The Fortune Teller

Caravaggio painted this in the mid-1590s, 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. His biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori, writing decades later, told how Caravaggio, urged to study the ancient statues everyone copied, instead called in a woman passing in the street and painted her from life. The subject caught on fast, and he made a second version soon after, now in the Louvre.