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Costantino Spata played a vital role in Caravaggio’s career. It was through him that the painter came to the attention of one of his most important supporters, his principal patron during his early years in Rome. Baglione tells the story in a few words: ‘This was the means by which he met Cardinal del Monte, an art lover, who invited him to his home.’40 Cardinal del Monte would nurture Caravaggio through the next few crucial years of his life. Not only would he house, clothe and protect him, but he would introduce him to a circle of the most powerful and influential collectors in Rome, and negotiate the difficult waters of higher Church patronage on his behalf.

Del Monte, the ‘art lover’, whose palace was just around the corner from the Piazza di San Luigi, was one of Spata’s clients. Did the dealer and the painter think up a deliberate strategy to get the cardinal’s attention? Did Spata even advise Caravaggio on what to paint, helping to bait the hook that would land the big fish? Certainly, the work that Caravaggio created for his new dealer to try to sell was markedly different from anything he had painted before.

The two pictures with which Caravaggio and Spata successfully tempted del Monte, The Gypsy Fortune-Teller and The Cardsharps, still exist. The first is to be found in the Capitoline Museum in Rome (a later and even finer version of the same composition, painted for a friend of del Monte, is in the Louvre). The second is in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Between them, they mark a radical new departure for Caravaggio, and indeed they are among the most innovative pictures created anywhere in Europe in the late sixteenth century.

Each painting shows a scene of trickery and deceit, enacted by half-length figures. ‘Genre picture’ was the less than satisfactory term eventually settled upon by art historians to describe such works. But the genre picture in this vein did not exist until Caravaggio invented it. Although there had been shadowy precedents for such work, in prints and drawings and in marginal details of paintings about other things, The Gypsy Fortune-Teller and The Cardsharps introduced a new concept to art: the low-life drama. Hung together in a single room in del Monte’s Roman palace, their influence was soon felt far and wide. The taste for such pictures grew rapidly and spread across all of Europe. Caravaggio’s tricksters spawned a whole world of painted rogues, created by a multitude of artists including Bartolomeo Manfredi in Italy, Rembrandt in Holland and Georges de La Tour in France.

The differing dimensions of the two canvases suggest that they were not painted as a pair, although both are offspring of the same idea. In The Gypsy Fortune-Teller, a sharply dressed young man with a sword at his hip has fallen under the spell of a smiling young Romany traveller. She fixes him with an intense and slightly nervy stare. He returns her hypnotic gaze with a dreamy, half-lost expression of his own. Shadows play on the dun-coloured wall behind the two figures. The precise nature of the action was explained by Mancini: ‘I do not think I have seen a more graceful and expressive figure than the Gipsy who foretells good fortune to a young man … he shows the Gipsy’s slyness with a false smile as she takes off the ring of the young man, who shows his naivete and the effects of his amorous response to the beauty of the little Gipsy who foretells his fortune and steals his ring.’41 Under the pretence of reading the young man’s palm, the streetwise confidence trickster is actually robbing him.

The Cardsharps plays a variation on the same theme, a gentleman fooled out of his money. The scene is a gambling den, in which we encounter the second of Caravaggio’s fresh-faced, rich young men, playing a game of cards. He is dressed in sumptuous black silk over a lace-trimmed shirt – sleek finery that has drawn the attention of not one but two urban predators. The yellow-and-black stripes of their costumes suggest the image of a pair of wasps buzzing around