Lute Player

Valentin de Boulogne

Oil on canvas

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Lute Player depicts a young soldier playing a lute and singing a love madrigal, rendered in Valentin de Boulogne's characteristically direct and vivid Caravaggesque manner. The figure emerges dramatically from a dark background through the use of tenebrism — the bold contrast of light and shadow closely associated with Caravaggio — a technique that Valentin mastered during his long career in Rome. Born in Coulommiers, France, in 1591, Valentin spent virtually his entire working life in Rome, where he became widely regarded as the greatest French follower of Caravaggio, celebrated for genre scenes of music-making, drinking, and fortune-telling. The painting passed through the distinguished collection of Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV's powerful chief minister, in the 1650s, and is now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.