Caravaggio’s gallant and fortune teller are alive and well in the second season of the HBO show The White Lotus, set in Sicily. After all, rapid urbanization-and the massive inequality thereby produced-led to scenes like the ones Caravaggio depicted repeating endlessly. With this painting, Caravaggio helped launch the craze for “genre painting” that began to sweep Europe soon, the depiction of stock characters from seamy urban life, like those of The Fortune Teller, rivaled portraiture to become the dominant representation of the human figure.

The fortune teller of the painting is Romani: the itinerant people pejoratively known for centuries as “Gypsies.” Rome’s wealth stood in stark contrast to the plague-ridden and war-torn rest of Italy, whose displaced migrants (including Caravaggio himself) flocked into the Eternal City to cheat and beg from the very rich who had played a part in putting them there. Painted in 1595 by the naturalist Italian prodigy Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller captured the opulence of papal Rome, at a moment when it was embracing an ethos of worldly splendor soon to find artistic expression in the Baroque. It’s a powerful image of the timeless gullibility of the rich, and yet, for its moment, it was as timely as could be. Holding the gallant young man’s palm carefully, even gently, in order to tell his fortune, the young woman surreptitiously slips the ring from his finger.

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