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By Root 1407 0

‘Girolamo’. There is strong evidence that such reports tended to multiply at times of genuine social crisis, especially when the existing structures of poor relief were being put under intense pressure by plague or famine. There were several occasions during the 1580s and 1590s – the plague of Caravaggio’s childhood, in 1576–7, being a prime example – when the sheer number of beggars and indigent people at large threatened to overwhelm the ability of the Italian states to function. Tough measures against itinerant beggars and ‘vagabonds’ were periodically introduced throughout the late sixteenth century: in Florence in 1576, in Milan the following year, in Genoa in 1582, in Palermo in 1590 and in Rome throughout the 1590s. The stories that circulated about ‘fraudulent beggars’, the growing literature devoted to their typology and taxonomy, were partly a reflection of reality and partly a reflection of deep anxiety within the governing classes of society. They multiplied in much the same way as stories about supposed illegal immigration or welfare fraud multiply in right-wing newspapers today, at times when the economy or social services come under strain.

The medieval Christian attitude to the poor had been essentially supportive. Every poor person was to be seen as the living image of the impoverished Christ himself, and helped accordingly. St Francis of Assisi had gone so far as to declare himself married to ‘Lady Poverty’. But by the late sixteenth century such attitudes had undergone a sea change. In many states – including the papal states – the poor were viewed with increasing distrust and hostility. In some places they were simply driven out by edict. Elsewhere the great lazzaretti, the plague hospitals of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, were converted into poor houses where the indigent were coralled and forced to do menial work.

The ruling and religious elites of the day were bitterly divided by the issue. The more authoritarian wing of the Catholic Church favoured rigorous means of social control and repression. But there were also those more sympathetic to the ancient medieval view – orders such as the Franciscans and Jesuits – who continued to plead for sympathy with the poor. There was, in other words, a form of right-wing / left-wing split in Caravaggio’s Rome over the treatment of poverty. One way to view the growing literature devoted to ‘roguery’ – whether the writings of Garzoni or the ‘improved’ trial transcripts attributed to ‘Pompeo’ and ‘Girolamo’ – is as propaganda for the right.

All this helps to clarify the most important questions that need to be asked about these two pivotal works in the painter’s career. Can the Gypsy Fortune-Teller and Cardsharps be seen as a plea for sympathy for those afflicted by poverty? Or are they simply a translation into painting of the sinister mechanisms of state control – a visual means (pace Burke) ‘of legitimating the repressive measures’ taken against those living on the margins of society?

Caravaggio’s pictures were certainly not painted for political ends. They were created to amuse and entertain an art-loving cardinal. But it may be significant that del Monte, who dared to hang these startlingly novel pictures of low-life characters on the wall of his palace, was a Medici supporter who publicly shared the Medici’s known sympathy for the ‘pauperist’ views – as they have been termed – of Filippo Neri and the Oratorians. In other words, he was a man who stood to the left in Rome’s divide on the issue of the poor.

Caravaggio was undoubtedly familiar with the overwhelmingly negative picture of the rogue or trickster presented in so much of the moralizing literature of his time. His depiction of the Cardsharps is so close to the accounts of card cheats in texts such as A Manifest Detection, or the seventeenth-century judge Antonio Maria Cospi’s book of advice to magistrates, Il giudice criminalista (1643), that he may actually have consulted such works when planning his composition. Cospi’s section on the marking of cards is a virtual gloss on the action in The