A Caravaggio Rediscovered The Lute Player

Meant as an update and a corrective to The Age of Caravaggio show, this exhibition and catalogue inaugurates the extended loan to the Metropolitan Museum of a newly identified painting by Caravaggio, The Lute Player, one of the artist's best-known works in seventeenth-century Rome. Almost completely ignored by modern scholars, recently published documentation now establishes the picture's authorship and provenance beyond any doubt. The exhibition includes three other pictures, in addition to The Lute Player, that were made for his patron Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, but also a variant of the title work now residing in the Hermitage that was created for the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani. Taken together, these pictures constitute the most important group of secular works by the artist ever assembled and provide a unique occasion to evaluate both Caravaggio's development as an artist and the importance of Cardinal del Monte as a patron and collector. No less significant than the appearance and reidentification of "new" pictures by Caravaggio are some developments—really advances—in our understanding of the cultural milieu in which he worked in Rome and of the meaning that underlies some of his most familiar early masterpieces. Once such advance is the subject of the second part of the exhibition, which investigates music and musical practice and patronage in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy through paintings and prints. Also included are musical instruments of the period similar to those in the paintings, which have been drawn from the Metropolitan's comprehensive collection. [This book was originally published in 1990 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.] Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press