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They are thieves by nature, descended from Cus son of Ham, cursed son of Noah … They still feel this paternal curse, wandering dispersed around the world without being able to find a homeland or other permanent place … They sell their own sons for food … They come from the region between Egypt and Ethiopia and wander through the world, erecting their tents outside cities in fields and highways. They make deception, changes and prognostication from the lines of the hand, and earn their living by these amusing frauds … Like beasts, they consider marriage to their own sisters legitimate … The women steal chickens, and while they pretend to tell one’s fortune by the signs of the hand, rob the peasants and steal the women’s purses and handkerchiefs.46

English attitudes could be just as virulent. In Thomas Dekker’s pamphlet of 1608, Lanthorne and Candle-light, gypsies are described as: ‘a people more scattered than the Jewes and more hated: beggarly in apparell, barbarous in condition, beastly in behaviour and bloudy if they meete advantage. A man that sees them would sweare they all had the yellow Jawndis, or that they were Tawny Moores bastardes …’47

But when Caravaggio painted his Gypsy Fortune-Teller he went against the grain of such crude stereotypes. His gypsy is a thief, for sure, but she is a far cry from the subhuman monster of Cospi and Dekker. She is a beautiful enchantress, an exotic swindler who steals her victim’s heart as surely as she pilfers the ring from the hand he drowsily surrenders to her. Like Caravaggio’s cardsharps, she has stepped into his painting straight from the theatre – and emphatically not from the pages of judges or journalists seeking to control a perceived social menace.

Three years before Caravaggio painted the picture, Cesare Ripa published an enormously influential guide to the symbolism of the post-Renaissance world, entitled the Iconologia. The book is a description, as its title page says, of ‘diverse Images of Virtues, Vices, Affections, Human Passions, Arts, Disciplines, Humours, Elements, Celestial Bodies, Provinces of Italy, Rivers and every region of the world’.48 The gypsy appears twice in Ripa’s encyclopedia of imagery, each time as a woman. On the one hand, she is an emblem of poverty, shown ‘with a twisted neck’ in the act of begging for alms: ‘poverty is represented in the guise of a Gipsy,’ explains Ripa, ‘because a poorer folk than this is not to be found; for they have neither property nor nobility nor taste, nor hope of anything that can give a particle of that happiness that is the aim of political life.’ But she is also a symbol of comedy, of light-hearted resilience to the blows of fortune.

Under this aspect, Ripa notes, ‘her dress should be of various colours; in her right hand she should carry the horn which is used as a musical instrument; in her left hand she should have a mask, and she should wear socks on her feet. The diversity of colours signifies the varied and diverse actions dealt with by this sort of poetry, which delight the eye of the mind no less than variety of colours the eye of the body through their expression of the accidents of human life, of virtues, vices and worldly conditions, as found in every quality and kind of people, except those of princely blood.’49 Here Ripa is distantly following the classical theory of theatrical genres propounded by Aristotle in his Poetics. Aristotle’s distinction between tragedy and comedy, much parroted by the more prescriptive literary theorists of sixteenth-century Italy, held that tragedy should focus on the actions of the elite – kings and princes – while comedy should concern itself with the behaviour of those at the very bottom of the social heap.

Caravaggio’s Gypsy Fortune-Teller is smiling poverty personified. But she is no mere emblem. With her turban-like headscarf and long cloak she is, in fact, dressed precisely as a real gypsy in late sixteenth-century Italy. Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni, or Costumes Past and Present, published