O Tocador de Alaúde

Caravaggio was in his mid-twenties and newly making his name in Rome when he painted this young lute player, one of two versions he made of the subject. He was working for wealthy Roman collectors who prized exactly this kind of thing: a real boy caught mid-song, a still life of fruit and flowers rendered so precisely you can see the wilt on the leaves and the bruise on the pear. The music laid open on the table is written out clearly enough to read, a set of madrigals about love. One of his patrons is said to have called a version of it the finest picture Caravaggio ever made. The instruments and the cracked blooms were the sort of detail that made him famous almost overnight.