Paintings
Of a total output comprising of a little under 90 authenticated canvasses, only five paintings borrow accessories and people from music. A distinction must be made between the works in which music is the principal subject and those in which it is but one element of the composition. To the first category belong the singers and players in the Concert, and the two versions of The lute player. To the second, the angel musician of Rest during the flight into Egypt and the allegorical instruments of Conquering Love. They come from a relatively short period in the painter’s life, from 1595 to 1602, in other words, from his 24th to his 31st year. Seven essential but all too brief years in his career. In these years the artist, stimulated by the Roman milieu, attempted all genres (sacred and secular) and all formats (from easel canvasses related to the tastes of collectors, to great altarpieces, single works and cycles).
Dating from the years 1595–1596, the painting which is today known as the Concert is mentioned in the Del Monte inventory of 1627 as Caravaggio’s Music: I could find no better justification for the title of this article. His first truly ambitious composition due to the number of figures (four in all, moreover inaccurately associated; more superimposed like an assemblage of precarious balance than genuinely harmonised in the same space), the picture preserved in New York reserves a privileged place for music. A singer’s back on the right, a lute player tuning his instrument in the centre, a player of the chalumeau or possibly the cornetto (which may be a self–portrait) in the background. Scores and violin in the foreground, arranged in a comprehensible disorder thanks to the effect of daring perspective, express the real agitation in the preparations of musicians before a concert. Moreover, the central figures stare at us as though they were looking at another musician, instead of us.
This is a principle identical to that which we find in the other two versions of The lute player. The absent player whose violin rests on top of the scores in the foreground clearly indicates who is missing. This seizing of our gaze shows the bewitchment which the painter creates between canvas and spectator. He makes the painting the natural prolongation of our space, insisting too, thanks to this illusionist technique, on the living realism of the image.
The presence on the left-hand side of a winged boy occupied in picking a bunch of grapes. This boy (Cupid?) brings into play a supplementary reading coherent with the musicality of the composition. This apparently anodyne peripheral motif takes the subject into Dionysian mode. Bacchus’s grape underlines the sensual nature of the theme. Is this friendly Cupid the explanation of the painting? In opposition to the Platonic conception which makes of it the illustration of universal harmony and the metaphor of virtuous, moral and intellectual love, music is in Caravaggio’s vision more concrete than idealist, a pulsating hymn, a liberator of the senses, a song of feeling and desire. Intoxication is the promise of sensual pleasures, as the allusive eroticism of the adolescent bodies would in any case indicate. The tactile sensibility of the painter transcends the lonely abstraction of music. He prefers a voluptuous colouring which is emphasised by the plasticity and richness of the chosen chromatic range. The ample dark red drapery of the lute player and the purplish iridescence of the ribbon knotted round the singer’s waist echo the autumnal evocation of the vine.
Moreover, this Bacchic connotation also accompanies the numerous figures of young men painted since Caravaggio’s arrival in Rome. Bacchus crowned with vines, painted immediately after the Concert (c.1596–1597) is the apotheosis (Florence, Uffizi). Be that as it may, in the Concert, one fundamental point is clear: the importance of the scores.
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