Veglia dei Musici

The Veglia dei Musici wallpaper comes from an image that seems suspended outside time: four musicians — a lutenist, a violinist, a violist and a singer — pressed shoulder to shoulder around a single candle, the only source of light in the room. It is the Baroque style, with its dense tenebrism and its brushwork loaded with matter, that builds this scene: the faces, the hands and the pages of the two songbooks, with their hand-ruled staves and clearly legible black notation, emerge from an almost absolute darkness.

I wanted the group to gather like a medallion at the centre of the composition, heads inclined over the scores, instruments turned inwards, while a deep brown void wraps the scene at the sides and above, pushing the eye straight towards the amber glow of the flame running down the wax. Bitumen and black dominate the palette, warmed by the deep gold sliding over cuffs and collars, punctuated by muted crimson, ochre and a few flashes of ivory on the pages and the pearl buttons.

Up close one discovers the grain of the aged varnish, the reflection of the taut strings, the curls of the brush that draw hair and lace: detail that WallZad renders faithfully, pigment upon pigment, like a true rediscovered canvas. It is a mute concert that asks only to be listened to with the eyes, in any interior able to receive the precious silence of a Veglia dei Musici wallpaper made to tell, without clamour, the ancient beauty of shared music.