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“...a kind of match between the painting of the first baroque period and the spectacular changes that the coexistent music registered. The three great composers who made possible the flourishing of baroque music in Italy at the end of the XVII century, Monteverdi, Frescobaldi and Gabrieli, belong approximately to the same epoch as Caravaggio.”
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But in Caravaggio’s work, there is no reference to Frescobaldi, nor to Marenzio, nor to Monteverdi. Why? This omission is surprising. The character of the publication and Roman taste could explain it. It could be linked to the state of the musical prints then available in Roman circles: the Franco-Flemings took the place of the Italians. It could also ensue from the welcome which the Roman literati reserved for the Italian madrigal. The time was one of reforms. Tastes changed. The avant-garde was interested in foreign forms. Patrons disowned the madrigalesque form whose fantastic effects and dissonances betrayed the purity of the text, added to the poetic content, sounded archaic and obsolete. Their language contradicted the expression of the truth. The vocal combinations which it allowed recalled the mannerist trappings to which Caravaggio’s art was radically opposed. One understands then why the Italian madrigalists did not hold his interest.
The Franco-Flemish source looked avant- garde, if not modern, less exotic. The more so since Giustiniani and Del Monte did not hide their preferences for non-Italian works, specifically Franco-Flemish. The painter’s subjects and the musical references bear witness to the culture and the sensibility of his patrons. Del Monte, friend of Virgilio Crescenzi, executor of the will of Matthieu Cointrel (Matteo Contarelli), allowed Caravaggio, in 1599, to carry out the two lateral pictures of the Contarelli chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi. The young artist owed the obtaining of this important work to him: the pictorial cycle of the Contarelli chapel is his first great poetic work. As for Vincenzo Giustiniani, he lived with his brother, Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, in a palace bought after 1590, opposite the French church. Both brothers showed clearly the affinity which they had with the French colony of Rome. Moreover, the Cardinal’s collections of paintings unmistakably displayed his French orientation. Protector of the French followers of Caravaggio in Rome, he was the very model of a perfect art lover, an archetype subsequently recognised by Cassiano Dal Pozzo, an honourific affiliation in that one knows that the latter was the protector of Poussin, “the most French of the Romans of the Seicento”.
In this context which closely mixes painter and patrons, another combination stands out, that which links one place to two arts which held there a genuine dialogue: San Luigi dei Francesi is the church which contained the most spectacular cycle of Italian painting, executed by a young artist with the most revolutionary attitudes, and it was also the place in which several renowned musicians learned their profession: Allegri, who would begin as a chorister (in 1591, a year before the painter’s arrival in Rome) then tenor, from 1601 to 1606, at the moment when the Contarelli chapel was being finished. Later, Orazio Benevolo would be chapel master from 1638. Could one ask for better evidence? Music and painting found themselves joined, linked in the space of an architecture symbolic of the period under discussion.
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