Concert

The title says concert, but nobody is playing yet. Around 1615 Lionello Spada was back in his native Bologna after a stay in Malta, and he painted the minutes before a performance. A bearded man in blue silk, ermine at his shoulder, hands out sheets of music across a table draped in green. A boy holds up a page and looks toward a man with a small wind instrument at his lips. Behind them two long brass trombones rise into the dark, while in the foreground a man in a fur cap bends over his violin and bow. The Borghese museum reads the scene as the tuning before the music starts, and sees Caravaggio's influence handled with less drama and a real taste for detail. The canvas belonged to the Pamphilj family before it entered the Borghese collection in 1769.