The Städel Museum in Frankfurt recently acquired a significant painting by the Utrecht painter Dirck van Baburen dating from 1622. It shows a young singer presenting a virtuoso sample of his art. This masterpiece of both keen observation and dramatization is closely related to quite a number of depictions of musicians all of which were carried out in Utrecht in the 1620s. During that period, the Dutch town was an artistic laboratory where painters experimented with the novel pictorial invention, constantly competing for new solutions. The three protagonists among this group of artists – Hendrick Terbrugghen, Gerard van Honthorst, and Dirck van Baburen – had sojourned in Rome for an entire decade, where they had studied the art of Caravaggio, and soon prevailed with their own compositions executed in the style of their paragon. On exhibition though 26 July, 2009.
Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) – Lute Player ca 1596 Oil on Canvas
This exhibition for the first time offers a comprehensive and high-quality assembly of musicians and brothel scenes by these so-called Utrecht Caravaggists. Their works will be juxtaposed with superb paintings by Caravaggio that had served the Utrecht painters as an inspiration. The show will revolve around Caravaggio’s famous Lute Player, an incunabulum of Baroque portraiture of musicians. Museums throughout Europe and the United States are supporting this exhibition with over 40 important loans. Among the lenders are the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
The exhibition “Caravaggio in Holland. Music and Genre in the Paintings of Caravaggio and the Utrecht Caravaggists” is sponsored by Stiftung Flughafen Frankfurt/Main für die Region. A young man has come on stage, putting on his best pose. He holds the music book from which he sings in his left hand, while his right underscores his performance with a theatrical gesture. Donning a feathered beret and with his head thrown back, he pertly fixes his gaze upon the viewer – his audience – out of the corner of his eye. The young man’s exposed shoulder, his neck muscles tensing from his singing, and his tanned face are illuminated by a strong glare. Dirck van Baburen, who signed the painting 1622, brilliantly unfolds the whole gamut of Baroque histrionics in the portrayal of this single half-figure. And yet, incorporating ambiguities and ruptures, he does not stick to the rules of high pathos. The musician is anything but a neat gentleman giving a sample of his art for a refined company’s evening entertainment.
This masterpiece, acquired for the Städel by the Kulturstiftung der Länder, the Hessische Kulturstiftung, and the Städelscher Museums-Verein in late 2007, is one of the most impressive examples of the extremely popular depictions of musicians executed in Utrecht in the 1620s. The large number of surviving works in this thematic field suggests that the relevant patrons must have literally snatched the pictures out of the artists’ hands. The genre was primarily defined and brought to perfection by Dirck van Baburen (c. 1595– 1624) and his two Utrecht painter colleagues Hendrick Terbrugghen (1588–1629) and Gerard van Honthorst (1592–1656). Their magnificent chiaroscuro modeling and dramatic light effects, but also their calculated infringement of decorum, of the rules of what was regarded as proper and appropriate, which they opposed by declaring models of low origin worth portraying – for all this they were indebted to their great model in far-off Italy: Caravaggio, who earned his Dutch emulators the name “Utrecht Caravaggists.” Terbrugghen, Honthorst, and Baburen had actually worked in Rome for about ten years, dedicating themselves to the art of Caravaggio and related painters.
With his famous Lute Player, one of the highlights of the Städel’s exhibition, Caravaggio had created the incunabulum of Baroque portraiture of musicians, a work enthusiastically received by his successors. In addition, Caravaggio’s novel style set standards for an entire generation of artists. His manner of painting lent the figures depicted a hitherto unknown physicality and soulfulness. Caravaggio’s almost aggressive, spot-like lighting setting off individual objects from the deep darkness of the space surrounding them and the pronounced close-up view of his scenes, which seem to present themselves to the eye with no distance in between, endow the bodies with a concrete plasticity independent of the pictorial space’s depth.
Terbrugghen returned to Utrecht in 1614, Honthorst and Baburen in 1620. The artistic innovations they came back with from Rome were already acclaimed in the Dutch city in the course of the following decade. Their new pictorial language soon replaced the somewhat exhausted late Mannerist tradition of their predecessor generation including such artists as Paulus Moreelse or Abraham Bloemaert. Outside of Italy, the effects brought forth by Caravaggio’s painting were nowhere more marked than in Utrecht. The Städel Museum now elucidates this fascinating thematic complex for the first time under the metaphorical heading “Caravaggio in Holland” in an exhibition. In the first room, three versions of The Crowning with Thorns provide an impressive opening: the representations of the scene from the New Testament by Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Dirck van Baburen grant a direct insight into the artistic relationship between the Italian master, his successors, and the Utrecht Caravaggists. The thematic emphasis on “Music and Genre in the Work of Caravaggio and the Utrecht Caravaggists” is then unfolded in the following rooms.
Depictions of half-figure musicians like Baburen’s Young Man Singing form the core of the show that deliberately focuses on Terbrugghen, Honthorst, and Baburen as the great three masters of the Utrecht Caravaggists and on the quinquennium from 1621 to 1626, in which the portraiture of musicians found its decisive expression. These paintings are confronted with a superb selection of works by Caravaggio to which the Utrecht painters related to.
Since the – late– rediscovery of Caravaggio and the Caravaggists from about 1950 on and especially in recent years, several exhibitions have explored the phenomenon in question. The Städel Museum’s exhibition differs from past projects by emphatically focusing on the portraiture of musicians and brothel scenes and by directly confronting works by Caravaggio with paintings by the Utrecht artists Terbrugghen, Honthorst, and Baburen. A comprehensive and high-quality selection of their works will now be presented in Germany again for the first time since the exhibition “Holländische Malerei in neuem Licht. Hendrick ter Brugghen und seine Zeitgenossen” in Braunschweig in 1987. The assessment of the Utrecht Caravaggists’s depictions of musicians on the art market is also symptomatic of the high esteem these works presently enjoy. What fascinates collectors, public, and experts alike is the special aesthetics of this manner of painting that focuses on its motifs with an astounding measure of wit and irony despite all moralism.
Curator: Prof. Dr. Jochen Sander (Städel Museum)
Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt
www.staedelmuseum.de
