The Musicians

Caravaggio painted The Musicians in 1597 for Cardinal Del Monte, his first major patron in Rome. He was 26 years old and had been in Rome for about six years, working as an assistant in various studios and painting small pictures for sale on the street. The Cardinal took him into his household at the Palazzo Madama around 1597, gave him room and board, and commissioned the kind of paintings that would launch his career. The painting shows four young men in a room, rehearsing a piece of vocal music. Three of them hold musical instruments: a lute, a violin, and a cornetto. The fourth, at the center, sings from a sheet of music. The figures are close together, filling the frame, their bodies overlapping. The light comes from the left, falling across the faces and the white shirts, leaving the background in deep shadow. A glass of flowers sits on the table at the lower left, a detail that has been read as a symbol of the transience of music and of youth. The Musicians is one of Caravaggio's earliest genre paintings, a scene of everyday life rather than a religious or mythological subject. Cardinal Del Monte was a music lover who hosted concerts at his palace, and the painting reflects the world of the Cardinal's household. The figures are probably portraits of the young men who lived in the Cardinal's entourage, including the castrato Pedro Montoya and the painter Mario Minniti, who was Caravaggio's companion and model in the mid-1590s. Caravaggio's method was revolutionary. He painted from live models, in his studio, under controlled lighting. He did not make preparatory drawings, as the painters of the previous generation had done. He placed his models in the positions he wanted and painted what he saw, directly on the canvas. This gave his paintings a physical immediacy that no one had seen before: the figures look like real people in a real room, not idealized types arranged in a composition. Oil on canvas, 132 by 97 centimeters. Caravaggio painted with a limited palette of earth tones, whites, and deep reds. The white shirts are built in thick layers of lead white, which gives them a dense, physical presence. The faces are painted in warm browns and pinks, with the features defined by shadow rather than line. The background is a warm, dark brown, barely visible, which pushes the figures forward into the light. The vertical format and warm dark palette make this print work well in a study, music room, or dining room. The browns and whites pair with dark wood, candlelight, and traditional furniture. The 16x20 or 18x24 size gives the figures enough room to read. The painting has an intimate, musical quality that suits rooms where people listen or play. The painting is part of the Havemeyer Collection, bequeathed to the Met in 1929. It is one of only a handful of Caravaggio paintings in American museums. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.