The Lute Player (1596)

With The Lute Player, I'd like to discuss Caravaggio's methodology.  Though he wasn't the first painter to work from live models, he was the most insistent, and his results were the most true (if not to the reality he painted, then to the laws of the universe) that had yet been made.  To wit:

Caravaggio took his models from the streets.  Peasants, prostitutes, people he could pay a pittance to stand for weeks on end so he cold get every detail just right.  In The Lute Player, his scientific observation can be seen in the translucence of the boy's music sheet, the way it brightens at reflected light from the paper below.  Reflected light.  For goodness sake, this is the 1500s we're talking about!  The glint off the instruments is carefully documented, as is the complex shadowplay along the boy's left arm.  As with Boy Peeling Fruit, the dark background creates high contrast and... come to think of it, why is the background so dark?  If Caravaggio was as obsessed with detail as he seems here, how could he have painted a black background when he was clearly using such a strong and diffuse light source.  It's the same in Boy Peeling Fruit, and in Saint Francis in Meditation, Sacrifice of Isaac, David and Goliath, John the Baptists (1600), Crucification of  Saint Peter, and so many other of the painter's most stunningly apparently true to life works.  The fact is he wasn't painting real light, couldn't have been, he was making it up.  And doing it so realistically that we aren't even bothered.  His method of high contrast figure-ground relationships was something all together new in Rome.  Robert Nelson, of theage.com, writes that "Caravaggio neither invented dark, contrasty painting nor directional light nor realism nor daily life in art nor ordinary folk in religious painting" (2004).  But he combined them in a manner no painter had before him, because no previous painter working solely from live models could have, because no single live image could capture everything Caravaggio's paintings clearly do.  The dark backgrounds, the high contrast figures, the realism, and the celebration and damnation of street life, all were a result of Caravaggio's unique methodology.