Concert with a Bas-relief

The stone block these musicians gather around carries an ancient relief, and Valentin copied it from a real object. He was working in Rome in the mid-1620s, where cardinals and princes filled their palaces with excavated sculpture, and his model was an ancient terracotta of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis from the Farnese collection. That relief is now in the Louvre too, in the department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities. Around the block a violinist, a woman with a guitar and a lute player make music, a boy leans on the table beside an open book, and in front a soldier in armour pours wine from a straw-covered flask. The Louvre notes a gravity here that Valentin's earlier tavern scenes lack. Cardinal Mazarin owned the picture by 1653, and it was bought for Louis XV in 1742.