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Less anecdotal than it appears, the score reveals itself as the real essence of the totality, its semantic quintessence, its emblem, its height. Cardinal Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII Aldobrandini and commissioner of this masterpiece, eminent music lover, would certainly have appreciated the pertinent meaning of this musical choice. In this poetic work which recalls Giorgione (was Caravaggio in Venice?), did the painter wish to express the reconciliation which music brings? The fetal position of the Mother, forming one body with the Baby, Joseph’s feet together, everything indicates calm, sweetness, internalisation. The chromatic chord of warm, autumnal tones also illustrates plastically the sensation of sleep and the presence of the musical angel. The painter proposes a novel poetry in which all the arts are joined. The painter’s ambition seeks to re-establish the status of his art which has the same capacity as poetry and music (superior, however, according to the Platonic ideal) to express, to move, to convince.
Several teachings become clear. The scores are fundamental to the reading of the paintings. Their intelligibility on the surface of the canvasses makes of them more than simple realistic accessories. Their quotation reveals, on the contrary, by the choice of melody, a personal intention, a voluntary choice bringing its precise contribution to the overall meaning. Do these enigmas to be deciphered, these semantic links, keys to a plurality of meaning of the work within a work, signify that painting also has a meaning outside the visual field of the image, beyond, in spite of or in support of its declared subject?
Caravaggio the realist is also sibylline. His intelligence, his culture, prevented him from working without design. In this, while including the wishes of his commissioners, he affirms his capacity to transmit the magic of the real. This modernity of conception functions on various levels. His subjects become incarnate. Their presence stands out in the painting. With a naturalistic strength and a brutal chiaroscuro, highly personal. And yet in an inverse movement, the painter expresses the opposite, that is to say the absence, the feeling of the extreme fragility of beings, the feeling of loss, of the lost moment, the breath of the irreparable, the terror of the irreversible, grief.
As with the Concert, with the Lute player a violin and bow are placed upon an alto part. Is this the instrument of the second player, still absent, who will perhaps come back to join the young man depicted? The motif bears the weight of an absence. It re-establishes the reading of the painting in the “time” of the psyche: what is this lute player actually doing? Is he waiting, as one supposes, for his fellow player? This waiting bathed in an imperceptible nostalgia makes a great contribution to the understanding of the image, to its subject, leading one’s reading towards another meaning of the painting. Are the texts of the poems which accompany the melodies reproduced part of the meaning of a secret dialogue only intelligible to the painter, or his model, or the commissioner?
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