Caravaggio’s Angel Playing from a Netherlandish-Burgundian Score

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) was born in Milan, where his father Fermo Merisi served as household administrator and architect-decorator to Francesco Sforza (1550–1583), Marchese of Caravaggio. His mother, Lucia Aratori, came from a propertied family of the same Lombard district, and the connection between the Merisi and the Sforza household ran deeper than Fermo’s employment alone: Francesco Sforza had attended the wedding of Caravaggio’s parents, which gives some indication of how closely the two families were bound. Lucia’s sister, Margherita Aratori, served as wet nurse to the children of Francesco Sforza and his wife Costanza Colonna (1556–1626), which drew the Aratori family into an intimate proximity with one of the most powerful dynastic alliances in northern Italy, the Colonna being ancient Roman nobility allied by marriage to the Sforza and well connected to the Spanish Habsburg administration that had controlled the Duchy of Milan since 1535. It was a connection the Merisi family did not need in the relative stability of Caravaggio’s childhood, but would prove indispensable later.

When plague reached Milan in 1576 the family retreated to the town of Caravaggio, and within a year Fermo Merisi was dead, along with Caravaggio’s uncle, grandmother, and grandfather. Lucia Aratori survived and raised her children alone in reduced circumstances, maintaining whatever she could of the family’s connections to the Sforza household and its network. She did not live to see her son leave for Milan: she died in 1584, when Caravaggio was thirteen, leaving him an orphan with a modest inheritance and no immediate household to return to. That same year he was apprenticed to the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano (c.1535–c.1599), described in the contract of apprenticeship as a pupil of Titian (c.1488–1576) — a claim that carried as much commercial weight as biographical accuracy, but which reflects the Venetian current in Peterzano’s training that Caravaggio would later absorb into his own handling of light and surface. After completing his apprenticeship he appears to have remained in the Milan-Caravaggio area for some years, possibly with a period in Venice, before arriving in Rome around 1592.

He arrived without money, without a fixed lodging, and without a patron, and spent the better part of three years in genuine poverty, working for picture dealers and producing small devotional canvases before he came to the attention of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte (1549–1627). It was through a picture dealer near San Luigi dei Francesi — close to Del Monte’s Palazzo Madama — that Caravaggio manoeuvred himself into the cardinal’s view, painting two small genre scenes calculated to attract a wealthy collector. Del Monte was a Venetian by birth, of Tuscan aristocratic stock, diplomat for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, protector of the Sistine Chapel Choir, and one of the most intellectually ambitious patrons in Rome, whose household at the Palazzo Madama functioned as one of the city’s most active intellectual salons, frequented by scientists, musicians, painters, and men of letters. He recognised something exceptional in the two small paintings, took Caravaggio into his household around 1595, and gave him accommodation, materials, and a series of commissions. It was the arrangement that rescued Caravaggio’s career before it had properly found its footing, and it shaped the kind of painter he became far more thoroughly than his Lombard apprenticeship had done. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted at around 1597, is one of the works in which the full consequences of that arrangement are most legible, and the least examined of them is the music.

The painting’s commission remains contested. The early biographer Giulio Mancini recorded that it was made for a Monsignor Fantino Petrignani, with whom Caravaggio had lodged before entering Del Monte’s household, but the dates do not align comfortably with that account. Helen Langdon and Peter Robb, writing independently in 1998, raised the more persuasive possibility that the work was made for Del Monte himself, noting that the sophistication of its musical content is precisely what one would expect of a commission shaped by that cardinal’s intellectual tastes and personal enthusiasms (Langdon 1998; Robb 1998). A further candidate, proposed by other scholars, is Girolamo Vittrice, who also commissioned the Deposition now in the Vatican Museums; according to this account the painting was sold after Vittrice’s death to Camillo Pamphilj (1622–1666), which would explain its presence in the Doria Pamphilj collection (Graham-Dixon 2010). The question of who originally ordered the work matters because, whichever account one accepts, the painting was not made speculatively. This was the first large-scale canvas of Caravaggio’s career — a work of considerable compositional ambition, executed on a Flemish canvas that laboratory analysis has since shown was of the kind ordinarily used in the sixteenth century for tablecloths rather than for painting — and it was made for someone who expected, and could read, exactly the kind of learned musical reference that lies at its centre.

What that reference is, and what it means within the painting, was only established in 1983, when Franca Trinchieri Camiz and Agostino Ziino identified the score that the angel holds open before the seated Joseph as the motet Quam pulchra es [How beautiful you are] by the Franco-Flemish composer Noël Bauldeweyn (c.1480–c.1530), first published in Venice by Ottaviano Petrucci (1466–1539) in 1519 in the fourth volume of his Motetti de la corona [Motets of the Crown] (Camiz and Ziino 1983). The motet sets verses from Chapter 7 of the Song of Songs — Quam pulchra es et quam decora, / Assimilata es palmae / et ubera tua botris [How beautiful you are, how fair, / you are like a palm tree / and your breasts are like clusters of grapes] — a text whose erotic imagery had for centuries been interpreted within Catholic exegesis as an allegory of the Virgin Mary, the beloved of the Song understood as a figure for the Mother of God. The choice of this specific motet transforms what might otherwise read as a tender genre scene into a carefully structured theological argument: the angel is not simply playing something beautiful to send Mary and the Christ child to sleep, but is performing a song of praise addressed to Mary herself, in her presence, while she sleeps unknowing. The music is simultaneously lullaby and hymn, and the distinction between the two is precisely what gives the painting its particular kind of quiet intelligence.

Bauldeweyn is not a composer who appears in most general accounts of the period, but his Quam pulchra es occupied a significant place within the wider polyphonic tradition. Working in the generation immediately after Josquin Desprez (c.1450–1521), Bauldeweyn’s Missa Da pacem was so widely admired that it was attributed to Josquin himself well into the twentieth century. The Quam pulchra es motet was republished in Nuremberg as late as 1546, nearly thirty years after its first appearance, and a parody mass on it was composed by Nicolas Gombert (c.1495–c.1560), which signals the esteem in which the motet was held by the next generation of composers. That Caravaggio, or his patron, chose a work from the Netherlandish-Burgundian polyphonic tradition rather than any Italian or Roman contemporary composition is itself a pointed decision. By the late 1590s, the musical world in which Del Monte was so deeply invested was in the process of a fundamental transformation, and the choice of Bauldeweyn’s motet — composed perhaps eighty years earlier, in a tradition that was giving way to something entirely new — places the painting at an interesting angle to that transition.

Del Monte’s musical world in the 1590s was defined by the tension between two ways of thinking about what music was for. The dominant tradition that had shaped Roman sacred music for the better part of the century was Flemish polyphony, in which multiple voices wove together in complex counterpoint to create what contemporaries described as an otherworldly sound, the individual voice dissolving into the fabric of the whole. Del Monte, as protector of the Sistine Chapel Choir, was an institutional custodian of this tradition. But he was simultaneously one of the most avid advocates of the emerging practice of monody — the single melodic line sung by the solo voice, accompanied only by a continuo instrument — whose proponents argued that polyphony had sacrificed intelligibility and emotional directness in the pursuit of contrapuntal complexity. This was not a merely technical dispute: it carried within it a broader argument about whether music should move the listener through overwhelming collective sound or through the intimate communication of a single expressive voice. The monodic experiments of the Florentine Camerata, a circle of humanists and musicians with close connections to Del Monte’s Medici network, were already in circulation, and would within a decade produce the first operas. Del Monte’s Palazzo Madama sat at the crossroads of these two worlds, and Caravaggio, living there, was immersed in both.

Against this background, the choice of Bauldeweyn’s polyphonic motet acquires a retrospective quality that seems deliberate. The score that Joseph holds open and that the angel performs on the viol belongs to an older form, one associated with the chapels and courts of the Burgundian north rather than with the reformed liturgical culture of post-Tridentine Rome or the experimental salons of the Florentine Camerata. There is something specifically Netherlandish about the gesture — the score itself, readable enough that scholars could identify it nearly four centuries later, functions as an object of humanistic erudition within the painting, the kind of precise musical reference that circulated among collectors who owned Flemish panel paintings alongside Italian ones and who understood music as a branch of learned culture rather than merely as entertainment. Whether Caravaggio himself understood the full weight of the reference, or was guided by a patron or adviser who did, is a question the sources do not resolve; but the painting could not have taken its present form without someone in the transaction knowing exactly what Bauldeweyn’s motet meant and how it spoke to the image of Mary asleep with her child.

What Caravaggio makes of all this, pictorially, is something that no amount of musical annotation fully explains. The angel — a boy of perhaps sixteen, barefoot, one wing folded and one slightly open, wearing a white garment that slides from one shoulder — stands with his back to the viewer and his front to Joseph, playing from the score that the old man holds up with the quiet concentration of someone who has been asked to do this and is doing it carefully. The pose of the figure has been connected to that of the allegorical Vice in Annibale Carracci’s (1560–1609) Choice of Hercules, completed early in 1596 and widely discussed in Rome; if Caravaggio borrowed the pose, he transformed it entirely, removing whatever erotic ambiguity attached to its original context and replacing it with something altogether more still. Joseph sits to the left, his eyes on the score, his body frail and slightly hunched, a man performing an act of service that is also an act of faith. Mary, on the right, has fallen asleep against the Christ child, her face tipped down, completely absent from the transaction between the angel and her husband. She is the subject of the music but not its audience. The painting turns on that irony: the hymn of praise is addressed to someone who cannot hear it, and its beauty exists for the viewer rather than for the person it celebrates.

This is an unusual painting in Caravaggio’s output in several respects beyond the music. It is one of his very few works that include a genuine landscape, the open fields and distant sky behind the figures one of the rare occasions on which he allowed his scenes to breathe outdoor air. The canvas itself, laboratory analysis has revealed, is Flemish in origin — a type of cloth ordinarily used in the sixteenth century for tablecloths rather than for painting — which some scholars have taken as evidence of financial constraint at the time of execution, though it may equally reflect the availability of materials within a household that maintained extensive Netherlandish connections. Either way, the material substrate of the painting bears its own quiet relationship to the musical score depicted within it: both the canvas and the motet come from north of the Alps, and both were carried into a Roman context where they were put to uses their original makers had not anticipated.

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt is, among other things, a painting about the relationship between music and image, and about what each can do that the other cannot. Music moves in time; painting arrests it. The angel in Caravaggio’s canvas is caught in the act of playing a note that the viewer will never hear, holding a score that can be read but not sounded, performing a hymn of praise to a woman who has fallen asleep. The painting does not resolve that tension so much as dwell in it, which is perhaps why it has attracted the kind of close attention that most of Caravaggio’s more obviously dramatic works do not.

References

Graham-Dixon, A. (2010) Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. London: Allen Lane

Langdon, H. (1998) Caravaggio: A Life. London: Chatto and Windus

Robb, P. (1998) M: The Caravaggio Enigma. London: Bloomsbury

Spike, J.T. (2010) Caravaggio. 2nd edn. New York: Abbeville Press

Trinchieri Camiz, F. (1991) ‘Music and painting in Cardinal del Monte’s household’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 26, pp. 213–226. Available at: https://resources.metmuseum.org/resources/metpublications/pdf/Music_and_Painting_in_Cardinal_del_Montes_Household_The_Metropolitan_Museum_Journal_v_26_1991.pdf (Accessed: 14 October 2025)

Trinchieri Camiz, F. (1991) ‘Music and painting in Cardinal del Monte’s household’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 26, pp. 213–226. Available at: https://cdn.sanity.io/files/cctd4ker/production/0e643de368a9a945df4fb37eec164ecbd4e40b1a.pdf (Accessed: 14 October 2025).

Thalmann, F. (2014) ‘Irony, ambiguity, and musical experience in Caravaggio’s musical paintings’, Academia.edu. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/9488015/Irony_Ambiguity_and_Musical_Experience_in_Caravaggios_Musical_Paintings (Accessed: 14 October 2025).