The Theorbo Player

For a long time this musician was thought to be by Caravaggio. The German scholar Hermann Voss was the first to take him away from Caravaggio, and he noticed something else as well. The canvas looked like a fragment, cut from a larger concert scene with three figures. In 1928 the critic Roberto Longhi gave the picture to Antiveduto Grammatica.

The fragment idea gained a body in 2022, when a painting of two musicians surfaced on the art market, a woman singing at a claviorgan, an instrument that is half organ and half harpsichord, and a young flute player watching her. Technical study showed it had been cut down on one side, and an old copy of the whole composition places a lute or theorbo player at its right. The Italian state bought it for Turin, and today the two canvases hang in the same room, Sala 18.

The museum stays careful. Copies of the theorbo player on his own also exist, so this picture may once have stood alone. The gallery has also proposed a sitter, the composer and harpsichordist Cesare Marotta.