. Behind him, a dark-haired boy holding a barely visible cornetto – a hybrid instrument of the Renaissance, with a trumpet-like mouthpiece and the fingerholes of a recorder – looks up in a way that suggests the troupe has been disturbed while rehearsing.
A third young man, pressed so close to the foreground that he might almost be on the point of falling out of the picture, studies a sheaf of music. He is presumably the singer, and therefore the star attraction. But he looks as though he is still learning his song and his back is conspicuously turned to the viewer. He wears his costume carelessly, as if he knows that nothing much is going to happen for a little while yet. The folds of white cloth in which he is draped have fallen off his shoulder and become ruched up under the purple silk bow meant to hold them in place, leaving him almost naked from the waist up. The somewhat ragged group is completed by a curly-haired boy, sitting to the lutenist’s right, who has a pair of Cupid’s wings strapped to his back and a quiver full of arrows hanging at his right shoulder. But firing darts of love is plainly the last thing on his mind. He looks down and helps himself to some grapes, as much out of boredom as hunger.
The picture is not in good condition, having suffered considerable damage during the two hundred years that it spent in obscurity after disappearing into a series of unknown collections in the early eighteenth century. The violin and the page of music in the foreground have been largely reconstructed by modern restorers; the lute has lost its strings. But the work’s fundamental originality and oddity remain undimmed, despite considerable areas of paint loss.
The Musicians was clearly one of Caravaggio’s better known early pictures, because both Bellori and Baglione mention it specifically. Baglione says that ‘For Cardinal del Monte he painted a Concert of Youths from nature, very well.’ Bellori describes it in the same terms: ‘the Concert of Youths portrayed from life in half figures’. The young man with the cornetto, at the back, resembles Caravaggio himself, while the lutenist may be his friend Mario Minniti. But the composition as a whole radiates an air of contrivance. It resembles a frieze or bas-relief, rendered in paint. The four boys are so similar in aspect and demeanour that they might be clones of each other. The suspicion lingers that they were all based on the same figure, depicted from different angles and then collaged together to form a single composition. Perhaps when Baglione and Bellori talked of Caravaggio portraying from life and painting from nature they were not talking about the artist’s processes – the use of models, and so on – but trying to capture the distinctive mood of his picture. For all its artifice, it does have a certain clumsy lifelikeness. And that is precisely what made it so different from most earlier paintings of similar subjects.
By the late sixteenth century there was a long-established tradition of so-called ‘concert’ pictures. The genre had originated in Venice, and in its early form it is exemplified by the so-called Le Concert Champêtre of around 1510, now in the Louvre. Once thought to have been painted by Giorgione but now generally attributed to Titian, it is a tender and lyrical fantasy. A young man in fine clothes strums at his lute while conversing with a shepherd. Two naked women are present alongside them, one filling a glass jug with water, the other breaking off from playing on her recorder to listen to the two men’s conversation. The action takes place outside, in a golden, idealized landscape based loosely on that of the Veneto itself. The