Caravaggio and his Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French followers working in the wake of his radical naturalism and dramatic use of light in early seventeenth-century painting.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, c.1601–02, Oil on canvas, 107 × 146 cm, Bildergalerie Sanssouci, Potsdam
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, c.1601–02 Oil on canvas, 107 × 146 cm, Bildergalerie Sanssouci, Potsdam
Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637) was not a man easily impressed. A Genoese banker settled in Rome, he had assembled one of the most impressive collections in Europe and had written, in his Discorso sopra la pittura [Discourse on Painting], a careful taxonomy of artistic achievement that ranked working from life as the highest degree of skill a painter could attain. When he commissioned this picture from Caravaggio, probably around 1601, he was acquiring something that answered his own critical convictions almost point for point. Together with his brother Cardinal Benedetto, Giustiniani had already helped secure for Caravaggio some of the most importnat public commissions in Rome, both men steeped in the intellectual and devotional currents of Counter-Reformation culture. The painting joined a distinguished group of works by the artist in the family collection, among them the St Matthew and the Angel of c. 1602.
Three paintings attributed to Caravaggio from the Giustiniani holdings were destroyed in the fires that consumed the Friedrichshain flak tower in Berlin in May 1945. That this canvas survived the war is itself a miracle worth pausing over.
Two autograph versions of the composition are recorded. Giovanni Baglione (c. 1566–1643), Caravaggio’s biographer and lifelong antagonist, noted that an ecclesiastical version had been painted for Girolamo Mattei; that picture is now in a private collection in Trieste. The Potsdam canvas is the secular version, made for Giustiniani, which later passed into the Prussian royal collection. The composition became Caravaggio’s most widely copied work, with at least twenty-two replicas known from the seventeenth century alone. That rate of reproduction raises a question worth asking plainly: was it the subject that travelled so well, or the composition? Probably both. For Counter-Reformation audiences, faith confirmed through physical witness carried genuine theological weight, and for collectors, owning a version of a Caravaggio carried a rather more worldly prestige.
The passage is John 20:24–29. Thomas, absent from the earlier appearances of the risen Christ, refuses to believe unless he can put his hand into the wound. Caravaggio strips the scene to four figures pressed close together, heads bent into a tight cluster, hands converging on the opening in Christ’s side. The composition is arrestingly compact. Everything falls towards Thomas’s right hand, which Christ himself guides firmly towards the wound; the index finger presses carefully into the flesh. The other two apostles keep their hands hidden, though their curiosity is anything but concealed, their faces crowding in with an intensity scarcely less urgent than Thomas’s own. The motif of the probing finger is an old one in art, and the device may owe something to a Dürer print, though Caravaggio makes the gesture feel startlingly literal in a way no engraving could.
The palette is earthy, the chiaroscuro tightly controlled, and the effect is to hold doubt and physical proof in an unresolved tension. One difference between the two versions is worth noting: in this secular canvas, Christ’s thigh is left bare, while in the Trieste picture white drapery covers it. What are we to make of that? The absence of a halo pushes in the same direction, insisting on the body of the risen Christ as a body, warm and wounded and present. The paradox of the passage presses itself directly onto the viewer: Thomas must touch to believe, and in touching he refutes the very scepticism that brought his hand to the wound in the first place. Christ’s words from the Gospel linger over the image as its quiet counter-argument, never illustrated, never answered: ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.’ Whether Giustiniani, a man who prized the evidence of his own eyes above almost everything, found that rebuke comfortable is another question entirely.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, London
Painted during Caravaggio’s second Neapolitan period, in the final months of his life, this work belongs to the small group of late canvases in which themes of violence and mortality are presented with uncommon directness. By this stage Caravaggio was a fugitive, living under sentence of death in Rome following the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606. The precise character of that encounter remains contested. Contemporary avvisi cited a quarrel over a pallacorda wager, and the incident was long absorbed into a narrative of honour culture and formal duelling. Subsequent scholarship, drawing on archival evidence including a barber-surgeon’s report, has proposed rather different readings — among them that the fighting was organised as a pretext to settle a personal account, and that the fatal wound was no accident but an act of deliberate symbolic injury (Graham-Dixon, 2010; Balduzzi, cited in Calvesi, 1990). Whatever the precise sequence of events, the legal consequences were unambiguous: Caravaggio was condemned to death under a bando capitale, and the bounty on him required no body — only his head.
The London Salome is the later of two treatments of the same subject; the Madrid version, now at the Palacio Real, almost certainly dates from his first Neapolitan stay of 1606–7, while the looser handling and pared-down palette of the National Gallery canvas place it in the final months of the artist’s life. Against a void of darkness, the executioner lowers the Baptist’s severed head onto a platter that Salome receives, while an older woman, marked by grief, turns her gaze aside. None of the figures look at one another. Their averted eyes create an atmosphere of deliberate silence, stripping the scene of any theatrical resolution. What remains is the transaction of death, handed over as though by contract.
Technically, the painting is characteristic of Caravaggio’s late manner: the handling is freer than in earlier works, with a broad application of paint in place of finely modelled gradations, and the dark ground left deliberately exposed in several areas to provide the mid-tone in the shadows. The palette, already darkening in the late Roman works, restricts itself almost entirely to earth tones and silvery whites, with only occasional flashes of warmer colour. The effect is unsparing: nothing is offered to soften the brutality or place it at a safe aesthetic distance. As Keith’s technical examination of the canvas confirms, this economy was deliberate, not unfinished (Keith, 1998).
Created as Caravaggio was still awaiting a papal pardon that might allow his return to Rome, the painting carries an intimacy with the subject of killing that is difficult to attribute to coincidence. A man who had made decapitation a recurring subject in the years after his own condemnation, and who had recently survived what may have been a retaliatory attack in Naples, was here again handing a severed head across the picture plane (Graham-Dixon, 2010; Puglisi, 1998). The violence in the image is neither heroic nor condemned. It simply is — which is, in the end, what makes it so hard to look away from.
References
Graham-Dixon, A. (2010) Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. London: Allen Lane
Langdon, H. (1998) Caravaggio: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus.
Puglisi, C. (1998) Caravaggio. London: Phaidon
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, LondonMichelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 1609/10. Oil on canvas, 91.5 × 106.7 cm. The National Gallery, London
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, c.1595 Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, on temporary loan to The National Gallery, London
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, c.1595 Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, on temporary loan to The National Gallery, London
Painted in Rome soon after Caravaggio entered the service of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, this canvas represents one of his first major religious commissions and marks a decisive moment in his career. At this stage, Caravaggio had already made his reputation in Rome with small-scale genre pieces of musicians, cardsharps, and fortune tellers, but he had yet to prove himself a painter of sacred history. Del Monte, whose circle included theologians, musicians, and humanists, recognised in the young Lombard painter a talent capable of giving the new spirituality of the Counter-Reformation a startling immediacy.
The subject derives from St Bonaventure’s Legenda maior, recounting Francis’s vision on Mount La Verna when he received the stigmata. Instead of representing a radiant seraph or a celestial beam of light, Caravaggio dramatises the moment as an intimate collapse of the body, the saint swooning in ecstasy and supported by an angel whose embrace deliberately recalls traditional Pietà compositions. The imagery fuses Francis’s mystical experience with Christ’s own Passion, emphasising the Franciscan theme of imitation Christi. The angel’s youthful face, softly lit, creates a startling contrast with the rugged, almost portrait-like features of Francis, grounding the miracle in palpable humanity.
The picture also reveals the painter’s early experiments with the radical chiaroscuro that would come to define his mature style. The figures emerge abruptly from the surrounding darkness, light falling only where the narrative demands attention. Behind them, barely discernible, are Brother Leo and two shepherds who witness the vision; their subdued presence links the saint’s ecstasy both to the Nativity tradition and to the everyday world of the faithful.
This emphasis on lived reality was central to Caravaggio’s approach. He dispensed with preparatory cartoons and worked directly from posed models, adjusting as he painted. Technical examination has shown that Francis’s gesture towards his side was altered during the process, strengthening the allusion to the stigmata. Such working methods, unusual at the time, gave his pictures their disarming sense of immediacy but also exposed him to criticism from contemporaries who judged his naturalism irreverent.
The canvas entered the collection of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, one of Rome’s most powerful patrons, consolidating Caravaggio’s reputation as a religious painter of note. From this moment, his career shifted rapidly towards large ecclesiastical commissions that would scandalise and enthral the city in equal measure. Seen in the context of his life, this painting occupies the threshold between the artist’s early years of obscurity and the stormy decade that followed.
References
Graham-Dixon, A. (2010) Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. London: Allen Lane
Langdon, H. (1998) Caravaggio: A Life. London: Chatto & Windus.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Supper at Emmaus, 1601, Oil and tempera on canvas, 141 × 196.2 cm, The National Gallery, London
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Supper at Emmaus, 1601, Oil and tempera on canvas, 141 × 196.2 cm, The National Gallery, London
Painted in 1601 for Ciriaco Mattei, and commissioned in the wake of the public sensation caused by the Contarelli Chapel paintings in San Luigi dei Francesi, the Supper at Emmaus belongs to the most confident phase of Caravaggio’s Roman career. Ciriaco, together with his brother Asdrubale, was among the most active collectors in the city, and their patronage gave Caravaggio access to a cultivated audience willing to absorb the demands of his naturalism. Within two years the Mattei circle commissioned three canvases from him, a degree of sustained investment that speaks to how seriously his work was being taken in the highest levels of Roman collecting.
The canvas captures the instant in the Gospel of Luke when the risen Christ reveals himself to the disciples at Emmaus. Cleopas, in a brown jacket bearing the scallop-shell pilgrim badge, flings his arms wide in astonishment, while his companion shoves back from his chair in disbelief. Between them, Christ raises his right hand in blessing, his stillness holding steady against the commotion around him. The fruit basket, balanced perilously at the edge of the table, carries both symbolic resonance and a calculated challenge to pictorial space, drawing the viewer into the scene as though they might catch it before it falls.
Contrary to the long-standing impression that Caravaggio worked impulsively, without preparation, technical examination has shown that he sometimes laid down outlines with a brush — the abbozzo — and traces of brushed underdrawing in dark brown paint survive here, slightly above the final contour of the wine glass, indicating that the still-life arrangement was carefully placed before paint was applied. Caravaggio did not sketch in light tones; he began with a graphic trace in burnt umber, then, while it was still wet, built over it with fast, firm brushwork that merged the underdrawing with the first paint layer. What reads as spontaneous presence was the product of close observation and deliberate construction.
This was painted when Caravaggio was still secure in Rome, sustained by powerful patrons and admired for his startling directness of vision. The killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606 ended that. He fled Rome under a bando capitale, his life forfeit to anyone who caught him within papal territory. The Brera Supper at Emmaus was most likely painted on the Colonna estate at Paliano, where he sought refuge in the immediate aftermath of the killing. The work was subsequently sold, through the intermediary Ottavio Costi, to the Costa brothers; by 1624 it appears in an inventory of the Palazzo Patrizi in Rome.
The contrast between the two versions is worth dwelling on. The London canvas is expansive and brightly lit, with a youthful Christ and figures whose gestures reach outward, into the viewer’s space. In the Brera version, the poses and gestures have shed their theatricality; the colours remain varied but are less insistent, the light softer, the handling looser. Presence becomes more important than performance. Where the London canvas announces itself as a display of virtuosity for a patrician collection, the Brera picture has the quality of something painted for the painter’s own need, with little between him and the subject. Together they trace a path through Caravaggio’s career: from the ambitious naturalist working for one of Rome’s great households, to the fugitive painter on the run, turning back to a familiar subject under very different circumstances.
References
Graham-Dixon, A. (2010) Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. London: Allen Lane.
After Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence, 1600 or 1609/2015, Oil on canvas, 268 × 197 cm. Palermo, Oratory of San Lorenzo. Stolen 1969; replica installed in 2015
The painting that once occupied the altar wall of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Palermo was stolen on the night of 17–18 October 1969 and has not been recovered. All that survives of its appearance is a colour transparency taken in 1968 and a set of large-format black-and-white glass-plate negatives produced during the painting’s last restoration in 1951.
The traditional dating places the work in 1609, during Caravaggio’s passage through Sicily. Giovanni Baglione (c. 1566–1643), writing in 1642, recorded that Caravaggio had passed through Palermo after leaving Messina; Giovan Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) expanded the claim; Francesco Susinno (c. 1670–c. 1739) placed the work squarely within the Sicilian itinerary. No document has ever surfaced attesting to Caravaggio’s physical presence in Palermo, but the biographers’ agreement seemed sufficient, and for three centuries the dating went uncontested. More recent archival research, principally by Giovanni Mendola and Michele Cuppone, has unsettled it. A contract dated 5 April 1600, registered in the house of the Sienese merchant Fabio Nuti, records a commission from Caravaggio for a painting ‘with figures’, specifying dimensions of twelve Roman palmi in height by seven or eight in width. The height corresponds closely to the Palermo canvas. Nuti’s commercial network connected him to a member of the Compagnia di San Francesco, the confraternity that owned the oratory, and further archival findings confirm financial payments from Nuti to Palermo around this date.
Cuppone has identified the Palazzo Madama in Rome, where Caravaggio was then living, as the probable place of execution, which would make the Nativity the artist’s first altarpiece, painted in the same working space where Maffeo Barberini (1568–1644), the future Pope Urban VIII, had sat for his portrait only a year or so earlier. The argument has gained support from scholars including Claudio Strinati and the late Maurizio Calvesi (1927–2020), but has not yet displaced the traditional dating. The question remains open, and it matters: if the painting belongs to 1600, it sits alongside the Contarelli Chapel commissions at San Luigi dei Francesi; if to 1609, it belongs to the same desperate Sicilian months that produced the Burial of St Lucy (1608, Church of Santa Lucia alla Badia, Syracuse), the Raising of Lazarus and the Adoration of the Shepherds (both 1609, Museo Regionale, Messina). The technique, as far as the photographs allow us to judge, sits more comfortably with the early Roman works: tighter, more resolved, more deliberate in its modelling than the loose, abbreviated handling of those late three Sicilian canvases, where forms emerge from dark grounds in broken, almost febrile strokes. This is one of the strongest formal arguments for the earlier dating, though it is not conclusive.
The composition is quiet for so large a canvas. The Virgin sits directly on the ground in the Madonna dell’Umiltà tradition, an iconographic type established in Italian devotional art from the early fourteenth century by painters including Simone Martini (c. 1284–1344). The Christ Child lies before her on a thin scattering of straw. There is no manger, no stable architecture, no ox, no ass: none of the apparatus that had accumulated around the Nativity subject over centuries of Northern Italian and Flemish tradition. The setting is barely specified, a deep undefined darkness against which a few figures are gathered in a concentrated fall of light.
St Lawrence kneels at the left in a golden diaconal dalmatic, one hand resting on the gridiron, his gaze inclined towards the infant. Behind him, in deeper shadow, St Francis of Assisi kneels hooded in a dark Conventual habit. The two saints occupy the same side of the canvas but inhabit different registers of light: Lawrence catches it fully, his dalmatic gleaming; Francis recedes, his face barely distinguishable from the surrounding dark. In Caravaggio’s work, proximity to the light source is never arbitrary, and a devotional logic may be at play: the deacon-martyr, whose cult is bound to the physical and the sacrificial (the gridiron, the distribution of the Church’s goods to the poor), receives direct illumination, while the contemplative saint withdraws into something closer to self-effacement.
At the right, Joseph stands in a green cloak with his back almost entirely to the viewer, leaning towards a companion figure variously identified as a shepherd or as Friar Leone, the companion of St Francis. If the latter, the scene becomes a specifically Franciscan meditation on the Incarnation rather than a conventional Nativity with pastoral witnesses. The question cannot be settled from the photographs. What is clear is Joseph’s unusual treatment: turned away, his face hidden, excluded from the devotional circuit of gazes connecting the other figures to the Child. He also appears unusually young, departing from the aged patriarch standard in Western art since its consolidation through Byzantine convention and the Meditationes Vitae Christi [Meditations on the Life of Christ]. Was this deliberate, or was it simply the model available? The painting invites the question and can no longer answer it.
Above, a foreshortened angel unfurls a banderole inscribed Gloria in Excelsis Deo. The pose closely anticipates that of the angel in the second St Matthew and the Angel (1602, formerly Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Berlin; destroyed 1945), and the resemblance has become a fixture of the dating dispute: prototype or self-quotation, depending on where you stand.
Since December 2015, a high-resolution facsimile produced by the Madrid studio Factum Arte, generated from the transparency, the 1951 negatives and a comparative study of Caravaggio’s technique in surviving paintings, has occupied the original frame above the altar. The colours are extrapolated rather than recorded; the surface is flat, printed, without the physical density of oil on canvas. It serves as the oratory’s liturgical image, but it is not a Caravaggio.
Gregori, M. (1985) The Age of Caravaggio. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New evidences in the following
Carrabino, D. (2026) Caravaggio in Early Modern Sicily. London: Routledge
Cuppone, M. (2020) ‘Caravaggio e Mario Minniti tra Roma e Siracusa’, in Cuppone, M. and Romano, M. (eds.) Caravaggio a Siracusa. Un itinerario nel Seicento aretuseo. Ragusa: Le Fate Editore
Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen (1588–1629), A Man playing a Lute, 1624. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 74.9 cm. The National Gallery, London
Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen (1588–1629), A Man playing a Lute, 1624. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 74.9 cm. The National Gallery, London
The most immediately arresting fact in the catalogue raisonné of Hendrick Jansz ter Brugghen (1588–1629) is a conspicuous absence. Of the eighty-nine paintings accepted as autograph, not one can be securely attributed to the years he spent in Italy (Slatkes and Franits, 2007). Both Gerrit van Honthorst (1592–1656) and Dirck van Baburen (c. 1595–1624), who followed him to Rome at a later date, received documented commissions there, built reputations, and returned with traceable bodies of Italian work. Ter Brugghen, who arrived first and stayed longest, left nothing behind that has survived identification. The first monograph on the artist, published by Benedict Nicolson (1914–1978) in 1958, acknowledged the difficulty without fully resolving it; Nicolson organised ter Brugghen’s development around what he could see in the Utrecht paintings rather than around any Italian foundation. Scholars subsequently proposed candidates for Italian-period attribution, with estimates ranging from eight to fifteen possible works (Slatkes and Franits) but every one has been rejected on stylistic or evidential grounds in the 2007 catalogue raisonné. A Turin Crucifixion, previously placed in the Italian period by Robert Schillemans on the basis of its North Italian provenance and certain formal qualities, was subsequently argued to belong to ter Brugghen’s Utrecht maturity (Franits, 2017). The Italian period remains, in the specialist literature, perplexing.
The catalogue raisonné was itself an unusual document. Its lead author, Leonard J. Slatkes (1929–2003), had devoted decades of research to the project but died before completing it; his former graduate student Wayne Franits took on the task of finishing and publishing the work, and the resulting volume contains, somewhat exceptionally, open disagreements between the two scholars. Franits disavows, for instance, Slatkes’s enthusiasm for the Toledo Museum of Art’s Supper at Emmaus as the earliest of ter Brugghen’s certain works, setting aside objections from other specialists about both its authenticity and date (Slatkes and Franits, 2007; HNA Reviews, 2017). The internal wrangling is one of the book’s distinguishing features. It also serves as a reminder that a catalogue raisonné is not a settled verdict but a position, coloured by the differing judgements of its authors at a particular moment in the discipline.
Against the background of that gap in the record, the one first-hand document that survives from ter Brugghen’s Italian years carries unusual weight. On 1 April 1615, appearing before the Utrecht court as a witness in a minor legal dispute, ter Brugghen described himself as having spent ettelicke jaren in Italy exercising his art. The phrase translates as ‘some years.’ The Dutch term ettelicke characteristically implies fewer than ten, which is precisely what made the statement significant, since the older biographical tradition had assumed a Roman sojourn of a full decade. That tradition derived from a family-commissioned engraving of 1708, produced nearly eighty years after the artist’s death, which stated that he had ‘travelled from Utrecht to Rome, and ten years later returned.’ The legal testimony, in ter Brugghen’s own words, quietly undermined it (Franits, 2017).
The dispute over dates has not resolved itself tidily, and no consensus has emerged. A document of 1607 identifies a man of the same name in military service, which has led some scholars to place his Italian departure no earlier than that summer. If correct, this would mean he arrived in Rome after Caravaggio (1571–1610) had fled the city in 1606 following the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni, making any direct encounter between the two painters impossible (Franits, 2017). The National Gallery, London, maintaining the earlier chronology, continues to state that ter Brugghen ‘travelled to Rome in about 1604, within the lifetime of Caravaggio’ (National Gallery, n.d.). Others, working from the sequence of his Bloemaert training and the probability that he left Utrecht around the age of sixteen or seventeen, have supported the earlier date of c. 1604–05. Neither position has produced a decisive piece of documentary evidence, and what is established on firm archival ground is simply that ter Brugghen was in Milan in the summer of 1614 on his way home, and present in Utrecht by April 1615.
What he encountered during those years can be partially reconstructed from what subsequently emerges in his Utrecht paintings. The Contarelli Chapel at San Luigi dei Francesi, with its three large Caravaggio canvases completed by 1602, was the most publicly discussed painting commission of the period in Rome and effectively unavoidable for any painter working there. Ter Brugghen’s two versions of the Calling of Saint Matthew (1617, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Havre; 1621, Centraal Museum, Utrecht) respond directly to the Contarelli composition: the arrangement of figures around a table, the frozen moment of recognition, the figures pressed close to the picture plane. His handling of light is entirely his own in both versions, cooler and more diffuse than Caravaggio’s raking beam, but the compositional debt is legible (Slatkes and Franits, 2007). He also knew the Cerasi Chapel paintings in Santa Maria del Popolo (c. 1600–01), and the Giustiniani collection, which housed Caravaggio’s Lute Player (c. 1596) among other works, was not inaccessible to visiting painters of serious purpose.
What Rome did not give him, it is equally important to note, was the Manfredi manner. Bartolomeo Manfredi (c. 1582–1622), Caravaggio’s most persistent direct follower in the city, developed the half-length genre scene of musicians, drinkers, and card-players into the format that would eventually dominate Utrecht painting in the early 1620s. That manner arrived in Utrecht not through ter Brugghen but through van Baburen and van Honthorst on their return from Rome in 1620–21, which explains why ter Brugghen’s own genre scenes begin only in 1621, six years after he came home (Dayton Art Institute, n.d.). The North Italian dimension of his Italian formation is in some ways more visible in his early Utrecht pictures. His 1619 Adoration of the Magi (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), the earliest painting attributable to him with certainty, carries clear traces of Carlo Saraceni (c. 1579–1620), a Venetian-born Caravaggist whose cooler palette and more decorative handling of light distinguished him sharply from the Manfredi tradition. The workshop of Jacopo Bassano (c. 1510–1592) also left marks on his approach to multi-figure compositions that persist through the 1620s (Slatkes and Franits, 2007). The quality of crisp, lateral light moving across solid forms that intensifies in ter Brugghen’s work from 1621 onward has been traced by Franits to the example of Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), another North Italian painter active in Rome during ter Brugghen’s years there, with the same light quality appearing in van Baburen’s mature work, suggesting both men absorbed it from the same source independently (Dayton Art Institute, n.d.).
Whether ter Brugghen made a second Italian journey, somewhere between 1619 and 1621, was debated across much of the twentieth century. The hypothesis was first advanced by Roberto Longhi (1890–1970), the Italian art historian who did more than anyone else to reconstruct the Caravaggist movement as a European phenomenon, and was taken up by others who found the sudden deepening of Italianate elements in ter Brugghen’s post-1621 work difficult to account for otherwise. Franits, the most recent and most thoroughly documented voice on the question, concluded that the return of van Baburen and van Honthorst to Utrecht provided sufficient stimulus without any second journey being necessary (Slatkes and Franits, 2007). The Rijksmuseum catalogue entry for the 1619 Adoration of the Magi states more bluntly that ‘the notion that he made a second trip to Italy has been rejected by most recent scholars’ (Rijksmuseum, n.d.). The Utrecht archives record ter Brugghen’s presence in the city with increasing frequency from 1622 onward, and no document places him elsewhere between 1615 and his death.
The one contemporary writer who knew ter Brugghen personally and committed his impressions to paper was Joachim von Sandrart (1606–1688), who spent time in Utrecht during the second half of the 1620s. In his Teutsche Academie [German Academy of the Building, Sculptural and Painting Arts] (1675), Sandrart described the artist in terms that have since generated their own scholarly literature: ‘in line with his inclination to harbour profound but melancholic thoughts he followed nature and its unpleasant defects in his works very well, but disagreeably.’ Marten Jan Bok, in a 2009 article in the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art specifically devoted to the passage, concluded that Sandrart genuinely intended to characterise ter Brugghen’s personality as melancholic, and that this assessment was based on direct acquaintance with the man during those Utrecht years rather than on biographical convention (Bok, 2009). The remark about following nature ‘unpleasantly’ is usually read as distaste for unflattering physiognomies and unglamorous flesh. It is also, unintentionally, a precise description of what ter Brugghen had kept from Caravaggio’s example: not the theatrics, not the lighting system, but the refusal to make a face more presentable than it was.
A Man Playing a Lute (oil on canvas, 101.6 × 74.9 cm, National Gallery, London), signed in monogram at the upper right and firmly dated 1624, belongs to a single remarkable year in ter Brugghen’s career. In that year alone he produced no fewer than five separate compositions devoted to musical subjects, including bagpipe players and a violinist as well as the lute players (National Gallery of Art, Washington, n.d.). The concentration is striking, and it was not accidental. Dirck van Baburen had died early in 1624, aged around twenty-nine, ending an association that had energised ter Brugghen’s genre output since 1621 and possibly, for a period, taken the form of a shared workshop (Slatkes and Franits, 2007). The year of van Baburen’s death is the year in which ter Brugghen appears to have made the musician subject fully his own.
The type had a longer history than the Utrecht context might suggest. Images of solo instrumentalists existed from the early sixteenth century, but it was Caravaggio’s paintings of a lute player, made for Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637) around 1596 and subsequently for Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte (1549–1626), that restored the subject to contemporary currency in Rome. Those paintings are semantically layered: they include music scores, flowers, a violin, a recorder, instruments pointing toward love poetry, the transience of pleasure, and the five senses. When van Baburen produced his Lute Player in 1622 (Centraal Museum, Utrecht), now the earliest securely dated Utrecht example of the type, he stripped most of that iconographic apparatus out. He wanted the figure, the instrument, and the confrontational directness of a face aimed at the viewer. Ter Brugghen, beginning with his first musical genre pieces of 1621, moved in the same direction, though toward a quieter outcome.
The National Gallery painting shows a man entirely absorbed in playing, rendered at close range with an intimacy that carries a slight edge of comedy. The reddened nose and moist lips have conventionally been read as signs of inebriation, and the image permits a moralising interpretation in which sensory pleasure shades toward excess. A second autograph version, a singing lute player of similar dimensions now in the Kremer Collection, dates to the same year or very shortly after (RKD, n.d.), and an engraving made in 1624 after a related composition was inscribed with a Dutch couplet: ‘I play expertly on the sweet full strings of the lute; thereby I can also sing lustily and know that it sounds good’ (National Gallery, n.d.). The breezy self-congratulation of the rhyme, written from the perspective of the painted figure, gives no sign of moral alarm. How much moralising weight the original audience would have brought to an image like this ? Ter Brugghen does not seem particularly inclined to disapprove of his lutenist.
Within the Utrecht Caravaggisti, the painting occupies a position that is easier to define by contrast than by direct description. Van Honthorst (1592–1656), who had by 1624 largely redirected his practice toward the polished courtly portraits and mythologies that would secure his success in The Hague and London, worked in his genre pieces with deep, artificial candlelight and a theatrical surface. Van Baburen’s figures are more physically insistent, their modelling blunter, their gaze more confrontational. Ter Brugghen worked at a different register altogether. The light in the 1624 lute player is cool and lateral, moving across the surface of fabric and flesh in soft gradations rather than abrupt contrasts. The figure does not perform for the viewer so much as offer access to a private moment that the viewer is permitted to overhear. In his two Flute Players of 1621, ter Brugghen had already experimented with placing dark figures against lighter grounds, an inversion of the standard Caravaggesque tonal arrangement (Nicolson, 1958), and that interest in atmospheric delicacy rather than dramatic impact distinguishes him consistently from his Utrecht contemporaries. It also explains why his influence, once traced, reaches forward rather than staying within the Caravaggist circle.
Ter Brugghen died on 1 November 1629, still in Utrecht, at forty-one. His recovery into the scholarly canon was slow: Nicolson’s 1958 monograph marked the first serious attempt to establish his place in seventeenth-century painting, more than three centuries after his death, characterising him as ‘a link between Caravaggio and Vermeer’ but also, and more durably, as a painter of independent achievement in the first spring of Dutch realism (Nicolson, 1958). What the lute player of 1624 makes plain is that ter Brugghen had, by the middle of his brief career, arrived at something that his contemporaries recognised as distinct. Sandrart called it disagreeable. The painting has worn that description rather well.
Seaman, N.T. (2012) The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen: Reinventing Christian Painting after the Reformation in Utrecht. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate
Slatkes, L.J. and Franits, W.E. (2007) The Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen (1588–1629): Catalogue Raisonné. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Matthias Stom (1600–after 1649), Esau Returning from the Hunt, Selling his Birthright to Jacob for a Bowl of Lentils, c.1639–43, Oil on canvas,155.7 × 204.5cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Matthias Stom (1600–after 1649), Esau Returning from the Hunt, Selling his Birthright to Jacob for a Bowl of Lentils, c.1639–43, Oil on canvas,155.7 × 204.5cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Matthias Stom, a Netherlandish painter active in Italy, developed a distinctive form of Caravaggesque realism that flourished during his years in Naples and Sicily. The present painting belongs to a group of works executed in Sicily between 1639 and 1645 and depicts the episode from Genesis 25 in which Esau, exhausted from the hunt, surrenders his birthright to his younger brother Jacob in exchange for food. Stom compresses the scene into a confined space, bringing the protagonists close to the picture plane. Jacob is shown seated at a table, pale and smooth-skinned, offering the dish of lentils; Esau stands to the right with a hare still in his grasp, his rugged features marked by fatigue; behind them Rebecca leans forward, guiding the transaction. The figures are lit by a single candle, the light falling sharply on flesh, fur, and fabric, while the surrounding darkness closes in around them.
The theme had particular resonance in the seventeenth century, combining the immediacy of a domestic transaction with the weight of theological interpretation. In Christian tradition the episode was read as prefiguring the divine election of Jacob and the ancestral line of Christ, while Jewish exegesis emphasised the familial conflict and moral consequences of Esau’s choice. Stom renders the drama without ornament, relying on the interplay of light and shadow to underscore the contrast between the brothers and to heighten the role of Rebecca as the instrument of God’s plan.
Several versions of this composition are known, a sign of its popularity among collectors and of the adaptability of Stom’s formula. The Berlin canvas is among the most complete and best preserved. Its stark contrasts and concentrated narrative exemplify Stom’s mature Sicilian style and reveal the enduring appeal of Caravaggio’s legacy in northern European hands.
Matthias Stom (1600–c.1652), Christ on the Mount of Olives, c.1630–32, Oil on canvas, 155.7 × 204.5 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Matthias Stom (1600–c.1652), Christ on the Mount of Olives, c.1630–32, Oil on canvas, 155.7 × 204.5 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
Matthias Stom was a Dutch painter active in Italy, best known as one of the most distinctive Northern followers of Caravaggio. Born in Amersfoort around 1600, little is known of his training, though his work shows clear awareness of Utrecht Caravaggisti such as Gerrit van Honthorst. By the late 1620s he was in Rome, and by the early 1630s had moved to Naples, where he painted large-scale religious works for a local devotional market. He later worked in Sicily, in Messina and Palermo, where his paintings were acquired by religious confraternities and private patrons.
Christ on the Mount of Olives belongs to his Neapolitan period. The composition depicts the moment after the Last Supper when Christ prays in the Garden of Gethsemane. The angel who appears to him holds a chalice, symbol of his coming Passion, while the dramatic lighting isolates Christ’s figure against the surrounding darkness. The emphatic chiaroscuro, broad handling of paint, and half-length figures set in shallow space reveal Stom’s dependence on Caravaggio’s example, filtered through the work of Neapolitan masters such as Jusepe de Ribera.
Paintings such as this demonstrate Stom’s ability to adapt Caravaggesque naturalism to the requirements of private devotion. His works circulated widely in Southern Italy and had a lasting influence on Sicilian painting of the seventeenth century.
