The Lute Player

Caravaggio was in his mid-twenties, newly arrived in the household of Cardinal del Monte in Rome, when he painted this for the cardinal's friend, the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani. It is one of his earliest mature works and shows the naturalism that made him famous. Look at the still life: the pear is bruised, the lute has a visible crack, and the pages are creased and worn. Look also at the music itself, which is legible and has been identified as madrigals by Jacques Arcadelt, love songs with lines like you know that I love you. The cracked lute and the fading flowers are quiet reminders that music, love and youth all pass. The reflection of the window in the vase is a tiny piece of bravura.

The painting came to the Hermitage in 1808, when the Giustiniani collection was sold in Paris and Vivant Denon, the director of Napoleon's Louvre, helped Tsar Alexander the First acquire it. It is the only Caravaggio in Russia. A long restoration completed in the twenty-tens removed yellowed varnish and old overpainting, so the whites and the cool grey wall now look as fresh as the artist intended. Notice how the violin lies with its bow across it, as if waiting for a second player who has not arrived.

Did You Know? For two hundred years the painting was listed as a picture of a girl; the sitter is a boy, probably a young Spanish castrato singer.