Supper with a Lute Player

Around 1619 a young Dutchman living in Rome was painting large canvases of people eating, drinking and making music by candlelight, and one of the collectors who wanted them was Cosimo II de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. That is how a boisterous supper by a painter from Utrecht ended up in Florence, and why it hangs in the Uffizi today. The table is crowded and close. A lute player bends over his instrument while the others laugh, reach for the food and pour wine, all of it lit by one flame the figures themselves half-hide from us. Honthorst built the scene around that hidden light the way Caravaggio's Roman pictures did, so faces and hands glow warm against deep shadow. There are no saints here and no lesson, just an evening of company caught at its loudest. He left Rome in the spring of 1620, after about ten years in Italy, and pictures like this one stayed behind in the Medici collection.