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Lot Essay
Paolini was a key exponent of Tuscan Caravaggism, developing a highly idiosyncratic body of work that singled him out as a leading figure in the Lucchese school. Details of his early life are scarce, though he is known to have trained with Angelo Caroselli in Rome in the 1620s, where he was exposed to the work of the second generation of Italian and northern European followers of Caravaggio, notably Bartolomeo Manfredi and Valentin de Boulogne. He returned to Lucca by the early 1630s and there developed the inventive figural and allegorical compositions for which he is best known. Baldinucci described him as a 'pittore di gran bizzarria, e di nobile invenzione' (F. Baldinucci, Notizie dei Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in qua, Florence, 1728, p. 365), a sentiment borne out in the present picture.
The young sitter, his pale features and deep red cap set against a dark ground, presides over a table laden with the attributes of cultivated leisure: a violin laid across a lute, two books, an open games board with a die at rest, a stack of playing cards, and, at lower left, the richly chased hilt of a rapier; through an open shutter beyond, an earthenware vase with a sprig of greenery is glimpsed. The scroll of the violin and, more conspicuously, the neck of the lute project forward across the table and beyond the picture plane in a striking trompe l'oeil device. As Vernejoul has observed, Paolini sets the instruments of cultivated education ( the rapier, music, and books) in deliberate opposition to the cards, dice, and games board associated with idleness and dissipation, a binary moral structure further articulated by the disposition of light and shadow (op. cit.).
Datable to circa 1635-40, the present composition reprises the upright Young Man with Musical Instruments of circa 1620-25 in the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco (inv. no. 69.30.155; ibid., no. P. 2), here rendered with the softened naturalism of Paolini's Lucchese years.
We are grateful to Nikita de Vernejoul for endorsing the attribution on the basis of photographs (written communication, 2 May 2026).
The young sitter, his pale features and deep red cap set against a dark ground, presides over a table laden with the attributes of cultivated leisure: a violin laid across a lute, two books, an open games board with a die at rest, a stack of playing cards, and, at lower left, the richly chased hilt of a rapier; through an open shutter beyond, an earthenware vase with a sprig of greenery is glimpsed. The scroll of the violin and, more conspicuously, the neck of the lute project forward across the table and beyond the picture plane in a striking trompe l'oeil device. As Vernejoul has observed, Paolini sets the instruments of cultivated education ( the rapier, music, and books) in deliberate opposition to the cards, dice, and games board associated with idleness and dissipation, a binary moral structure further articulated by the disposition of light and shadow (op. cit.).
Datable to circa 1635-40, the present composition reprises the upright Young Man with Musical Instruments of circa 1620-25 in the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco (inv. no. 69.30.155; ibid., no. P. 2), here rendered with the softened naturalism of Paolini's Lucchese years.
We are grateful to Nikita de Vernejoul for endorsing the attribution on the basis of photographs (written communication, 2 May 2026).