The Fortune Teller

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The Fortune Teller: Caravaggio

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Caravaggio Oil Painting - The Fortune Teller

Keywords: Fortune, Teller

Work Overview: The Fortune Teller
second version
Artist Caravaggio
Year c. 1595
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 93 cm × 131 cm (37 in × 52 in)
Location Louvre, Paris

The Fortune Teller is a painting by Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It exists in two versions, both by Caravaggio, the first from 1594 (now in the Musei Capitolini in Rome), the second from 1595 (which is in the Louvre museum, Paris). The dates in both cases are disputed.

The painting shows a foppishly-dressed boy (in the second version the model is believed to be Caravaggio's companion, the Sicilian painter Mario Minniti), having his palm read by a gypsy girl. The boy looks pleased as he gazes into her face, and she returns his gaze. Close inspection of the painting reveals what the young man has failed to notice: the girl is removing his ring as she gently strokes his hand.

Caravaggio's biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori relates that the artist picked the gypsy girl out from passers-by on the street in order to demonstrate that he had no need to copy the works of the masters from antiquity:

"When he was shown the most famous statues of Phidias and Glykon in order that he might use them as models, his only answer was to point towards a crowd of people saying that nature had given him an abundance of masters."
This passage is often used to demonstrate that the classically trained Mannerist artists of Caravaggio's day disapproved of Caravaggio's insistence on painting from life instead of from copies and drawings made from older masterpieces. However, Bellori ends by saying, "and in these two half-figures [Caravaggio] translated reality so purely that it came to confirm what he said." The story is probably apocryphal - Bellori was writing more than half a century after Caravaggio's death, and it doesn't appear in Mancini's or in Giovanni Baglione, the two contemporary biographers who had known him - but it does indicate the essence of Caravaggio's revolutionary impact on his contemporaries - beginning with The Fortune Teller - which was to replace the Renaissance theory of art as a didactic fiction with art as the representation of real life.

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With The Fortune Teller, Caravaggio introduced a new subject into Italian art. Unlike most Italian paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, The Fortune Teller does not take its theme from the Bible or Greco-Roman mythology, but instead is a genre picture, or a scene of daily life.

Genre paintings were extremely popular in Northern Europe, abounding in Dutch art. Northern paintings and prints were becoming quite popular at the end of the sixteenth century especially in northern Italy and Caravaggio most likely became familiar with them during his years as an artist's apprentice in the Lombardy region.

Caravaggio depicts a wealthy, foppish young man having his palm read by a seemingly innocent gypsy girl (identifiable by her unique attire). Naively trusting and apparently easily distracted by the fairer sex, the boy flirtatiously gazes into the gypsy girl's eyes while she (according to contemporary sources) slightly slips the ring off his finger. Just like Northern genre paintings, the painting is imbued with a subtle moral lesson.

Contemporary sources say that Caravaggio even went so far as to invite a gypsy girl from the street into his studio to pose as his model, a practice unheard of at that time. The artist was famous for preferring to work from nature and drawing inspiration from every day events to studying the masters.

The Louvre version of The Fortune Teller is Caravaggio's second on this theme and the dates of both works are disputed. The first was painted for the open market, and sold for only 8 scudi. The work was acquired by the wealthy banker Marchese Vincenti Giustiniani.

Cardinal del Monte, Caravaggio's first important patron, was so admiring of Giustiniani's painting that around 1595 he commissioned another version from Caravaggio for himself, which is the version currently in the Louvre.

The Fortune Teller hangs in the Louvre today because it was acquired in the 17th century for Louis XIV. When it arrived to its new home, in order to make the painting match the size a neighboring artwork a strip of canvas was added to the top, and the feather on the boy's hat was embellished. Today, a careful observer can see the line where the strip was added on.

Caravaggio's unprecedentedly faithful realism and his careful attention to detail are already present early works such as The Fortune Teller.

Composition:
Several characteristics unique to Caravaggio's early style are evident, in terms of realism and attention to detail. Caravaggio's early paintings always take place indoors, with the figures placed in front of an empty, ambiguously defined neutral background.

Furthermore, every aspect of this painting was carefully studied from life. Even the young man's sword is clearly identifiable and the gypsy girl's dress corresponds exactly with contemporary descriptions: "as only dress an old blanket, very coarse and fastened on the shoulder by a band of cloth or cord, and underneath a poor shift for all covering."

There is a feeling of conspired serenity in this work due to the fact that compositional symmetry is created with each model occupying roughly half of the canvas. The two figures produce a round arch, with the young man's head-dress marking the pinnacle.

A careful study of Caravaggio's paintings reveals that he often used the same model and even later in life would continue to paint these early models' features from memory. Here, the boy's face has tentatively been identified as that of Mario Minniti, a Sicilian painter who was Caravaggio's roommate before the more famous artist entered the court of Cardinal del Monte.

Use of light:
Light almost always enters from the upper left hand corner of the picture plane in the artist's early paintings.

Color palette:
The color palette used for this peace also creates a feeling of serenity. Warm golden-brown tones of the skin and the background are blended with soft lighting, and set off by the whites, greens, reds and browns of the garments and this adds to the painting's symmetry.

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