Soldiers playing Cards

This large canvas of soldiers bent over a card game once belonged to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, the Habsburg governor who assembled one of the great picture collections of the 17th century in Brussels. When his court painter David Teniers made an illustrated catalogue of that gallery, the Theatrum Pictorium of 1660, this Manfredi was among the plates, a printed record of a whole collection at a time when no such book had existed. The scene itself is pure Rome around 1615, off-duty soldiers gambling by lamplight, the pikes and armour set aside while the cards decide who keeps his pay. From the archduke's rooms in the north the picture eventually made its way south to Florence, where it now hangs in the Uffizi.