Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [61]
The older of the two conmen, with his holed, threadbare glove and black cloak – perfect for melting into the unlit gloom of Rome’s streets by night – is the spying accomplice described in numerous books and pamphlets of the time. There was a thriving literature devoted to the tricks of the street and, in particular, the devices of the card cheat. A popular Italian treatise on gambling, entitled The Book on Games of Chance (Liber de ludo aleae), was written by the mathematicican, astronomer and failed card-player Gerolamo Cardano (1501–76). Countless other texts listed the various techniques used by cheats at the gaming table. One of the most widely read, a work first published in England in 1552 under the title A Manifest Detection of the Most Vile and Detestable Uses of Dice-play, and Other Practices Like the Same, contains a more or less exact description of the ruse played out in Caravaggio’s Cardsharps: ‘Of this fraternity there be that called helpers, which commonly haunt taverns or ale-houses, and cometh in as men not acquainted with none in the company, but spying them at any game will bid them God-speed and God-be-at-their-game, and will so place himself that he will show his fellow by signs and tokens, without speech commonly, but sometime with far-fetched words, what cards he hath in his hand, and how he may play against him. And those between them both getteth money out of the other’s purse.’42
There is a narrative and symbolic affinity between the two pictures painted for Cardinal del Monte and the work that immediately preceded them, Boy Bitten by a Lizard. All three tell of a man undone by his own vices, of youth suddenly clouded by the prospect of disease, loss or debt – a pattern that the artist had perhaps experienced during his own youth in Milan. But what made The Gypsy Fortune-Teller and The Cardsharps so startlingly original was their unprecedentedly close focus on the world of the street and the gambling den.
The subject matter of these paintings was highly topical. Counter-Reformation Rome was a city in which all manner of thieves, rogues and scoundrels thronged. Their presence was a symptom of social crisis. Recurrent plague not only destroyed lives, but ravaged economies in the cities and states where it struck. The number of displaced and unemployed people had grown alarmingly during Caravaggio’s lifetime. Sixteenth-century Italy had also been racked by an almost constant state of war, resulting in a large, permanently uprooted population of mercenaries. When they had money such men gambled, drank and whored. If the recruiting officer did not call, they were liable to turn to crime. In Rome, ever a magnet for the poor in need of alms, they often masqueraded as pilgrims.
A vivid picture of this confusing world, where scurrility often dressed itself in the clothes of virtuous indigence, is painted by a set of notarial documents dated February 1595 (probably only a year or so before Cardinal del Monte purchased The Gypsy Fortune-Teller and The Cardsharps), which record the interrogation of a young man in the prison on the Sistine Bridge, in the centre of Rome. ‘I am called Pompeo,’ the boy declared. ‘I was born in Trevi near Spoleto, I am about 16 years old, I have no occupation, I was arrested by your men in the church of S. Giacomo degli Spagnoli, because I was begging for alms during Mass.’ When he was asked if he knew anything about other beggars in the city, and whether they formed a single sect,