The Fortune Teller

A young man in a plumed hat holds out his hand to a Romani fortune-teller, and while she reads his palm, hands creep out of the shadow at the left and rob her. The cheat is being cheated. Caravaggio's followers in Rome usually played this subject for laughs, and the Louvre points out how gravely Valentin treats it. Behind the pair another youth rests his tilted head on his hand, the old pose of melancholy.

On the right two musicians play, a woman with a guitar, the instrument of Rome's back streets, and a man with a harp. The harp may be a private joke. A French treatise on musical instruments written around 1640 notes that playing the harp could mean, figuratively, stealing. Louis XIV owned the picture before 1683 and hung it high on the wall of the salon in his private apartment at Versailles, where it stayed until 1701, when the room became his bedchamber.