Lot 225: Angelo Caroselli (Rome 1585-1652) A young man playing a lute by candlelight

A young man playing a lute by candlelight
oil on canvas
71.6 x 63cm (28 3/16 x 24 13/16in).

PROVENANCE:
The Arcade Gallery, London, 1965
K.R. Bernard-Smith Collection, New South Wales, Australia

Caroselli's work, of which a relatively small output is known, was greatly influenced by Caravaggio, particularly in his use of light effects and in his direct, unidealised realism. According to the eighteenth century art historian Baldinucci, it was Caroselli's association with this great artist that encouraged him to become a painter. After visits to Florence, in 1605, and Naples, in 1613, he settled in Rome and around 1619 shared a studio with the Lucchese painter Pietro Paolini, and the two artists' oeuvres are sometimes confused.

In the first three decades of the seventeenth century, the depiction of musical subjects in Italian, and more specifically Roman, painting, underwent a fundamental change, with music itself becoming the principal subject, as opposed to a more subsidiary one, in, for example, religious paintings. This change in direction coincided with a shift in musical tastes from polyphony to a single vocal style accompanied by an instrument, such as the lute. Caravaggio's musical paintings from the very end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries undoubtedly served as the prototype with works such as The Lute Player (known in two versions), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, along with The Musicians, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, greatly influencing his followers. The change in the way music was performed in a private setting is described by Caravaggio's great patron, the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, in his Discorso sopra la musica of 1628. Of particular relevance to the present painting, Giustiniani comments on the demise in popularity of the lute in the 1620s 'In the past, the lute was frequently played; this instrument has now been almost abandoned, however, since the introduction of the theorbo which is better adapted to the voice, even the most mediocre voice, and has been widely accepted because it voids the great problem of playing the lute really well'.