Caravaggio

by Andrew Graham-Dixon

  Alongside this idealizing tradition of musical picture, there was another and more prosaic sort of painting that showed singers and musicians in mid performance. Sometimes such works were enlivened by touches of bawdy humour. In Callisto Piazza’s Concert of circa 1525, a group of performers is crowded into a shallow space, together with a single, male member of their audience. The most prominent of the musicians, a woman playing a lute, wears a low-cut bodice and has a coquettish expression on her face. Her admirer, who has evidently been enjoying the performance in more ways than one, wheels to face the viewer of the painting with a knowing look in his eye. The artist has furnished him with a phallic prop in the form of a sheathed dagger, fastened at his hip, which points towards the girl at an angle carefully calculated to indicate just what he has in mind.

  Caravaggio’s Musicians cannot easily be squeezed into the existing tradition of sixteenth-century musical paintings. It is certainly not a pastoral in the Venetian mode. Nor does it depict an actual performance, showing instead the preparations for one. There was no precedent for this. The presence of the boy with wings has prompted speculation that the picture might have been intended as an allegory of Music and Love. But that offers no real explanation for Caravaggio’s most obvious departure from convention. Why should he have chosen to depict this rather ramshackle scene of musicians rehearsing?

  Solutions to the enigma may be found in the unusually broad and experimental musical tastes of his patron. Cardinal del Monte was actively involved in music at the papal court throughout the 1590s. Clement VIII put him in charge of a far-reaching reform of liturgical music, and he served as Protector of the Sistine Choir.15 Music was also an essential part of life at his various residences. In one of his letters back to Florence, Emilio de’ Cavalieri gives a richly evocative description of an impromptu concert that took place one day in 1602 at del Monte’s country house at Porta Pinciana. The admired soprano Vittoria Archilei was the surprise guest at an afternoon party, together with her husband and accompanist. Also present were cardinals Paravicino and Acquaviva, who had ostensibly come to see a vineyard in the grounds of del Monte’s estate. Archilei was prevailed on to sing. She stunned her small audience with the naked emotion of her performance – so much so that even Cavalieri, who had helped to train her famously expressive voice, was surprised. He reported that because she was ‘in a wild mood and singing in a vaulted room, I have never heard her in more beautiful voice. She gave so much satisfaction that Acquaviva said to me: “I for shame did not weep.” Paravicino said he never thought such refinement was possible. They are both musicians.’16

  Such expressions of dumbfounded pleasure go beyond the courtly formulas of polite approval. Archilei had clearly given an unusually affecting performance, but that is not the only explanation for the strength of response she received. Its surprise lay essentially in the fact that she sang on her own, in public, to the simplest of instrumental accompaniments. By the early 1600s, medieval polyphony – many voices singing different lines of music simultaneously – had been the overwhelmingly dominant mode of music for centuries. Monody, in which a single melodic line is carried by a solitary singer, was still relatively uncommon in concert performance. The solo voice accompanied by the solo instrument was unfamiliar, arresting. As the rapturous response to Archilei’s singing shows, its potential was only just being developed.

  The polyphonic and monodic modes are at opposite ends of music’s emotional spectrum. Polyphony subsumes the individual voice within a choral harmony, reflecting the desire to conjure up an essentially otherworldly sound, such as the singing of the angelic host. Words are hard to distinguish in the layers of polyphonic singing. Syntax dissolves and sense is sacrificed for an effect of transcendence. By contrast, monody puts precise meaning and specific human emotions at the heart of music. The single melodic line, the solo voice, is easily understood. To follow its meanderings is to follow the contours of feeling expressed by words and music together (the theme of Vittoria Archilei’s song would, almost certainly, have been unrequited love). It might be said that while polyphony aspires to heaven, monody expresses man.

  ‘The solo voice contains all the purity of music, and style and melody are studied and appreciated more carefully when one’s ears are not distracted by more than one voice.’17 Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier of 1528 shows that the fashion for the solo voice had roots in an earlier period of the Renaissance. Further proof of this lies in the fact that the Flemish composer Adrian Willaert, choirmaster at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice in the 1530s, had rearranged a number of polyphonic madrigals so that they could be sung for the solo voice. What seems to have been most strikingly new in the more experimental singing of Caravaggio’s time, seventy years later, was its strong emphasis on vocal expression. This was characterized by the development of the stile rappresentativo, a style of monodic singing that followed the natural accents and rhythms of spoken language. It was an innovation that transformed the performance of choral music, and the style in which Vittoria Archilei would have sung.

  Emilio de’ Cavalieri was himself a composer at the forefront of this shift in musical sensibilities. He understood exactly what was going on in del Monte’s house that afternoon in 1602. What he describes, very precisely, is the shock experienced by the listeners as they encounter raw feeling through the medium of music. On this particular occasion, the already unfamiliar experience is amplified by the wildness of the singer’s own mood and the cavernous acoustic of a high-ceilinged room. The audience of cardinals Acquaviva and Paravicino is genuinely astonished, and Cavalieri’s parting shot – ‘they are both musicians’ – is meant to underscore the sheer novelty of the performance. These men are experienced listeners and practitioners; they know music very well; but they have never heard music quite like this.

  The origins of the musical transformation epitomized by Archileo’s performance were (and still are) debated. A group of Florentine musicians active in the 1570s and 1580s had built a whole philosophy around the doctrine of a return to monody. For them, this was an extension of the Renaissance ideal of reviving the modes of classical antiquity. Their spokesman had been the humanist author Vincenzo Galilei – father of the scientist and astronomer – who was partly inspired by the mistaken belief that the drama of ancient Greece had been sung rather than spoken. Galilei argued in favour of the perceived simplicity and emotional directness of ancient monody, conjuring the romantic vision of a world in which singers might reclaim the fabled powers attributed to Orpheus. He urged that song and drama should be reunited once more, to tell the stories of ancient legend and move the hearts of men. The ideas expressed in Galilei’s Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music, of 1581, would have profound implications for music in Italy and beyond. New and ever more nakedly emotional songs for the solo voice would be written and performed. The stile rappresentativo would triumph and the abstract patterns and harmonies of medieval polyphony fall out of fashion. In the music of court entertainment, individual performers separated from the chorus to sing passionate songs of love and death. Such songs would become known as arias, as the old genre of intermedii metamorphosed into a new, startlingly dramatic art form that became known, simply, as ‘opera’.

  Many different musicians and composers claimed a hand in these changes. Cardinal del Monte’s friend Emilio de’ Cavalieri was prominent among them. Cavalieri was thoroughly disgusted when his rival, the singer and composer Giulio Caccini, took credit for inventing the stile rappresentativo. ‘Everyone knows I am the inventor of this style,’ Cavalieri angrily countered in a letter of 1600.18 Posterity has sided with Caccini in that particular argument, partly because of his especially close association with the circle of Vincenzo Galilei. But Cavalieri’s other big claim, to have written the very first opera, has been more widely accepted. The work in question, a musical drama in three acts entitled La Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo, was composed in 1600 – at the height of his friendship with Caravaggio’s cardinal, and just
two years before his sudden death from an unknown illness.

  Cardinal del Monte was, then, rather more than a mere amateur of music: through his various musical activities and associations he had assisted at the birth of momentous changes in both composition and performance. By supporting a pioneer like Cavalieri, by hosting events like Vittoria Archilei’s remarkable concert, by reordering the priorities of liturgical music at the papal court and by subtly altering the style of the Sistine Chapel Choir itself to favour the expressive qualities of the human voice brought out by the stile rappresantativo – by doing so much, del Monte had placed himself at the forefront of musical experimentation at the turn of the seventeenth century.

  Del Monte was also friendly with the nobleman and banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, whose palace was directly opposite the Palazzo Madama. Giustiniani was a fellow musical enthusiast, who in 1628 would write A Discourse on Music describing the so-called musical camerino – a purpose-built private chamber, ‘nobly decorated with paintings made for the sole purpose’ of setting the right mood and tone for intimate musical performances. One of del Monte’s first acts on moving to the Palazzo Madama had been (in his own words) to ‘reserve a room for Harpsichords, Guitars, a Chitarrone and other instruments’.19 By the late 1620s such rooms were a familiar sight in the palaces of the Roman aristocracy. But in the early 1590s, when del Monte had created his own camerino at the Palazzo Madama, he had been setting a new trend. To judge by the inventory made after his death, it must have been a headily atmospheric space – a cross between a private concert chamber and a miniature museum on the theme of music. Del Monte’s camerino contained no fewer than thirty-seven musical instruments, not including the ‘chest where the viols are’.20 On its walls hung four pictures, all of which were listed, simply, as una musica, ‘a scene of music’. One of these was Caravaggio’s Musicians.

  So why did the painter depart from all the known conventions of the so-called ‘concert picture’ and depict his musicians as an ensemble of the blatantly unready? Further clues lie in Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s letters, which show (among much else) that Cardinal del Monte was extremely interested in the technical aspects of singing and performing. One of the most promising singers in his household was a Spanish castrato named Pedro Montoya, to whom Cavalieri gave six singing lessons, some of which del Monte himself must have attended: ‘The Cardinal del Monte was amazed because he [Montoya] can already sing to the same standard as Onofrio [probably Onofrio Gualfreducci, a gifted castrato attached to the household of Cardinal Montalto] and if he does not cause trouble, within a month he will surpass Onofrio.’21

  Caravaggio’s painting moodily evokes the milieu of del Monte’s household – a laboratory of musical experiment and innovation, where performers rehearsed under the tutelage of the cardinal and his friends, and where the expressive, classically inspired stile rappresantativo was taken to new extremes. The space into which Caravaggio’s four boys have been crammed evokes the cluttered intimacy of the camerino itself. Dressed in their makeshift all’antica costumes, they are preparing to take part in a piece of musical theatre of just the kind favoured and supported by del Monte. A single voice will be accompanied by only two instruments, in emulation of that imagined golden age when the songs of Orpheus were heard. The theme of the piece is the intoxicating effect of music on those who are in love. The song studied by the boy with his back to the viewer is no longer decipherable, but it probably expressed some variant of the sentiments voiced by Shakespeare’s Count Orsino in Twelfth Night: ‘If music be the food of love, play on.’

  By painting a rehearsal rather than a performance, Caravaggio went behind the scenes of the traditional concert picture. He showed the long hours of preparation and the artifice that made possible the final, polished performance. In doing so, he paid subtle tribute to the active role del Monte himself played in the musical culture of his time. Once hung in the room that the cardinal had consecrated to music, the picture conjures up a scene in which his own, animating presence is forever awaited. It is the picture of a process that depends on the energies of the patron himself. Only when the cardinal arrives can the final preparations be completed, and the concert begin.

  THE LUTE PLAYER AND THE BASKET OF FRUIT

  The second of Caravaggio’s musical paintings, The Lute Player, was commissioned by del Monte’s friend Vincenzo Giustiniani and probably painted around 1596. An effeminate young man plucks at the strings of a lute while gazing out at the viewer with an expression of such soulfulness that his eyes seem to be brimming with tears. Two musical part-books and a violin lie on the table before him beside some scattered fruit and a glass carafe full of flowers. The scene is lit by a bright, diagonal shaft of light that casts strong shadows.

  The wistful singer has sometimes been taken for a girl. Bellori, for example, described the figure as ‘a woman in a blouse playing a lute with the sheet music in front of her’.22 But the 1638 inventory of Giustiniani’s collection unambiguously listed the work as ‘a half-length figure of a youth who plays the lute, with diverse flowers and fruits and music books … from the hand of Michelangelo da Caravaggio’.23 There would seem little reason to doubt its accuracy. The singer’s face is androgynous but the shirt, open almost to the waist, reveals no sign of a cleavage.

  It is possible that Caravaggio’s Lute Player is an idealized portrait of del Monte’s promising but potentially troublesome castrato, Pedro Montoya. Montoya joined the Sistine Chapel Choir in 1592 and left in 1600, so he was almost certainly in del Monte’s household when the picture was painted. The soft, hairless skin and slightly swollen face of Caravaggio’s lutenist are consistent with the hormonal side-effects of castration. There may be a glancing allusion to the pitch of the boy’s voice in the part-books that lie on the table before him. The five-staved sheets of an open part-book reveal a number of madrigals. Beneath lies another part-book, prominently marked ‘Bassus’. It is closed, perhaps the painter’s way of indicating that this particular singer never would be capable of hitting the low notes.

  Castrati were much in favour in Rome in the years around 1600. Their rise coincided with that of the professional female singer, and both reflected the new taste for piercingly emotional music arranged for the single voice. In his Discourse on Music, Vincenzo Giustiniani noted that ‘the famous Vittoria Archilei’ had established ‘the true method of singing of women’, adding that it applied equally well to sopranos singing in falsetto and the castrati of the Sistine Chapel choir.24 The castrato voice was valued for its sweetness and sensuality, as well as for its clarity of enunciation.25

  Castrati were encouraged to learn musical instruments so that they might accompany themselves. Such tuition is likely to have been part of the regime in del Monte’s household. The cardinal himself played the Spanish guitar, and it is possible that Caravaggio learned the same instrument while living there. A deposition lodged against him by his landlady in 1605 includes the complaint that he came to her house late at night with a group of friends, playing the selfsame instrument and singing lewd songs, and a later inventory of his possessions lists one.

  The singer in the Lute Player is anything but raucous. He opens his mouth ‘not more than is necessary to converse with friends’, as a contemporary singing manual advised those performing chamber music of this kind.26 The picture is in such good condition that the sheet music open on the table is still legible: four madrigals by the Flemish composer Jacques Arcadelt (c. 1505–68): ‘Chi potra dir’, ‘Se la dura durezza’, ‘Voi sapete’ and ‘Vostra fui’.27 Their texts are a compendium of the conventions of the courtly love tradition, shot through with plaintive simile and metaphor – beauty that blinds like the sun, ardent fires of passion, cold unyielding marble of a proud woman’s heart. ‘Chi potra dir’ is representative:

  Who can express what sweetness I taste

  In gazing on that proud light of my lady

  That shames the celestial sphere?

  Not I, who am unable to find within myself

>   The proper words,

  So that, looking on her beautiful face and mien,

  So as not to see less well

  I would deign to lose together both life and light.28

  The amorous mood of the song is conveyed by the singer’s passionate, voluptuous expression. The beam of light that rakes the room, illuminating the boy’s face with its flash of radiance, may be Caravaggio’s own metaphor for ‘that proud light of my lady’. The melancholy poetry of a song has been translated into the texture of painting.

  The prominent still life may have been intended to enhance the bittersweet mood. Faded flowers traditionally symbolized the transience of life and love. Baglione singled them out for particular praise, focusing on ‘the carafe of flowers filled with water, in which we see clearly the reflection of a window and other objects in the room, while on the petals of the flowers there are dewdrops imitated most exquisitely’. The flowers have indeed been depicted with meticulous care, each one sharply individuated. But they pose a puzzle because neither they, nor the fruit, can possibly have been painted by Caravaggio himself. The handling is very different in this part of the painting, much harder in the outlines, with a pernicketiness in the finish that is quite alien to his style. The vase of flowers strikes an especially discordant note. The enamelled blooms are piled high in a merely decorative profusion. They have none of the weight, none of the mute and insistent singularity, of things seen and painted by Caravaggio. It is conceivable that the fruit and flowers were added by the Netherlandish painter Jan Bruegel (1568–1625), who was in Rome in the mid 1590s. The second son of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan Bruegel was a favourite of Carlo Borromeo’s cousin Cardinal Federico Borromeo, a friend of del Monte who lived close to the Palazzo Madama from 1597 to 1601. With Borromeo’s encouragement, Bruegel would later become a specialist painter of flowers in vases. Given that he was certainly in Caravaggio’s circle and in Rome at the right time, he is a plausible candidate for authorship of The Lute Player’s mysterious bouquet.