A young man holding a burning candle and a scamorza cheese, a fiasco bottle beside him

This enigmatic work is an exciting rediscovery and addition to the oeuvre of nocturnal paintings by Gerrit van Honthorst. Extremely dirty and unseen in public since the early 1960s, the picture largely eluded the attention of scholars until it was published in 2020 by Wayne E. Franits, who endorses it as an untypical yet autograph work by the artist (op. cit.). 
Honthorst’s artistic formation largely took place during his early years in Italy, where he attained a deep knowledge of Caravaggism that would have an enduring impact on his style. His early training, however, was in his native Utrecht, apprenticing under Abraham Bloemaert before travelling to Italy between circa 1610 and 1615, where he is thought to have stayed between seven and ten years. By the time Honthorst left Italy, his fame was so established that it preceded him to Utrecht, where he was fêted upon his return in 1620, with a party thrown in his honour at ‘Het Poortgen’ (‘The Little Gate’) on 26 July.
In Rome, Honthorst’s unique interpretation of Caravaggio’s tenebrist style earnt him commissions from such important patrons as Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his principal patron, Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, in whose palace he lodged for an extended period of time. Giustiniani’s collection strongly influenced Honthorst’s stylistic direction, boasting works by Caravaggio, Manfredi, Bassano, the Carracci and the lesser-known still-life painter Pietro Paolo Bonzi, whose Boy holding a melon may have been a source of inspiration for the present picture (Formerly Berlin, Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum; destroyed; see L. Salerno, ‘The Picture Gallery of Vincenzo Giustiniani - 1: Introduction’, The Burlington Magazine, January 1960, CII, no. 682, p. 23, fig. 32). Indeed, Bonzi’s work perfectly demonstrates the clever visual food puns that were so popular in Rome at this time, based on Renaissance ‘learned erotica’ steeped in metaphors and elaborate rhetorical devices.
Honthorst’s composition, though sparse and seemingly arbitrary, was clearly painted with such allusions in mind, the specific elements of which are so unique that they may have been included at the patron’s request. The object that the youth holds aloft and gazes at so intently has been identified by Franits as scamorza cheese, the name for which was derived from the now archaic verb scamozzare, meaning to pollard or lop off, in a witty and ‘not-so-subtle allusion to testicles’ (op. cit.). Indeed, being the fare of peasants and the poor, cheese was seen as a coarse food that lead to coarse behaviour of promiscuous sexuality, with scamorza featuring frequently in the works of Cecco del Caravaggio, such as The Fluteplayer of circa 1610-20 (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum). Franits speculates that this visual pun may have been extended in the feather of the youth’s cap, contributing to the scatological subject matter. Still lifes carrying erotic associations flourished throughout Italy particularly in the sixteenth century, with Italian artists like the Cremonese Vincenzo Campi underscoring the sexual implications of cheese in his Ricotta Eaters of circa 1585 (Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts). In the present picture, Honthorst reinforces the food’s erotic implications by prominently displaying a fiasco of wine, traditionally associated with lasciviousness, while acting upon the popularity of comparable images by Bartolomeo Manfredi, such as his Bacchus and a Drinker of circa 1600-10 (fig. 1; Rome, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica).
Sixteenth-century authors, like artists, were equally attracted to the congruities of food and sex, with the locus of the genre being in Rome. The Accademia dei Vignaiuoli (Academy of Vintners), founded in 1527, was renowned for celebrating the harvest season with recitations of bawdy poems linked to sexually suggestive crops (see J. Varriano, ‘Fruits and Vegetables as Sexual Metaphor in Late Renaissance Rome’, Gastronomica, V, no. 4, November 2004). In looking at influences chronologically closer to Honthorst’s artistic milieu, Franits observes that the painter would have no doubt been familiar with similar works of obscene subjects produced by Rome’s Caravaggisti, such as Simon Vouet’s Man Making a Fig Gesture (fig. 2; Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen). Painted in Rome in around 1615, it presents a man in a dress holding two figs while making the mano in fico, or fig gesture, intended to ‘give the fig’ — a euphemism first found in Dante's Divine Comedy – as an allusion to sexual intercourse. Franits notes that in the fruit fica, slang for female genitalia, and the scamorza, an allusion to testicles, the ‘bawdy visualization of erotic wordplay is fundamental to both Vouet and Honthorst’s canvases, and is certainly reflective of both artists’ knowledge of these linguistic possibilities’ (op. cit.).
Yet the influence of the Rome Caravaggisti on Honthorst extended far beyond the thematic. While always looking to the youthful sexuality of Caravaggio’s figures – the present, a seeming amalgam of his David with the Head of Goliath of circa 1607 (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) and Bacchus of circa 1596 (Florence, Uffizi), with the wine in the same corner – Honthorst may have looked to the artist David de Haen, a fellow countryman, for this specific work. De Haen’s Satyr Drinking from Grapes (fig. 3; sold Sotheby's, New York, 30 January 2014, lot 51), painted in Rome in circa 1619, shares striking parallels with the present picture in its composition, pose and earthy tenebrist treatment. As a close associate of Dirck van Baburen and one of the central figures in Rome, de Haen’s career coincided directly with Honthorst’s stay in the city, making it likely that their artistic paths crossed. The shared Bacchic iconography of both figures’ smiling, upturned gazes and il braccio in aria (‘arm in the air’) suggests that they may have also derived their models from similar sculptural sources, looking plausibly to ancient statuary, with Rome offering the greatest abundance of classical remains. Exact parallels can also be made to Jacopo Sansovino’s Bacchus of circa 1514 (fig. 4; Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello), considered one of the most celebrated sculptures of the High Renaissance, with which they would have no doubt been familiar.
While there has been debate as to whether Honthorst executed the present picture in Italy or upon his return to Utrecht, many of his visual sources are resolutely Italian – from the scamorza to the fiasco, largely exclusive to the region – adducing support that the work was painted for an Italian patron familiar with, and amused by, such allusions. In the exhibition of 1961, Roberto Longhi dated the present picture to Honthorst’s late Italian period, around 1619 to 1620 (op. cit.). Conversely, some scholars have questioned the attribution of the work due to its uniqueness in Honthorst’s oeuvre, with no other single-figure genre works known from his Italian period. For Franits, resolving the question of chronology with any certainty is difficult, if impossible, as such male figures could also be placed within the period of circa 1621-1623, immediately following the artist’s return to Utrecht. What is certain of this period, however, is that Honthorst did not remain idle, continuing to paint in the style that gained him fame as Gherardo delle Notti, which he injected into the stream of artistic development upon his return to the Netherlands.