Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [79]
The singer in the Lute Player is anything but raucous. He opens his mouth ‘not more than is necessary to converse with friends’, as a contemporary singing manual advised those performing chamber music of this kind.26 The picture is in such good condition that the sheet music open on the table is still legible: four madrigals by the Flemish composer Jacques Arcadelt (c. 1505–68): ‘Chi potra dir’, ‘Se la dura durezza’, ‘Voi sapete’ and ‘Vostra fui’.27 Their texts are a compendium of the conventions of the courtly love tradition, shot through with plaintive simile and metaphor – beauty that blinds like the sun, ardent fires of passion, cold unyielding marble of a proud woman’s heart. ‘Chi potra dir’ is representative:
Who can express what sweetness I taste
In gazing on that proud light of my lady
That shames the celestial sphere?
Not I, who am unable to find within myself
The proper words,
So that, looking on her beautiful face and mien,
So as not to see less well
I would deign to lose together both life and light.28
The amorous mood of the song is conveyed by the singer’s passionate, voluptuous expression. The beam of light that rakes the room, illuminating the boy’s face with its flash of radiance, may be Caravaggio’s own metaphor for ‘that proud light of my lady’. The melancholy poetry of a song has been translated into the texture of painting.
The prominent still life may have been intended to enhance the bittersweet mood. Faded flowers traditionally symbolized the transience of life and love. Baglione singled them out for particular praise, focusing on ‘the carafe of flowers filled with water, in which we see clearly the reflection of a window and other objects in the room, while on the petals of the flowers there are dewdrops imitated most exquisitely’. The flowers have indeed been depicted with meticulous care, each one sharply individuated. But they pose a puzzle because neither they, nor the fruit, can possibly have been painted by Caravaggio himself. The handling is very different in this part of the painting, much harder in the outlines, with a pernicketiness in the finish that is quite alien to his style. The vase of flowers strikes an especially discordant note. The enamelled blooms are piled high in a merely decorative profusion. They have none of the weight, none of the mute and insistent singularity, of things seen and painted by Caravaggio. It is conceivable that the fruit and flowers were added by the Netherlandish painter Jan Bruegel (1568–1625), who was in Rome in the mid 1590s. The second son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan Bruegel was a favourite of Carlo Borromeo’s cousin Cardinal Federico Borromeo, a friend of del Monte who lived close to the Palazzo Madama from 1597 to 1601. With Borromeo’s encouragement, Bruegel would later become a specialist painter of flowers in vases. Given that he was certainly in Caravaggio’s circle and in Rome at the right time, he is a plausible candidate for authorship of The Lute Player’s mysterious bouquet.
Jan Bruegel’s patron, Federico Borromeo, was one of the first collectors of still life painting. It was for him that Caravaggio painted his only pure example of the genre, the Basket of Fruit, now in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. Created some time in the later 1590s, it is among the very first autonomous still life pictures, a muffled explosion of morbidity and metaphysical aspiration, and another testament to Caravaggio’s extreme originality.
The Basket of Fruit was elaborated from the earlier Boy with a Basket of Fruit. What it shows, essentially, is