Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [77]
Many different musicians and composers claimed a hand in these changes. Cardinal del Monte’s friend Emilio de’ Cavalieri was prominent among them. Cavalieri was thoroughly disgusted when his rival, the singer and composer Giulio Caccini, took credit for inventing the stile rappresentativo. ‘Everyone knows I am the inventor of this style,’ Cavalieri angrily countered in a letter of 1600.18 Posterity has sided with Caccini in that particular argument, partly because of his especially close association with the circle of Vincenzo Galilei. But Cavalieri’s other big claim, to have written the very first opera, has been more widely accepted. The work in question, a musical drama in three acts entitled La Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo, was composed in 1600 – at the height of his friendship with Caravaggio’s cardinal, and just two years before his sudden death from an unknown illness.
Cardinal del Monte was, then, rather more than a mere amateur of music: through his various musical activities and associations he had assisted at the birth of momentous changes in both composition and performance. By supporting a pioneer like Cavalieri, by hosting events like Vittoria Archilei’s remarkable concert, by reordering the priorities of liturgical music at the papal court and by subtly altering the style of the Sistine Chapel Choir itself to favour the expressive qualities of the human voice brought out by the stile rappresantativo – by doing so much, del Monte had placed himself at the forefront of musical experimentation at the turn of the seventeenth century.
Del Monte was also friendly with the nobleman and banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, whose palace was directly opposite the Palazzo Madama. Giustiniani was a fellow musical enthusiast, who in 1628 would write A Discourse on Music describing the so-called musical camerino – a purpose-built private chamber, ‘nobly decorated with paintings made for the sole purpose’ of setting the right mood and tone for intimate musical performances. One of del Monte’s first acts on moving to the Palazzo Madama had been (in his own words) to ‘reserve a room for Harpsichords, Guitars, a Chitarrone and other instruments’.19 By the late 1620s such rooms were a familiar sight in the palaces of the Roman aristocracy. But in the early 1590s, when del Monte had created his own camerino at the Palazzo Madama, he had been setting a new trend. To judge by the inventory made after his death, it must have been a headily atmospheric space – a cross between a private concert chamber and a miniature museum on the theme of music. Del Monte’s camerino contained no fewer than thirty-seven musical instruments, not including the ‘chest where the viols are’.20 On its walls hung four pictures, all of which were listed, simply, as una musica, ‘a scene of music’. One of these was Caravaggio’s Musicians.
So why did the painter depart from all the known conventions of the so-called ‘concert picture’ and depict his musicians as an ensemble of the blatantly unready? Further clues lie in Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s letters, which show (among much else) that Cardinal del Monte was extremely interested in the technical aspects of singing and performing. One of the most promising singers in his household was a Spanish castrato named Pedro Montoya, to whom Cavalieri gave six singing lessons, some of which del Monte himself must have attended: ‘The Cardinal del Monte was amazed because he [Montoya] can already sing to the same standard as Onofrio [probably Onofrio Gualfreducci, a gifted castrato attached to the household of Cardinal Montalto] and if he does not cause trouble, within a month he will surpass Onofrio.’21
Caravaggio’s painting moodily evokes the milieu of del Monte’s household – a laboratory of musical experiment and innovation, where performers rehearsed under the tutelage of the cardinal and his friends, and where the expressive, classically inspired stile rappresantativo