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I have seen those who have marked the edge of the corner of the card with ink, who bend with the right hand a suit towards the narrower part, and bend the other suit at the same angle, but on the longer side … Many other observations could be made, not all of which could be foreseen or imagined, but this is enough to awaken the mind of the magistrate, should some suspect cards come into his hands, to observe or discover if there is some other mark on them. This is as much as I can say as regards the eye. There are also those who know the cards by touch, and these make a little hole with a needle that stands out in relief on the underside of the cards. According to the place where they feel this slight relief, they know which card it is that goes to their opponent or that they take from themselves. Others play with thick cards with such thick colours that they have a certain relief. They keep the tip of the middle finger of the right hand well shaven, so that the skin there is very sensitive, and on touching the card with that finger, they sense those colours and know which card is underneath.45

This explains why the cheat’s accomplice in Caravaggio’s picture has two prominent holes in his glove. The glove has not been worn by use. Its stitching has been unpicked, so that the trained and sensitive middle finger and thumb of the sharper can do their work. But, despite such finely observed details, it would be a mistake to assume that Caravaggio’s picture is an overtly moralizing work of art. The artist might have drawn on texts such as Cospi’s book for magistrates, but he himself reserved judgement.

Despite Caravaggio’s vaunted reputation for realism, he emphatically refused to present his image of cardsharping as a slice of reprehensible reality. This is no snapshot from the scene of a crime. It is a piece of lively, intriguing theatre. The gestures of the crooks – especially the pantomimic semaphore of the accomplice’s hand signal – plainly come from the world of drama. In an actual gambling den, such overt gesticulation would soon be discovered. But imagine The Cardsharps as a scene from a play, performed for an audience happy to suspend disbelief, to enjoy the sense of superiority that comes from knowing that they can see everything that the gulled cardplayer is blind to – and the exaggerated body language of the figures makes perfect sense.

The Cardsharps plays on the threat of il mondo alla rovescia, a world turned upside down, where wily guttersnipes win and aristocrats lose. But its message is not morally straightforward. The rich young man will no doubt return to his palace at the end of the game. The scruffy bravi robbing him blind – who may indeed be out-of-work mercenaries, to judge by the younger cheat’s sword – will no doubt drink their gains away and end up back in the gutter. But for this brief moment they are victorious.

Caravaggio’s painting is ambiguous, but contains a hint of where his sympathy – or, at least, his empathy – might lie. He paints the young gull with a form of smooth indifference, as a softly generalized figure of aristocratic insouciance. By contrast, the cheats themselves are live, lithe, fascinating. The older man’s concentration is absolute, and touched by a sense of desperation. The younger conman, gazing with fixity at his prey, is as tense and alert as a feral cat. Caravaggio paints his desperadoes like a man who feels with them, if not necessarily for them. He understands the deep seriousness of their desire to work their trick, to carry out their strategy without a hitch. When he painted the picture his own predicament was not altogether dissimilar to theirs.

The trickster in The Gypsy Fortune-Teller belonged to an even more reviled class of ‘vagabond’ than the cardsharps. For Cospi, gypsies were the lowest of the low because their habits of thievery were innate rather than learned. His entry on them in Il giudice criminalista is an undisguised racist diatribe – a nearly hysterical expression of burgeoning hatred for a people initially welcomed to Italy, in the