The Curator's PERSPECTIVE

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Hendrick Terbrugghen was one of the leading members of the Utrecht school, a group of Dutch artists from that particular city in Holland who traveled to Rome in the early seventeenth century. While there, they came under the spell of the dramatic and highly realistic art of the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Terbrugghen's interest in Caravaggio can be seen in several characteristic elements of this painting. First the subject, which is realistic. He's a poor common boy dressed up in fancy clothes and posed with a violin, gazing at us with a big toothy grin. Now Caravaggio painted people that he would have met on the streets or in taverns, and Terbrugghen is doing essentially the same. He's shown in three-quarters length, which is a very typical convention for the early pictures of Caravaggio. The lighting is also Caravaggesque, in that it comes from outside the picture plane. We don't know its source, but it's from the upper left and falls down upon the subject, sculpting it and making the results look quite theatrical. What we probably don't know is what Terbrugghen intended the picture to mean to us. On the primary level, of course, it's merely meant to please us. It's meant to entertain. However, it's not uncommon in Dutch Baroque art for there to be a hidden meaning - that is to say, for the picture to be an allegory. And in this case, the picture may be an allegory of hearing.

Dominique H. Vasseur

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