When we evoke Caravaggism, we automatically think of multi-figured complex scenes. There is also a type of composition that dates from before Caravaggism, but which was widely practiced by the painters of the generation: the half figure, in Italian the mezza figura. The first works by Caravaggio, the Ailing Bacchus or the Young man with a basket both constitute good examples of this technique. This type of composition was particularly favoured by art lovers who commissioned picturesque subjects of musicians, lansquenets but also saints, prophets and Classical philosophers.
The half figure was not an isolated fragment of a larger composition but a painting its own right. The personage represented is not a portrait but an idealised image. Nicolas Tournier produced beautiful examples in this domain in which he had wide scope for his elegant style and reserved emotional understatement as in the Flute-player in Brescia, Saint John the Evangelist in the Galleria Spada and the companion pictures in the Musée des Augustins, the Soldier and Saint Paul.
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