Caravaggio | The Cardsharps

About The Cardsharps by Caravaggio

Caravaggio painted The Cardsharps in Rome around 1595, in his early twenties, when he was still unknown and selling pictures through a dealer. A well-dressed boy is being fleeced at cards. An older accomplice leans over his shoulder reading his hand and signalling with gloved fingers whose tips have been cut away so he can feel the marked backs; the young cheat opposite reaches behind his belt for the card he needs, a dagger at his hip.

The picture made his career. Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte bought it, moved Caravaggio into his household at the Palazzo Madama and gave him board, a studio and introductions. Every major commission that followed — the Contarelli Chapel, the Cerasi Chapel, the altarpieces — runs back to this sale. It is also the first time Caravaggio brings a whole story down to a single table top, at close range, with no landscape, no allegory and nothing to explain it.

Then it disappeared. Recorded through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Barberini and Sciarra collections, it dropped out of sight in the 1890s and was known for almost a hundred years only from copies, until it resurfaced in a private collection in Zurich in 1987. The Kimbell Art Museum bought it that year.

Own a hand-painted The Cardsharps

Caravaggio made no drawings for this picture. He had no cartoon and no design worked out on paper. He posed live models in the room, scratched a few guide lines into the wet priming with the wooden end of his brush so the poses could be found again between sittings, and then painted straight onto the canvas. That is why the hands are so exact and why the drawing is very slightly off in places — the boy's shoulder, the length of the reaching arm behind the back. Those small irregularities are the record of decisions being taken in paint, in front of a person, with nothing to fall back on. A press lays down every part of an image with identical ink and identical pressure, and the effect on this painting is to make it look corrected: the hesitations flatten out and the surface arrives clean, even and slightly dead. Painted by hand in oils, a copyist has to repeat the process rather than photograph the result.