''The Musicians'' or ''Concert of Youths'' (c. 1595) is a painting by the
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
Baroque
The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...
master
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio, known as simply Caravaggio (, , ; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610), was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the final four years of hi ...
(1571–1610). It is held in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
,
New York
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* '' ...
, where it has been since 1952. It underwent extensive restoration in 1983.
Caravaggio entered the household of Cardinal
Francesco Maria Del Monte
Francesco Maria del Monte, full name Francesco Maria Bourbon del Monte Santa Maria, (5 July 1549 – 27 August 1627) was an Italian Cardinal, diplomat, and connoisseur of the arts. His fame today rests on his early patronage of the important Bar ...
sometime in 1595, and ''The Musicians'' is thought to have been his first painting done expressly for the cardinal. His biographer, the painter
Baglione
Giovanni Baglione (1566 – 30 December 1643) was an Italian Mannerism, Late Mannerist and Baroque, Early Baroque painter and art historian. He is best remembered for his acrimonious and damaging involvement with the slightly younger arti ...
, says he "painted for the Cardinal youths playing music very well drawn from nature and also a youth playing a lute," the latter presumably being ''
The Lute Player
The Lute Player, The Tsaritsa Harpist or The Tsaritsa who Played the Gusli (russian: Царица-гусляр), is a Russian fairy tale. It was published by Alexander Afanasyev in his collection ''Russian Fairy Tales'', as number 338. Andrew ...
'', which seems to form a companion-piece to ''The Musicians''.
The picture shows four boys in quasi-Classical costume, three playing various musical instruments or singing, the fourth dressed as
Cupid
In classical mythology, Cupid (Latin Cupīdō , meaning "passionate desire") is the god of desire, lust, erotic love, attraction and affection. He is often portrayed as the son of the love goddess Venus (mythology), Venus and the god of war Mar ...
and reaching towards a bunch of grapes. The picture is an allegory relating music to the sustenance of love in the same way that food is the sustenance of life.
Caravaggio seems to have composed the painting from studies of two figures.
The central figure with the
lute
A lute ( or ) is any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back enclosing a hollow cavity, usually with a sound hole or opening in the body. It may be either fretted or unfretted.
More specifically, the term "lute" can ref ...
has been identified with Caravaggio's companion
Mario Minniti
Mario Minniti (8 December 1577 – 22 November 1640) was an Italian artist active in Sicily after 1606.
Born in Syracuse, Sicily, he arrived in Rome in 1593, where he became the friend, collaborator, and model of the key Baroque painter Mic ...
, and the individual next to him and facing the viewer is possibly a self-portrait of the artist.
The cupid bears a strong resemblance to the boy in ''
Boy Peeling Fruit'', done a few years before, and also to the angel in ''
Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy''.
The manuscripts show that the boys are practicing
madrigal
A madrigal is a form of secular vocal music most typical of the Renaissance (15th–16th c.) and early Baroque (1600–1750) periods, although revisited by some later European composers. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the number o ...
s celebrating love, and the eyes of the lutenist, the principal figure, are moist with tears—the songs presumably describe the sorrow of love rather than its pleasures. The violin in the foreground suggests a fifth participant, implicitly including the viewer in the tableau.
Scenes showing musicians were a popular theme at the time—the Church was supporting a revival of music and new styles and forms were being tried, especially by educated and progressive prelates such as Del Monte. This scene, however, is clearly secular rather than religious, and harks back to the long-established tradition of "concert" pictures, a genre originating in Venice and exemplified, in its earlier form, by
Titian's ''
Le concert champêtre
''Le Concert Champêtre'' ("Woodland Music-makers") is an 1857 painting by French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, now in the Musée Condé of Chantilly, France. A reworking of a composition exhibited by Corot in the Salon of 1844, the paint ...
''.
[
This was Caravaggio's most ambitious and complex composition to date, and the artist has evidently had difficulties with painting the four figures separately—they don't relate to each other or to the picture-space, and the overall effect is somewhat clumsy. The painting is in poor condition, and the music in the manuscript has been badly damaged by past restorations, although a tenor and an alto part can be made out. Nevertheless, despite considerable paint loss, the work's originality remains undimmed.]
Loan to Australia
During the COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...
, the museum began a skylight replacement project that resulted in gallery closures, in response the Met loaned major works from the European collection, including 'The Musicians', to Qagoma
The Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, colloquially known as QAGOMA, is an art museum in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It consists of the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), which is the main building, and a second gallery, the Ga ...
in an exhibition titled ‘European Masterpieces’.
See also
*List of paintings by Caravaggio
The following is a list of paintings by the Italian artist Caravaggio, listed chronologically.Spike, John T. ''Caravaggio''. New York : Abbeville Press, 2001: p. 253–54
List of paintings
Footnotes
Further reading
*
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*
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*
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*
* ...
References
External links
''A Caravaggio Rediscovered, The Lute Player''
an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on this painting (see cat. no. 3)
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Musicians
1590s paintings
Paintings by Caravaggio
Paintings in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Self-portraits
Paintings of Cupid
Musical instruments in art