Fortuneteller (painting by Caravaggio)

The picture depicts a dapper-dressed young man who is guessing a gypsy by the hand. Both look very pleased with each other, exchanging favorable views, although the simple-minded young man does not notice that the fortuneteller deftly pulls the ring from him.

Caravaggio biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellory reports that the artist deliberately looked for a suitable gypsy on the street to demonstrate a refusal to use antique sculpture as a model, as was customary at the time:

When he was reminded of the famous statues of Phidias and Glycon, as models for teaching, instead of answering, he pointed his finger at a crowd of people, saying that it is enough to learn from nature. And to confirm his words, he called into the inn, a gypsy who was walking by chance along the street and wrote it, as she predicts the future according to the tradition of women of the Egyptian tribe. He wrote there also a young man who put one gloved hand on the hilt of a sword, and the other, without a glove, extended it to a gypsy, and she carefully looks at it, and so purely expressing the truth in both half-figures, Michele confirmed his words with this ^[1] .

This fact is most likely apocryphal, since Bellory wrote more than half a century after the death of Caravaggio, and other biographers who knew the artist personally, Giulio Mancini and Giovanni Ballone , did not mention this, but he points to Caravaggio's revolutionary desire to replace the didactic theory of the visual Renaissance art closer to reality painting.

The Fortuneteller aroused considerable interest among Roman young artists and collectors, however, according to Mancini, the poverty of Caravaggio forced him to sell the painting for a modest sum of eight scudos . She entered the collection of a wealthy banker and art connoisseur of the Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani , who later became the patron of Caravaggio. A friend of Giustiniani, Cardinal Francesco Del Monte , a year later acquired the next painting of the artist - “ Shuler ”, which made Caravaggio an entrance to the house of the cardinal. He later wrote a copy of The Fortune Teller for Del Monte, introducing a number of significant changes to it. Instead of the conditional background of the first version, a wall appears, separated by shadows from the window sash and curtains, the layout of the characters becomes more dense and voluminous, the lighting becomes brighter, the clothes become more embossed. The young man looks younger and more vulnerable, and the fortuneteller, in turn, is less cautious and better in control of the situation. The young man’s model for the second version of the picture is Mario Minniti , a Sicilian artist and friend of Caravaggio.

The Fortuneteller is one of Caravaggio’s two genre paintings, along with The Shulers, and is considered to be the earlier one, written immediately after the artist left the workshop of Giuseppe Cesari and the beginning of his own career. The theme of the picture is not original. Giorgio Vasari, in his Biographies , mentions that one of the followers of Francabigio , his brother Agnolo, wrote a sign for a perfume shop with a “gypsy who predicts a lady a future in a very graceful manner” ^[2] .