Der Lautenspieler

In the mid-1590s Caravaggio was a young unknown in Rome, painting his way out of poverty in the household of a music-loving cardinal. This is from those years, made for the marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, one of his first real backers. The open songbook on the table is not just a prop. It carries readable madrigals about love, and the player has paused mid-phrase to look straight out at us. Caravaggio piles the still life close to the eye: a violin, fruit already going soft, flowers past their best. The picture left Italy in 1808, when the French agent Vivant Denon sold it to Tsar Alexander I, which is how a Roman cardinal's music party ended up in St Petersburg.