Die Wahrsagerin

Caravaggio was barely into his twenties and largely unknown when he painted a version of this scene in Rome in the 1590s. He worked it up twice; the one in the Louvre is the later of the two. A well-dressed young man holds out his palm to a young Romani woman who reads his fortune, the two of them smiling at each other. The joke is what he does not notice. As she strokes his hand she is quietly slipping the ring off his finger, a small theft that only shows up on a close look and is not there in the earlier version. Choosing ordinary street types over saints and gods was new enough that it helped draw a wealthy banker, Vincenzo Giustiniani, to Caravaggio as a patron. The picture later hung at Versailles before the French Revolution sent it to the Louvre.