Die Wahrsagerin

Caravaggio painted this around 1594, not long after he had walked out of a busy Roman workshop with almost no money, selling pictures through a dealer to survive. It is one of his first scenes of ordinary life. A well-dressed young man, sword at his hip, holds out his palm to a Romani woman to have his fortune told, and does not notice that while she strokes his hand she is quietly sliding the ring off his finger. The whole story sits in that one gesture. A contemporary wrote that Caravaggio, told to go study the ancient statues everyone copied, instead pulled a passing woman off the street and painted her from life. It caught on fast, and he made a second version soon after, now in the Louvre.