Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [75]
Alongside this idealizing tradition of musical picture, there was another and more prosaic sort of painting that showed singers and musicians in mid performance. Sometimes such works were enlivened by touches of bawdy humour. In Callisto Piazza’s Concert of circa 1525, a group of performers is crowded into a shallow space, together with a single, male member of their audience. The most prominent of the musicians, a woman playing a lute, wears a low-cut bodice and has a coquettish expression on her face. Her admirer, who has evidently been enjoying the performance in more ways than one, wheels to face the viewer of the painting with a knowing look in his eye. The artist has furnished him with a phallic prop in the form of a sheathed dagger, fastened at his hip, which points towards the girl at an angle carefully calculated to indicate just what he has in mind.
Caravaggio’s Musicians cannot easily be squeezed into the existing tradition of sixteenth-century musical paintings. It is certainly not a pastoral in the Venetian mode. Nor does it depict an actual performance, showing instead the preparations for one. There was no precedent for this. The presence of the boy with wings has prompted speculation that the picture might have been intended as an allegory of Music and Love. But that offers no real explanation for Caravaggio’s most obvious departure from convention. Why should he have chosen to depict this rather ramshackle scene of musicians rehearsing?
Solutions to the enigma may be found in the unusually broad and experimental musical tastes of his patron. Cardinal del Monte was actively involved in music at the papal court throughout the 1590s. Clement VIII put him in charge of a far-reaching reform of liturgical music, and he served as Protector of the Sistine Choir.15 Music was also an essential part of life at his various residences. In one of his letters back to Florence, Emilio de’ Cavalieri gives a richly evocative description of an impromptu concert that took place one day in 1602 at del Monte’s country house at Porta Pinciana. The admired soprano Vittoria Archilei was the surprise guest at an afternoon party, together with her husband and accompanist. Also present were cardinals Paravicino and Acquaviva, who had ostensibly come to see a vineyard in the grounds of del Monte’s estate. Archilei was prevailed on to sing. She stunned her small audience with the naked emotion of her performance – so much so that even Cavalieri, who had helped to train her famously expressive voice, was surprised. He reported that because she was ‘in a wild mood and singing in a vaulted room, I have never heard her in more beautiful voice. She gave so much satisfaction that Acquaviva said to me: “I for shame did not weep.” Paravicino said he never thought such refinement was possible. They are both musicians.’16
Such expressions of dumbfounded pleasure go beyond the courtly formulas of polite approval. Archilei had clearly given an unusually affecting performance, but that is not the only explanation for the strength of response she received. Its surprise lay essentially in the fact that she sang on her own, in public, to the simplest of instrumental accompaniments. By the early 1600s, medieval polyphony – many voices singing different lines of music simultaneously – had been the overwhelmingly dominant mode of music for centuries. Monody, in which a single melodic line is carried by a solitary singer, was still relatively uncommon in concert performance. The solo voice accompanied by the solo instrument was unfamiliar, arresting. As the rapturous response to Archilei’s singing shows, its potential was