Description
The Fortune Teller, painted around 1596–1597, belongs to the early Roman career of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and is one of his most significant early genre paintings. The scene shows an elegantly dressed young man facing a young fortune teller who takes his hand under the pretext of reading his future.
The apparently cordial encounter conceals an act of deception. While attracting the young man's attention by reading his palm, the woman uses their physical contact to discreetly remove a ring. Caravaggio thus transforms an everyday situation into a compact narrative in which the viewer knows something that the protagonist himself has not yet discovered.
The Fortune Teller played an important role in the development of European genre painting. That uncertainty is part of the painting's effectiveness.
