"On the Trail of an Old Master: `The Lute Player'" (Caravaggio), New York City Tribune, Mar. 19, 1990, p. 16.

On the Trail of Old Masters

by Jason Edward Kaufman

Questions of attribution have always surrounded old master paintings. In the 19th century and well into the 20th, authorship was determined solely on the basis of connoisseurship. Having learned to recognize such telltale features as an idiosyncratic turn of the brush, or a distinctive punch mark in a gold halo, experts gave opinions that were regarded as inviolable.

Today, the financial interests of such opinion-givers having been laid bare, it takes a good deal more to connect a painter's name with a particular painting. Two small exhibitions, one at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the other at the National Gallery, illustrate some of the complexities brought to bear on questions of authorship.

The raison d'etre of The Metropolitan's show, "A Caravaggio Rediscovered: The Lute Player," is the reattribution of a picture on long-term loan from a private New York collection (Wildenstein). The half-length portrait of an androgynous male singer playing the lute was long believed to be a copy of a closely related painting by Caravaggio (loaned to the current exhibition by the Hermitage, Leningrad). On the basis of documents recently published by Sir Denis Mahon it has been demonstrated that the New York painting is by Caravaggio, himself.

In addition to the two versions of The Lute Player, the exhibition includes three other Caravaggio paintings: The Cardsharps, itself "rediscovered" in 1987, and among the Masterpieces from the Kimbell Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, recently displayed at The Frick Collection; The Fortune Teller from the Capitoline Museum, Rome; and The Musicians, from The Metropolitan's own collection. It was these works, all from the mid-1590s, that launched Caravaggio's career.

According to his 17th-century biographer, Giovan Pietro Bellori, Caravaggio (1571-1610) arrived in Rome from his native Lombardy in 1592. He suffered several years of poverty until, in 1595, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte purchased The Cardsharps and invited the painter to come live in the Palazzo Madama and to accept a stipend.

He remained in del Monte's employ until 1600, taking advantage of his patron's connections with members of Rome's art circle. In 1599, del Monte obtained for Caravaggio a public commission to paint The Calling and Martyrdom of St. Matthew in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Such a commission was the Baroque equivalent of a one-man museum show.

Whereas most collectors favored the idealized classicism of the High Renaissance, the Venetian-born del Monte preferred naturalism. It is easy to see why The Cardsharps (c. 1595), a superbly painted moralizing scene of gullibility and deception, would have appealed to him.

It shows two feather-capped youths at a carpeted gaming table on the edge of which sits a backgammon board. On the far side of the table, a bearded man stands behind the victim, signaling his confederate. The cheat responds by plucking a card he has tucked behind his back, while keeping a worried eye on his unsuspecting opponent. Caravaggio superbly conveys the uneasy tension of the conspirators, and by positioning the cheat with his back to the viewer, reveals the ruse in its entirety.

Unlike this extremely well-preserved canvas, the surface of an earlier work on a similar theme, The Fortune Teller (c. 1594), is so badly abraded that all detail has disappeared. The Louvre has a better-preserved rendition of this subject, in which a beguiling gypsy steals the ring of a finely-garbed client as she reads his palm. Nevertheless, from the 1984-85 cleaning, much of the original composition is legible, including the victim's dramatically foreshortened sword hilt. A stamp on the reverse indicates that the painting belonged to the Cardinal.

Caravaggio's first commissioned work for del Monte was The Musicians (c. 1595). That the group of figures in classicizing drapery represents an allegory of music is confirmed by the presence of a winged Cupid gathering grapes, associating love and wine with music. The figure in the back right is regarded as a self-portrait by Caravaggio. The canvas is in such poor shape it is hard to tell what is original and what is the restorers' inpainting. The still life in the foreground, for instance, is almost entirely reconstructed, and its textures, tones, and proportions are evidently distorted.

The Leningrad Lute Player (c. 1595-96) remains completely in tact, and although darkened varnish clouds the composition, such details as the water droplets on the pears in the foreground and the reddish highlights of the lutanist's hair remain visible. It has been suggested that Caravaggio used as his model the castrato, Pedro Montoya, also in del Monte's employ, and that he borrowed from his patron's extensive collection of musical instruments and part books in arranging the still life. The flowers and overripe fruit, and the cracked body of the instrument, suggest an allegory of vanity, reminding the viewer that like all earthly experience, beauty and pleasure are transient.

In the New York version of The Lute Player (c. 1596-97), the marble table top of the Leningrad painting is carpeted, the fruits removed in favor of a spinettina, and the bouquet of flowers supplanted by a caged finch. The foreground is extended to allow room for another instrument: a tenor recorder.

The waxen wood of the violin, the sheen on the recorder, and the brilliantly rendered pages of the music book are remarkable passages of Caravaggio's realism, the equals of the wonderful Leningrad painting. (This still life, replete with period instruments and the same madrigal part books arrayed on a Persian textile, is brought to life in a display case in the exhibition.) But, the perspective seems a little skewed, especially the tabletop which rises more steeply than in either the Hermitage or Kimbell paintings.

The figure presents some problems, too. Instead of the plump, fleshiness of the Hermitage lutanist -- with the soft, sated look found also in the dupes of The Cardsharps and The Fortune Teller -- in this version of The Lute Player the face is hard and the expression less sweet than bovine. The features are more sharply defined, the eyebrows severely geometrized, and the complexion pink, rather than fleshtone.

In the catalogue one reads that the picture "marks a significant step toward the more dramatically lit, highly focused style of Caravaggio's Maturity." But, one might just as well note that the pictorial developments manifest in this painting, whether it is autograph or not, mark a significant decline in terms of aesthetic quality.

Despite these apparent inconsistencies, according to Keith Christiansen, Curator of European Paintings at The Met, and organizer of the exhibition, the painting's provenance can now be traced directly from a 1627 inventory of the collection of Cardinal del Monte to its 1628 sale from del Monte's estate to Cardinal Antonio Barberini, in whose family collection it remained until 1948, when it was purchased by the father of the present owner.

The Hermitage version is first listed in the 1638 inventory of Caravaggio's other great Roman patron, the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, in whose family it remained until 1808, when it was sold to Baron Dominique Vivant-Denon, then parlayed to Czar Alexander I, from whom it entered the State Collection.

Although the first record of these works dates from three decades after their execution, technical evidence helps to clarify their interrelationship. An x-radiograph of the New York picture shows that the artist had initially blocked in the entire composition of his Leningrad picture. In other words, though he made some adjustments to the figure, and overpainted the still life of fruits, Caravaggio closely followed his original composition. Even the revised placement of the violin bow in the copy adheres to a feature of the Hermitage painting, falling along the line described by the front edge of the marble table. Thus, it can be deduced, Caravaggio copied the Giustiniani painting in order to satisfy the wish of his other patron, del Monte.

The exhibition concludes with two galleries of Baroque paintings on the theme of music, including portraits of musicians and groups of entertainers, many of which compositions were apparently inspired by Caravaggio's examples. But, the nucleus remains the first room in which are assembled the genre pieces from the late 1590s, including the juxtaposed versions of The Lute Player, both of which scholarship now compels us to ascribe to Caravaggio.

"A Caravaggio Rediscovered: The Lute Player" continues at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 82nd Street and Fifth Avenue, through April 22. A day-long seminar on "Art, Music, and Poetry in the Age of Caravaggio" will be held at the Museum on Friday, April 20. For tickets ($10) call (212) 570-3949. For further information call (212) 879-5500.

Jason Edward Kaufman ©