File:Cornelisz, Cornelis, A Courting Couple and Woman with a Songbook, ca. 1594.jpg

English: Catalogue Entry:

Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem portrays a simple yet delicate temptation scene. The gentleman is poised to embrace the drunken woman on the left. We, too, are offered the lure of wine, women, and song, as his companion’s glass tips precariously forward. The woman on the right turns to us, a songbook in her lap. Despite the moral ­dubiousness of the scene, Cornelisz. renders the balanced half-length figures in elegant curves ­silhouetted against a mysteriously dark interior.

The painting bears witness to a change in the artist’s style following the return of his fellow ­Haarlem painter Hendrik Goltzius from Italy. Cornelisz. eschews the complexities of his earlier works in favor of a few large-scale figures set in a dark, shallow space reminiscent of Caravaggio’s innovations. This painting’s pastel tones and the figures’ egg-shaped heads, however, are far from the realism of the Dutch followers of Caravaggio. Cornelisz.’s simple, elegant composition dignifies and refines a moralizing subject based on the wasted youth of the Prodigal Son.

Gallery Label:

Cornelis Cornelisz.’s painting shows a scene of temptation, in which the attractions of music, wine, and love seduce his figures into indulgence in the pleasures of the senses. Though the subject is explicitly secular, the artist’s treatment of the male figure in particular recalls contemporary artistic representations of the Prodigal Son, suggesting that an everyday interaction might take on moral dimensions of biblical proportions. The woman whom he courts presents another negative example, as her distant expression and loose grip on the wine glass betray her intoxicated state. As the couple boldly reciprocates romantic advances and sustains longing looks, the woman with the songbook engages the viewer directly with her own gaze. This motif might be taken to implicate the viewer as a participant in the merrymaking, unsettling the usual borders between the actual world and the painted one.