The Fortune Teller

What Happens in the Picture

The woman is dressed plainly. A white cloth is wound in thick coils round her head, with a dark embroidered zigzag worked along the edge nearest her face. Her blouse is white with full sleeves, crossed by a dark red sash over a green bodice. Her cheeks are flushed and she is half smiling with her lips closed.

The young man is dressed expensively. He wears a wide black hat carrying black and white ostrich plumes, a white ruff at the throat, and an ochre doublet slashed and banded with black velvet. A rapier hangs at his side with a swept hilt: an ovoid pommel, a grip bound in wound cord, a straight crossbar with knobbed ends, and looped guard bars beneath it.

His gloved hand rests at his hip, and the limp empty fingers of a second glove hang below it. The two of them look at each other steadily. Neither of them looks at the hand being read.

The setting is nothing at all: a plain olive-brown wall crossed by a broad diagonal band of paler ochre. Caravaggio gave the scene no room, no window and no furniture.

The Hands

The centre of the canvas is a knot of hands, and it is painted more carefully than either face. The young man's right hand is open and slack, palm upward, the fingers relaxed and spread. The woman's right hand comes across from the left and cradles it from beneath. Her fingers curl round and work at the base of his fingers.

The gesture is the subject. She is being paid for a reading, and both of her hands are occupied with his while his attention is on her face. Caravaggio sets the exchange up so that the viewer watches the hands and the boy does not.

Two Versions

Caravaggio painted this composition twice. The Louvre's record notes a second Caravaggio of a closely related composition in the Pinacoteca Capitolina in Rome, which it traces to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte's collection.

The Capitoline Museums hold that second version as La Buona Ventura, Inv. PC 131, and date it to 1596 to 1597. It is oil on canvas at 115 by 150 centimetres, so it is the larger of the two by some margin. The Capitoline record gives its origin as the Pio collection, and hangs it in the Hall of Saint Petronilla.

The two are not copies of one another in the ordinary sense. They are the same idea painted again, which Caravaggio did more than once in his career.

A Transferred Canvas

The Louvre states the medium as oil on canvas with a transfer. The paint layer was lifted from its original support at some point and laid onto a new one, a treatment used on old paintings whose canvas had decayed.

A transfer is invasive and it leaves traces. It is one reason the surface reads the way it does, with a fine, even craquelure spread across the flesh and the pale ground.

How It Reached Paris

The Louvre records the painting with Alessandro Vittrici in Rome, then with the Doria-Pamphili family. Prince Camillo Pamphili gave it to Louis XIV in 1665. It appears in the royal inventory of 1683 as number 189.

It came to France as a diplomatic gift rather than a purchase, some thirty years before Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin was bought for the same crown. Both now hang in Room 712 of the Grande Galerie, in the Denon wing.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Two people look at each other and four hands do the work. Caravaggio put the transaction at the centre of the canvas and painted the hands more carefully than either face. The background is a bare wall with one diagonal band of light on it, so there is nothing else to look at.