手持淫秽画像的微笑女子(名妓)

Gerard van Honthorst had spent years in Rome soaking up the dramatic candlelit style of Caravaggio, and by 1625 he was back in Utrecht putting it to worldly use. A laughing young woman leans out of the dark, brightly lit, and holds up a small painted medallion. The image on it is bawdy, a naked woman hiding her face, with a crude Dutch caption inviting the viewer to guess her from behind. She is a prostitute, and the medallion is essentially an advertisement, a common enough thing in the Dutch towns of the period. Honthorst gives the whole encounter the same theatrical lighting a religious painter would use for a saint, the face and bare shoulder blazing out of a background of total black.