The Musicians by Caravaggio was created in 1597. The painting is in Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The size of the work is 92,1 x 118,4 cm and is made as an oil on canvas.
While Cupid confirms Caravaggio’s allegorical frame for representing Music, the artist equally engages with contemporary performance and individualized models, including a self-portrait in the second boy from the right. Caravaggio’s contemporary, Giovanni Baglione, recorded that the artist painted “a concert, with some youths portrayed from nature very well” immediately after joining the household of his first great patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte. Most likely, this is the same painting and is one of several employing the half-length, earthy yet sensual figures with which Caravaggio made his name upon arriving in Rome. (Read more in Metropolitan Museum of Art)
About the Artist: Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born in Milan. During the final four years of his life he moved between Naples, Malta, and Sicily until his death. His paintings have been characterized by art critics as combining a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting. Caravaggio employed close physical observation with a dramatic use of chiaroscuro that came to be known as tenebrism… Read more
