The Musicians

The Musicians is a masterful oil on canvas painting created around 1597 by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. This significant early work, now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exemplifies the artist’s increasing focus on blending idealized classical forms with dramatic, naturalistic observation, a hallmark of early Baroque painting in Rome.

The scene depicts a gathering of four youthful male figures engaged in musical practice, a common theme in genre painting of the period often infused with homoerotic undertones. Three main figures are clustered around sheets of music, two actively playing instruments, a lute and a violin, while the third gazes outward, holding a horn. A crucial element of the composition is the presence of a small figure of Cupid in the upper left, reaching toward a still life arrangement of grapes. This inclusion suggests an allegorical commentary on the intertwined nature of music, sensory pleasure, and desire.

Caravaggio utilizes intense realism and a burgeoning form of tenebrism to illuminate the figures against a shadowy backdrop, emphasizing texture, particularly the shine on the wooden instruments and the rich folds of their garments. This piece marks a transition in the artist’s career toward complex, multi-figure compositions. While the original remains a centerpiece of the Met’s European collection, high-quality prints and reproductions of this public domain artwork ensure widespread access to the master’s pivotal early technique.