UNIT 3
The Lute Player
The Lute Player is a composition by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio. It exists in three versions, one in the Wildenstein Collection, another in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg and a third from Badminton House, Gloucestershire, which came to light in 2007. All show a boy with soft facial features and thick brown hair, accompanying himself on the lute as he sings a madrigal about love.
All three versions demonstrate the innovative approach to light that Caravaggio adopted at this time. Caravaggio's method was to use "a strong light from above with a single window and the walls painted black, so that having the lights bright and the shadows dark, it gives depth to the painting, but with a method that is not natural nor done or thought of by any other century or older painters like Raphael, Titian, Correggio and others."
The flowerpiece is of major importance for the still-life tradition, not only in Italy, but also in the Netherlands, and there is a certain link to earlier Flemish painting. The fruits in the “Luteplayer” are not of the same season as the flowers, and another interesting feature is that they appear to have been originally placed in a bowl or basket with a base, of which the shadow survives on the corner of the partbook and the circumference around the fruit itself.
The idea of "correspondences" that informed so much of contemporary natural philosophy, means that the globe of the carafe with its reflections, like a crystal ball, would have been seen as a parallel with the celestial globe on the ceiling with the Elements above. Elements of the composition of the Apollo “Luteplayer” are repeated not only in the Hermitage work (with several counterpoint variations), but also in the glass carafe in the lower part of the two paintings “A Boy bitten by a Lizard”, most especially in the version in the National Gallery, London. There the central rose and white jasmine is quite close to these elements in the present work, while in the Longhi Foundation picture the rose is a white one.
The lower daisy in the present work has been repositioned, and in fact a prominent pentiment exists 3 cm above, and that is the position it has in the Hermitage painting of the Luteplayer. It could well be that the original flowerpiece that we know Del Monte owned of Caravaggio’s, which he seems to have bought even before he met him, probably through the local picture dealer Maestro Valentino, could have been the continuing source of these variations. It was a painting described as a carafe of flowers, two palmi high, which was bought at the 1628 sale of the Del Monte collection in a lot that included the “Musicians”, but it has not been heard of since. It is interesting that he would devote such care to a painting of flowers and that he was not averse to doing this, as is illustrated by the fact that he introduced the carafe of water with the same reflections into the canvases of the “Boy bitten by a lizard”, without regard to the position of the figure in front of the light sources. It was natural for him to repeat his own inventions when he arrived at this sensational new technique of copying reality, from a virtual image, instead of other people’s compositions. The parabolic mirror, probably the same one that Della Porta had had constructed in Venice in 1580, which had produced some sensational effects and led to the development of the camera obscura, was probably no larger than an eye-glass, but it made it possible to make a mosaic of naturalistic images that was extremely compelling; the technique also explains the shallow focus of Caravaggio’s compositions.