Lute Player

In the mid-1590s the young Caravaggio was living in the Rome household of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, a churchman who loved music and kept singers and instruments around him. A soft-faced youth pausing over a lute, an open songbook, fruit and instruments crowded on a table: this is the sort of picture Caravaggio made for that circle, and the realism was the new part. The fruit is already going soft and the still life is set down with a plainness Roman painting had barely tried before. The composition survives in more than one version. This one, in Munich, the collection lists as attributed to Caravaggio rather than certainly from his hand, and scholars still argue where it sits beside the other Lute Players in the Hermitage in St Petersburg and at the Metropolitan in New York.