Fortune Teller

This painting depicts a fortune teller, bravo, lute player, drinking figure, and a pick-pocket. It is one of the artist’s earliest works. Depictions of card players and tavern drinkers were popularised by Bartolomeo Manfredi soon after Caravaggio’s stay in Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century, and this new form was rapidly taken up by the plethora of Northern artists working in the city at the time. Few of them though absorbed the innovations of Caravaggio and Manfredi as quickly and as successfully as Valentin, who must surely be considered one of the finest of all of Caravaggio’s followers.

In the present work Valentin provides a development to the standard depiction of bohemians and crooks by portraying the victim of the intrigue, that is the soldier being duped, with his back to us, creating a greater spatial complexity, while the figures facing us are presented in a harmonious and fluid dynamic which underscores their complicity.