Dinner with nuptials

The Italian title for this picture calls it a betrothal supper, and that is the occasion Honthorst has set down: a wedding feast crowded around a table late in the evening. He painted it about 1617, midway through a stay in Rome that ran close to ten years, when his lively banquet scenes were finding buyers among the city's great collectors, the marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani among them. The guests are packed in tight and shown half-length, close to us. They eat, drink and lean together while a musician keeps the evening going, and the whole room is lit from within the picture by a single candle, so the faces nearest the flame come forward and the rest sink into brown dark. There is no saint in it and no moral. It is a secular party made to be enjoyed as one, and the old Florentine inventories list it plainly as a banquet by candlelight.