Caravaggio

Tratado sobre Caravaggio

Mahon, formerly attache at the National

Gallery in London, has specialized in

research on the Italian seventeenth century.

He is at present preparing the catalogue of

the Guercino drawings at Windsor Castle.

The Metropolitan Museum has recently secured

an example of the relatively rare work

of a great artist who had a profound impact

on European painting and who has often been

hailed as "the first modern painter." As I have

already discussed The Musicians in some detail

elsewhere,1 with the full art-historical apparatus,

I shall limit myself here to repeating that

I identify this remarkable canvas with Caravaggio's

painting of young musicians which

his contemporary, Giovanni Baglione, records

as having been executed for the art-loving

Cardinal del Monte immediately after the latter

had taken the destitute young genius under

his protection: an early work therefore,

painted in the fifteen-nineties-to be dated

about 1594-1595, according to my interpretation

of the very complex chronological problem

of the youthful group to which it must

belong.

On the present occasion I should like to

touch on some aspects of the background,

both general and particular, which a picture

of this kind reflects. Perhaps it is necessary to

insist from the start on the regrettably limited

scope of our knowledge and understanding of

seventeenth-century Italian painting, of which

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was one

of the founding spirits. The time is long overdue

for a much wider recognition of the fact

that, under the facade of smooth-but superficial

and outdated-text-book generalizations,

1 The Burlington Magazine, xciv (1952), pp. 3 ff., and

Paragone, no. 25 (Jan. 1952), pp. 20 ff. For information

on the recent provenance see also The Burlington

Magazine, xciv (1952), pp. 119 f.

there exists (particularly as regards the early

phases of Seicento painting) a multiplicity of

intricate problems which are but rarely posed,

much less solved. Specialists who have to

wrestle with these questions in detail are only

too well aware of the extent of the groundwork

which remains to be done, but many art

historians are still to be found who, having

no