The painter’s ambition, patrons and musical training
Rome, opulent and cosmopolitan, awakened in artists’ souls the hope of a flourishing career, which for painters meant the chance to “ennoble the profession” as Titian had hoped. The century nursed within the imagination of everyone the dream of rejuvenating the status of the painter. Caravaggio carried a sword. This was illegal, a privilege of the nobility, and earned him several arrests. After him, like Rembrandt, Vermeer and Rubens, Poussin perpetuated this sovereign ambition. Little by little, the prince-artist became aware of his value. He imposed his signature and his style on an elite avid for his touch and whose delectation fed the speculations of the art market. This elite were the inheritors of the first collectors of the 16th century. First they achieved fame, then the artists themselves reaped the benefits. Each one had to overcome the harsh rigidity which inflicted an antiquated and archaic hierarchy in the Arts. Surely such an artistic pretension affirms the dignity of the painter in spite of the unfavourable judgement which had persisted since Platonic philosophy, in which according to the Parnassus, academy of the arts and of good taste inherited from Antiquity, nothing was of value except sovereign music. Music played on Apollo’s lyre?
The aim of 17th–century painting was to achieve equality with music and poetry, thus initiateing it into the values of Arcadian poetry in which music, mistress of the arts, symbolised the universal harmony. Painters appropriated musical subjects in order to acquire from them indirectly an aesthetic advantage profitable to their medium, in Rome the young Caravaggio discovered an ideal world, cultivated and sumptuous. In which music, with painting, illustrated the refinement of the patron-princes. Especially he discovered the taste of the protectors, “amateurs and connoisseurs” of poetry as well as the sciences.
Between Caravaggio’s painting and music a number of things underline points of conjunction, particularly the pictures from the first Roman period (1592–1601). First of all musicians, both instrumentalists and singers, figure in his work. These emblematic choices attract one’s attention. Music did not concern him for more than a few years, at the time of his move to Rome, where reference to musical elements found an echo in the princely circles which encouraged him. These aristocrats, Princes, legates of the Roman Curia were all great music lovers. The tastes of these patrons influenced the importance to which the painter gave musical subjects.
In this way, Caravaggio’s stay at the Madama palace of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte and the simultaneous protection of the Marquis Giustiniani fixed the limits of this musical inspiration. Del Monte, who also owned the Villa Ludovisi, commissioned the artist to paint an exceptional ceiling-high mural there, a rare allegory to alchemy linked to the prelate’s esoteric interests.
It was a formative period. Caravaggio learned to model the body, dared his first foreshortening of perspective, thanks to the instruments in the foreground. He chose a violently contrasted or subtly vaporous light, luminous and Venetian. The quite particular style of Giorgione, from whom he borrowed the theme of the concert. This is particularly clear in the lute player, a subject taken from the Concert Champêtre (Paris, Museum of the Louvre, today attributed to the young Titian after an initial sketch by his master Giorgione). The young prodigy then paid his rent in canvasses.
The role of his patrons was fundamental to his training. The orientation of the layouts, the choice of subjects, the poetic allusions, the privileged portrayal of instruments, reveal in particular the collaboration and dialogue which began between the painter and Cardinal Del Monte. A musicologist, very well read, a lover of poetry, alchemy and optics. Del Monte, who was of Venetian origin, exemplifies the first archetype of the perfect gentiluomo of the Seicento. His collections (known thanks to the inventory of his possessions which appeared after his death in 1627) provide evidence of his artistic leanings. A friend of Galileo, the Cardinal, himself an excellent lute player, owned a number of important musical instruments, especially strings. The musical guide of the young artist, he advised the painter in the choice of scores and instruments depicted.
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