Caravaggio - The Lute Player 1596
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The Lute Player 1596
96x121cm oil/canvas
Ex-Badminton House, Gloucestershire
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The Badminton House painting came to light at auction in Sotheby's, New York (January 25, 2001, lot 179). Originally covered in a thick yellow varnish, it corresponds in all details with the description made by Baglione of the work he saw at Cardinal Del Monte’s palace. The flowers are scattered with dewdrops as Baglione remarks, and the carafe of water reflects the window and other features of the room. These elements, and the considerable number of pentimenti (incisions made in the paint with the brush-handle, a mark of Caravaggio's working methods), set the Badminton House painting apart from the Hermitage version. It is slightly larger than the Hermitage work, whose original edge cuts the flowers on the left and the scroll of the violin, and painted with denser brushwork.
This painting would seem to be the one described in the 1627 inventory of Del Monte’s collection. It was not the painting described in 1628 by the heirs as ‘Un giovane che sona di clevo’ (without an attribution) which was sold together with Caravaggio’s 'St Catherine and the 'Cardsharps (named specifically as by Caravaggio) and various other paintings to Cardinal Antonio Barberini, which has come down to us in the work in the Wildenstein collection, at present on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the features of the face, with its slightly out-of-line eye and wide cheek, make it clear that this was the source of the other versions, rather than the Hermitage painting, in which Caravaggio himself introduced modifications to the profile and lined up the eyes.