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The Fortune Teller | |
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Italian: Buona ventura | |
Artist | Caravaggio |
Year | c.1594 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Dimensions | 115 cm× 150 cm(45 in× 59 in) |
Location | Musei Capitolini, Rome |
The Fortune Teller | |
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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 c. 1594 (now in the Musei Capitolini in Rome), the second from c. 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 Romani 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.[ citation needed ]
Caravaggio's painting, of which two versions exist, shows a well-groomed, vain young man having his palm read by a Romani woman. The wily Romani woman is guilty of deceit, however: her seductive smile is false, and because the young man has been charmed off his feet by her beauty, he does not notice that she has meanwhile slipped the ring from his finger. [1] In 1603 the poet Gaspare Murtola dedicated a madrigal to Caravaggio's Fortune Teller, in which he compares the deceit of the sensuous Romani woman with the illusionistic manner of Caravaggio, therefore implying that the viewer, like the young man, is the victim of duplicity. [2] The madrigal is addressed to Caravaggio himself: `Non so qual sia più maga / O la donna, che fingi, / O tu che la dipingi. / Di rapir quella è vaga / Coi dolci incanti suoi / Il core e ’l sangue a noi. Tu dipinta, che appare / Fai, che viva si veda. Fai, che viva, e spirante altri / la creda.' [3]
(I don't know who is the greater sorcerer / The woman you portray / Or you who paint her. Through sweetest incantation / She doth desire to steal / Our very heart and blood. Thou wouldst in thy portrayal / Her living, breathing image / For others reproduce, That they too may believe it.)
This section possibly contains original research .(May 2012) |
Caravaggio's biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori relates that the artist picked the Romani 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:
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.
The 1594 Fortune Teller aroused considerable interest among younger artists and the more avant garde collectors of Rome, but, according to Mancini, Caravaggio's poverty forced him to sell it for the low sum of eight scudi. It entered the collection of a wealthy banker and connoisseur, the Marchese Vincente Giustiniani, who became an important patron of the artist. Giustiniani's friend, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, purchased the companion piece, Cardsharps, in 1595, and at some point in that year Caravaggio entered the Cardinal's household.
For Del Monte, Caravaggio painted a second version of The Fortune Teller, copied from the Giustiniani but with certain changes. The undifferentiated background of the 1594 version becomes a real wall broken by the shadows of a half-drawn curtain and a window sash, and the figures more completely fill the space and defining it in three dimensions. The light is more radiant, and the cloth of the boy's doublet and the girl's sleeves more finely textured. The dupe becomes more childlike and more innocently vulnerable, the girl less wary-looking, leaning in towards him, more in command of the situation.
The Fortune Teller is one of two known genre pieces painted by Caravaggio in the year 1594, the other being Cardsharps . The Fortune Teller is believed to be the earlier of the two, and dates from the period during which the artist had recently left the workshop of the Giuseppe Cesari to make his own way selling paintings through the dealer Costantino.
The subject of the painting was not unprecedented. In his Lives of the Artists , Giorgio Vasari notes that one of Franciabigio's followers, his brother Agnolo, painted a sign for a perfumer's shop "containing a gipsy woman telling the fortune of a lady in a very graceful manner". [4] [5]
Michelangelo Merisida Caravaggio, known as simply Caravaggio, was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the final four years of his life he moved between Naples, Malta, and Sicily until his death. His paintings have been characterized by art critics as combining a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.
Giovanni Baglione was an Italian Late Mannerist and Early Baroque painter and art historian. He is best remembered for his acrimonious and damaging involvement with the slightly younger artist Caravaggio and his important collection of biographies of the other artists working in Rome in his lifetime, although there are many works of his in Roman churches and galleries and elsewhere.
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The Crucifixion of Saint Peter is a work by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, painted in 1601 for the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. Across the chapel is a second Caravaggio work depicting the Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus (1601). On the altar between the two is the Assumption of the Virgin Mary by Annibale Carracci.
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Rest on the Flight into Egypt is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, like the Flight into Egypt, was a popular subject in art, but Caravaggio's composition, with an angel playing the viol to the Holy Family, is unusual.
The Lute Player is a composition by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio. It used to exist in two versions, one in the Wildenstein Collection and another in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. However, a third from Badminton House, Gloucestershire, came to light in 2007.
Boy with a Basket of Fruit is an oil on canvas painting generally ascribed to Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, created c. 1593. It is held in the Galleria Borghese, in Rome.
Boy Bitten by a Lizard is a painting by the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. It exists in two versions, both believed to be authentic works of Caravaggio, one in the Fondazione Roberto Longhi in Florence, the other in the National Gallery, London.
The Cardsharps is a painting by the Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The original is generally agreed to be the work acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in 1987, although Caravaggio may have painted more than one version.
Bacchus is an oil painting by Italian Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) commissioned by Cardinal Del Monte. The painting shows a youthful Bacchus reclining in classical fashion with grapes and vine leaves in his hair, fingering the drawstring of his loosely draped robe. On a stone table in front of him is a bowl of fruit and a large carafe of red wine. He holds out a shallow goblet of the same wine, inviting the viewer to join him. The painting is currently held in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas is a painting of the subject of the same name. One of the most famous paintings by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, c. 1601-1602. There are two autograph versions of Caravaggio's "The Incredulity of Saint Thomas", an ecclesiastical "Trieste" version for Girolamo Mattei now in a private collection and a secular "Potsdam" version for Vincenzo Giustiniani that later entered the Royal Collection of Prussia and survived the Second World War unscathed and can now be admired in the Palais at Sanssouci, Potsdam.
The Cerasi Chapel or Chapel of the Assumption is one of the side chapels in the left transept of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. It contains significant paintings by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci, two of the most important masters of Italian Baroque art, dating from 1600–1601.
The Crowning with Thorns is a painting by the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Made probably in 1602/1604 or possibly around 1607, it is now located in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. It was bought in Rome by the Imperial ambassador, Baron Ludwig von Lebzelter in 1809, but did not arrive in Vienna until 1816.
Giovanni Pietro Bellori, also known as Giovan Pietro Bellori or Gian Pietro Bellori, was an Italian art theorist, painter and antiquarian, who is best known for his work Lives of the Artists, considered the seventeenth-century equivalent to Vasari's Vite. His Vite de' Pittori, Scultori et Architetti Moderni, published in 1672, was influential in consolidating and promoting the theoretical case for classical idealism in art. As an art historical biographer, he favoured classicising artists rather than Baroque artists to the extent of omitting some of the key artistic figures of 17th-century art altogether.
Nicolas Régnier (1591–1667), known in Italy as Niccolò Renieri, was a painter, art dealer and art collector from the County of Hainaut, a French-speaking part of the Spanish Netherlands. He is often referred to as a Flemish artist because this term was often used to designate people from the Spanish Netherlands. After training in Antwerp, he was active in Italy where he was part of the international Caravaggesque movement. His subjects include genre scenes with card players, fortune tellers, soldiers and concerts, religious scenes, saints, mythological and allegorical scenes, and portraits. He also painted a few scenes with carnivals.
Events from the year 1594 in art.
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One of Francia's disciples was his brother Agnolo, who died after having painted a frieze that is in the cloister of S. Pancrazio, and a few other works. The same Agnolo painted for the perfumer Ciano, an eccentric man, but respected after his kind, a sign for his shop, containing a gipsy woman telling the fortune of a lady in a very graceful manner, which was the idea of Ciano, and not without mystic meaning.