Caravaggio Paintings
1571 - 1610 Italy, Baroque
The Fortune Teller, 1596-1597
Oil on canvas, 38 7/8 x 51 1/2 inches (99 x 131 cm)
Musee du Louvre, Paris Figurative Art
With The Fortune Teller (La Zingara), Caravaggio introduced, around 1594/95, a subject into Italian painting that was known, if at all, only in Netherlandish paintings: the so-called genre, depicting scenes of everyday life, but with a hidden or underlying meaning intended for the edification of the observant spectator. Two themes from Caravaggio's early years can be placed in the category of genre painting: one representing a card game is unfortunately lost, the other is the Fortune Teller. This theme is preserved in two paintings both of which are probably original. The other painting is in the Pinacoteca Capitolina in Rome.
Caravaggio depicts a foppishly dressed young man, a milksop with no experience of life, who gives his right hand to a young girl whose expression is difficult to define, in order to have his future read. His ideas about his future are effectively influenced by the astute young gypsy girl, whose gentle caress in tracing the lines of his hand captivates the handsome young fool so completely that he fails to notice his ring being drawn from his finger. This anecdotal narrative could be further embroidered, and indeed The Fortune Teller invites us to do so as much through the plot it portrays as through what it tells us of the two characters by way of their clothing. The feathered hat, the gloves and the showy, oversized dagger immediately tell us who we are dealing with here. Similarly, the gypsy girl with her light linen shirt and her exotic wrap is intended as a "type" rather than as an individual person.
This means, of course, that what we have here in The Fortune Teller by Caravaggio is not an anecdote of two specific people, but an everyday tale. No specification of place or time detracts our attention from the point of the story, which gives the spectator a sense of complacent superiority as well as aesthetic pleasure.
