Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (27 page)

The picture is not in good condition, having suffered considerable damage during the two hundred years that it spent in obscurity after disappearing into a series of unknown collections in the early eigh-teenth century. The violin and the page of music in the foreground have been largely reconstructed by modern restorers; the lute has lost its strings. But the work’s fundamental originality and oddity remain undimmed, despite considerable areas of paint loss.

The Musicians
was clearly one of Caravaggio’s better known early pictures, because both Bellori and Baglione mention it specifically. Baglione says that ‘For Cardinal del Monte he painted a Concert of Youths from nature, very well.’ Bellori describes it in the same terms: ‘the Concert of Youths portrayed from life in half figures’. The young man with the cornetto, at the back, resembles Caravaggio himself, while the lutenist may be his friend Mario Minniti. But the composition as a whole radiates an air of contrivance. It resembles a frieze or bas-relief, rendered in paint. The four boys are so similar in aspect and demeanour that they might be clones of each other. The suspicion lingers that they were all based on the same figure, depicted from different angles and then collaged together to form a single composition. Perhaps when Baglione and Bellori talked of Caravaggio portraying from life and painting from nature they were not talking about the artist’s processes – the use of models, and so on – but trying to capture the distinctive
mood
of his picture. For all its artifice, it does have a certain clumsy lifelikeness. And that is precisely what made it so different from most earlier paintings of similar subjects.

By the late sixteenth century there was a long-established tradition of so-called ‘concert’ pictures. The genre had originated in Venice, and in its early form it is exemplified by the so-called
Le
Concert Champêtre
of around 1510, now in the Louvre. Once thought to have been painted by Giorgione but now generally attributed to Titian, it is a tender and lyrical fantasy. A young man in fine clothes strums at his lute while conversing with a shepherd. Two naked women are present alongside them, one filling a glass jug with water, the other breaking off from playing on her recorder to listen to the two men’s conversation. The action takes place outside, in a golden, idealized landscape based loosely on that of the Veneto itself. The precise meaning of the
Concert Champêtre
(if it has one) is open to debate, but the allegorical thrust of Titian’s dreamlike vision is clear enough. It has its roots in the ancient, classical fantasy of pastoral retreat. The city sophisticate retreats to nature and finds there a world as pure as the clearest spring water, and a harmony as sweet as that of the most beautiful music. In Arcadia, he retunes the strings of his very being.

Alongside this idealizing tradition of musical picture, there was another and more prosaic sort of painting that showed singers and musicians in mid performance. Sometimes such works were enlivened by touches of bawdy humour. In Callisto Piazza’s
Concert
of circa 1525, a group of performers is crowded into a shallow space, together with a single, male member of their audience. The most prominent of the musicians, a woman playing a lute, wears a low-cut bodice and has a coquettish expression on her face. Her admirer, who has evidently been enjoying the performance in more ways than one, wheels to face the viewer of the painting with a knowing look in his eye. The artist has furnished him with a phallic prop in the form of a sheathed dagger, fastened at his hip, which points towards the girl at an angle carefully calculated to indicate just what he has in mind.

Caravaggio’s
Musicians
cannot easily be squeezed into the existing tradition of sixteenth-century musical paintings. It is certainly not a pastoral in the Venetian mode. Nor does it depict an actual performance, showing instead the preparations for one. There was no precedent for this. The presence of the boy with wings has prompted speculation that the picture might have been intended as an allegory of Music and Love. But that offers no real explanation for Caravaggio’s most obvious departure from convention. Why should he have chosen to depict this rather ramshackle scene of musicians rehearsing?

Solutions to the enigma may be found in the unusually broad and experimental musical tastes of his patron. Cardinal del Monte was actively involved in music at the papal court throughout the 1590s. Clement VIII put him in charge of a far-reaching reform of liturgical music, and he served as Protector of the Sistine Choir.
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Music was also an essential part of life at his various residences. In one of his letters back to Florence, Emilio de’ Cavalieri gives a richly evocative description of an impromptu concert that took place one day in 1602 at del Monte’s country house at Porta Pinciana. The admired soprano Vittoria Archilei was the surprise guest at an afternoon party, together with her husband and accompanist. Also present were cardinals Paravicino and Acquaviva, who had ostensibly come to see a vineyard in the grounds of del Monte’s estate. Archilei was prevailed on to sing. She stunned her small audience with the naked emotion of her performance – so much so that even Cavalieri, who had helped to train her famously expressive voice, was surprised. He reported that because she was ‘in a wild mood and singing in a vaulted room, I have never heard her in more beautiful voice. She gave so much satisfaction that Acquaviva said to me: “I for shame did not weep.” Paravicino said he never thought such refinement was possible. They are both musicians.’
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Such expressions of dumbfounded pleasure go beyond the courtly formulas of polite approval. Archilei had clearly given an unusually affecting performance, but that is not the only explanation for the strength of response she received. Its surprise lay essentially in the fact that she sang on her own, in public, to the simplest of instrumental accompaniments. By the early 1600s, medieval polyphony – many voices singing different lines of music simultaneously – had been the overwhelmingly dominant mode of music for centuries. Monody, in which a single melodic line is carried by a solitary singer, was still relatively uncommon in concert performance. The solo voice accompanied by the solo instrument was unfamiliar, arresting. As the rapturous response to Archilei’s singing shows, its potential was only just being developed.

The polyphonic and monodic modes are at opposite ends of music’s emotional spectrum. Polyphony subsumes the individual voice within a choral harmony, reflecting the desire to conjure up an essentially otherworldly sound, such as the singing of the angelic host. Words are hard to distinguish in the layers of polyphonic singing. Syntax dissolves and sense is sacrificed for an effect of transcendence. By contrast, monody puts precise meaning and specific human emotions at the heart of music. The single melodic line, the solo voice, is easily understood. To follow its meanderings is to follow the contours of feeling expressed by words and music together (the theme of Vittoria Archilei’s song would, almost certainly, have been unrequited love). It might be said that while polyphony aspires to heaven, monody expresses man.

‘The solo voice contains all the purity of music, and style and melody are studied and appreciated more carefully when one’s ears are not distracted by more than one voice.’
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Baldassare Castiglione’s
Book of the Courtier
of 1528 shows that the fashion for the solo voice had roots in an earlier period of the Renaissance. Further proof of this lies in the fact that the Flemish composer Adrian Willaert, choirmaster at St Mark’s Basilica in Venice in the 1530s, had re
arranged a number of polyphonic madrigals so that they could be sung
for the solo voice. What seems to have been most strikingly new in the more experimental singing of Caravaggio’s time, seventy years later, was its strong emphasis on vocal expression. This was characterized by the development of the
stile rappresentativo
, a style of monodic singing that followed the natural accents and rhythms of spoken language. It was an innovation that transformed the performance of
choral music, and the style in which Vittoria Archilei would have sung.

Emilio de’ Cavalieri was himself a composer at the forefront of this shift in musical sensibilities. He understood exactly what was going on in del Monte’s house that afternoon in 1602. What he describes, very precisely, is the shock experienced by the listeners as they encounter raw feeling through the medium of music. On this particular occasion, the already unfamiliar experience is amplified by the wildness of the singer’s own mood and the cavernous acoustic of a high-ceilinged room. The audience of cardinals Acquaviva and Paravicino is genuinely astonished, and Cavalieri’s parting shot – ‘they are both musicians’ – is meant to underscore the sheer novelty of the performance. These men are experienced listeners and practitioners; they know music very well; but they have never heard music quite like
this
.

The origins of the musical transformation epitomized by Archileo’s performance were (and still are) debated. A group of Florentine musicians active in the 1570s and 1580s had built a whole philosophy around the doctrine of a return to monody. For them, this was an extension of the Renaissance ideal of reviving the modes of classical antiquity. Their spokesman had been the humanist author Vincenzo Galilei – father of the scientist and astronomer – who was partly inspired by the mistaken belief that the drama of ancient Greece had been sung rather than spoken. Galilei argued in favour of the perceived simplicity and emotional directness of ancient monody, conjuring the romantic vision of a world in which singers might reclaim the fabled powers attributed to Orpheus. He urged that song and drama should be reunited once more, to tell the stories of ancient legend and move the hearts of men. The ideas expressed in Galilei’s
Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music
, of 1581, would have profound implications for music in Italy and beyond. New and ever more nakedly emotional songs for the solo voice would be written and performed. The
stile rappresentativo
would triumph and the abstract patterns and harmonies of medieval polyphony fall out of fashion. In the music of court entertainment, individual performers separated from the chorus to sing passionate songs of love and death. Such songs would become known as arias, as the old genre of
intermedii
metamorphosed into a new, startlingly dramatic art form that became known, simply, as ‘opera’.

Many different musicians and composers claimed a hand in these changes. Cardinal del Monte’s friend Emilio de’ Cavalieri was prominent among them. Cavalieri was thoroughly disgusted when his rival, the singer and composer Giulio Caccini, took credit for inventing the
stile rappresentativo
. ‘Everyone knows
I
am the inventor of this style,’ Cavalieri angrily countered in a letter of 1600.
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Posterity has sided with Caccini in that particular argument, partly because of his especially close association with the circle of Vincenzo Galilei. But Cavalieri’s other big claim, to have written the very first opera, has been more widely accepted. The work in question, a musical drama in three acts entitled
La
Rappresentazione di Anima e di Corpo
, was composed in 1600 – at the height of his friendship with Caravaggio’s cardinal, and just two years before his sudden death from an unknown illness.

Cardinal del Monte was, then, rather more than a mere amateur of music: through his various musical activities and associations he had assisted at the birth of momentous changes in both composition and performance. By supporting a pioneer like Cavalieri, by hosting events like Vittoria Archilei’s remarkable concert, by reordering the priorities of liturgical music at the papal court and by subtly altering the style of the Sistine Chapel Choir itself to favour the expressive qualities of the human voice brought out by the
stile rappresantativo
– by doing so much, del Monte had placed himself at the forefront of musical experimentation at the turn of the seventeenth century.

Del Monte was also friendly with the nobleman and banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, whose palace was directly opposite the Palazzo Madama. Giustiniani was a fellow musical enthusiast, who in 1628 would write
A
Discourse on Music
describing the so-called musical
camerino
– a purpose-built private chamber, ‘nobly decorated with paintings made for the sole purpose’ of setting the right mood and tone for intimate musical performances. One of del Monte’s first acts on moving to the Palazzo Madama had been (in his own words) to ‘reserve a room for Harpsichords, Guitars, a Chitarrone and other instruments’.
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By the late 1620s such rooms were a familiar sight in the palaces of the Roman aristocracy. But in the early 1590s, when del Monte had created his own
camerino
at the Palazzo Madama, he had been setting a new trend. To judge by the inventory made after his death, it must have been a headily atmospheric space – a cross between a private concert chamber and a miniature museum on the theme of music. Del Monte’s
camerino
contained no fewer than thirty-seven musical instruments, not including the ‘chest where the viols are’.
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On its walls hung four pictures, all of which were listed, simply, as
una musica
, ‘a scene of music’. One of these was Caravaggio’s
Musicians
.

So why did the painter depart from all the known conventions of the so-called ‘concert picture’ and depict his musicians as an ensemble of the blatantly unready? Further clues lie in Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s letters, which show (among much else) that Cardinal del Monte was extremely interested in the technical aspects of singing and performing. One of the most promising singers in his household was a Spanish castrato named Pedro Montoya, to whom Cavalieri gave six singing lessons, some of which del Monte himself must have attended: ‘The Cardinal del Monte was amazed because he [Montoya] can already sing to the same standard as Onofrio [probably Onofrio Gualfreducci, a gifted castrato attached to the household of Cardinal Montalto] and if he does not cause trouble, within a month he will surpass Onofrio.’
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