The Four Ages of Man

Valentin de Boulogne was a Frenchman who spent his whole short career in Rome, working in the deep shadow of Caravaggio, who had died there only a few years before. He painted this around 1629, gathering the four ages of human life around one table. A boy holds an empty bird trap, his innocence already flown. A young man tunes a lute for pleasure. A soldier in armour, crowned with laurel, cradles a book. An old man broods over his coins and a glass, near the end. Within three years Valentin was himself dead at 41, after a feverish night that, so the story went, ended with him plunging into a cold Roman fountain. He never reached the old age he set down here.