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By Root 1489 0

was taken to new extremes. The space into which Caravaggio’s four boys have been crammed evokes the cluttered intimacy of the camerino itself. Dressed in their makeshift all’antica costumes, they are preparing to take part in a piece of musical theatre of just the kind favoured and supported by del Monte. A single voice will be accompanied by only two instruments, in emulation of that imagined golden age when the songs of Orpheus were heard. The theme of the piece is the intoxicating effect of music on those who are in love. The song studied by the boy with his back to the viewer is no longer decipherable, but it probably expressed some variant of the sentiments voiced by Shakespeare’s Count Orsino in Twelfth Night: ‘If music be the food of love, play on.’

By painting a rehearsal rather than a performance, Caravaggio went behind the scenes of the traditional concert picture. He showed the long hours of preparation and the artifice that made possible the final, polished performance. In doing so, he paid subtle tribute to the active role del Monte himself played in the musical culture of his time. Once hung in the room that the cardinal had consecrated to music, the picture conjures up a scene in which his own, animating presence is forever awaited. It is the picture of a process that depends on the energies of the patron himself. Only when the cardinal arrives can the final preparations be completed, and the concert begin.

THE LUTE PLAYER AND THE BASKET OF FRUIT

The second of Caravaggio’s musical paintings, The Lute Player, was commissioned by del Monte’s friend Vincenzo Giustiniani and probably painted around 1596. An effeminate young man plucks at the strings of a lute while gazing out at the viewer with an expression of such soulfulness that his eyes seem to be brimming with tears. Two musical part-books and a violin lie on the table before him beside some scattered fruit and a glass carafe full of flowers. The scene is lit by a bright, diagonal shaft of light that casts strong shadows.

The wistful singer has sometimes been taken for a girl. Bellori, for example, described the figure as ‘a woman in a blouse playing a lute with the sheet music in front of her’.22 But the 1638 inventory of Giustiniani’s collection unambiguously listed the work as ‘a half-length figure of a youth who plays the lute, with diverse flowers and fruits and music books … from the hand of Michelangelo da Caravaggio’.23 There would seem little reason to doubt its accuracy. The singer’s face is androgynous but the shirt, open almost to the waist, reveals no sign of a cleavage.

It is possible that Caravaggio’s Lute Player is an idealized portrait of del Monte’s promising but potentially troublesome castrato, Pedro Montoya. Montoya joined the Sistine Chapel Choir in 1592 and left in 1600, so he was almost certainly in del Monte’s household when the picture was painted. The soft, hairless skin and slightly swollen face of Caravaggio’s lutenist are consistent with the hormonal side-effects of castration. There may be a glancing allusion to the pitch of the boy’s voice in the part-books that lie on the table before him. The five-staved sheets of an open part-book reveal a number of madrigals. Beneath lies another part-book, prominently marked ‘Bassus’. It is closed, perhaps the painter’s way of indicating that this particular singer never would be capable of hitting the low notes.

Castrati were much in favour in Rome in the years around 1600. Their rise coincided with that of the professional female singer, and both reflected the new taste for piercingly emotional music arranged for the single voice. In his Discourse on Music, Vincenzo Giustiniani noted that ‘the famous Vittoria Archilei’ had established ‘the true method of singing of women’, adding that it applied equally well to sopranos singing in falsetto and the castrati of the Sistine Chapel choir.24 The castrato voice was valued for its sweetness and sensuality, as well as for its clarity of enunciation.25

Castrati were encouraged to learn musical instruments so that they might accompany