Lorenzo Costa, 'A Concert', about 1488-90

With this painting, Costa invented a type of image that would become very popular in northern Italy, particularly Venice, in the sixteenth-century – look at The Music Lesson and A Concert, for example. While pictures of people playing musical instruments and singing are now often called ‘concerts’, they may have been intended to depict private moments.

The band of singers is engrossed in the camaraderie of their music; as she sings, the young woman keeps time by tapping her fingers against the marble ledge and her companion’s shoulder. He is deep in concentration, his eyes lowered towards the open book containing the musical composition – its notes have only been roughly sketched in. His lute, by contrast, has an elaborately carved rosette which has been painted with great attention to detail. The young man behind him appears to be straining to reach or hold a note and he too is tapping time on the ledge. The trio’s concentration and exertion are tangible, and the intensity of the moment is enhanced by the deep black background. The song is perhaps a complex one. It might be a frottola – a three-part song written for tenor, soprano and bass accompanied by a lute. The woman’s dress, with its cloth of gold sleeves and jewelled gold collar, provides some luxurious embellishment to an otherwise stark image.

The small violin-like instrument is a rebec; a recorder leans across it. The end of the rebec projects over the edge of the ledge, adding an extra dimension of space to the image – the space between us and the ledge. The inclusion of these instruments not only suggests the musical skill and versatility of the musicians but also the depth of the ledge.

It has been suggested that the singers might be members of the Bentivoglio family, who commissioned an altarpiece – featuring their portraits – from Costa for the church of San Giacomo Maggiore, Bologna, at around this time. A painting in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid shows a group of figures huddled around a sheet of music, and includes inscriptions identifying them as members of the Bentivoglio family; the comparison with the faces of our musicians is not entirely convincing. As the score and musical instruments aren‘t painted with complete accuracy, some have suggested that the picture could have been intended as an allegorical representation of Harmony or the art of music. But it seems most likely that the picture was made to entertain an educated and wealthy patron who, like his contemporaries, embraced the fashion for cantare a libro (’singing from a book’), a developing trend in northern Italy. We know from surviving fifteenth-century letters that members of the Este family, the rulers of Ferrara, for example, enjoyed performing together for their own or others' entertainment.