Musical Group on a Balcony

Smiling, singing figures lean out over a painted balustrade with their instruments — a lute, a violin, a flute — inviting the people below to join the music. A parrot and a dog gaze down from their perches, and the bright, casually coloured clothes and open expressions give the whole scene its carefree mood. It is probably part of an allegory of Harmony, and the panel may once have been wider and about twice as long, carrying the full balustrade and more figures; the head of the man at the top is a later addition. Gerrit van Honthorst painted it in 1622, two years after he came back from Italy, where he had seen the great illusionistic ceilings of the Carracci and their followers, and it is the earliest painting of its type made in the Netherlands. The trick depends on a careful calculation of perspective, so that the musicians seem to burst through the flat plane of the ceiling. Honthorst, an Utrecht master nicknamed “Gherardo delle Notti” for his candlelit night scenes, was one of the Caravaggisti who brought Caravaggio’s realism home from Rome. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.