The Concert

A group of young musicians crowds around a table, one tuning a lute, another raising a glass, their heads tilted at different angles and their hands caught mid-gesture. Manfredi arranges them much as Caravaggio arranged the tax collectors in his Calling of Saint Matthew, half-length figures pressed into a shallow band of space and drawn out of the shadow by one strong light. A concert like this had no story to tell and no saint in it, only the pleasure of company and sound, and that was still a fairly new thing to hang as a full-size canvas around 1620. The instruments and the loose collars belong to ordinary Roman life of the day rather than to any old legend. It shares a room in the Uffizi with the tavern and guardroom pictures from the same hand.