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“The ‘Fruit Seller’ is a languishing youth in a situation unsuited to his temperament.” Whatever the boy signifies, he and his basket of fruit are a magnificent study.
    Although Caravaggio did not work long for Arpino, the association ensured his emergence from obscurity. He became known to the city’s artists and connoisseurs as a young man of promise. His employer moved among Rome’s cleverest and most cultivated men, belonging to the “Academy of those without Senses,” whose members pledged themselves as Neoplatonists to forgo sensual pleasure to enjoy more fully the “celestial and divine.” Arpino also belonged to the Accademia di San Luca, revived at about this time to improve the status of Roman artists; its cardinal protector was Federigo Borromeo, Carlo’s nephew. Some of these discerning minds must have noticed the young Lombard, realizing that if Arpino employed him, he was likely to be talented.
    Despite the benefits of being associated with Arpino, Caravaggio developed a lasting hatred for him. Arpino was conceited and overbearing, and nobody ever found Caravaggio easy. Or it may have been sheer envy at the dazzling success of someone still only in his early twenties. Before they could come to blows, Caravaggio left Arpino’s workshop in January 1594, after being injured by a kick from a horse. Penniless, he had to enter a freehospital, Santa Maria della Consolazione, which specialized in nursing the victims of street accidents. During what appears to have been a lengthy convalescence, Caravaggio painted pictures for the prior in charge of the hospital, who afterward took them home with him to Spain.
    On leaving the hospital, Caravaggio worked with another widely respected artist, Prospero Orsi, a specialist in “grotesques” inspired by the ancient murals he had seen underground. The first documentary evidence for Caravaggio’s presence in Rome dates from October 1594, when his name and Prospero’s appear as members of a vigil in a church during a “Forty Hours” exposition of the Sacrament. Then he set up on his own, hoping to live by his paintings, but he failed miserably in trying to sell them. To make matters worse, he had to leave a room he had been lent at the Palazzo Petrignani. Once again, he was destitute.
    Luckily, some gentlemen of the profession came to his rescue out of pity, and Maître Valentin, a French picture dealer, at last managed to sell some of his pictures. One of them was
The Fortune Teller
, now at the Louvre, which shows a gypsy girl stealing a ring from a young man’s finger while she tells his fortune. Caravaggio received a mere eight scudi for it.
    This was probably during the autumn of 1596, just before a dramatic change in his own fortunes. Valentin’s shop was visited by a distinguished collector, who seems to have admired
The Fortune Teller
but was told that it had already been sold. His attention was drawn to another painting by Caravaggio,
The Cardsharps
(in Italian,
I Bari
—“The Cheats”). During the next century Bellori saw this picture in Cardinal Antonio Barberini’s collection and described it: “He depicts a callow youth holding some cards in his hands, with a head which is very well done from life, and wearing a dark suit of clothes, while facing him a young rogue leans on the table with one hand as, with the other behind him, he pulls a false card from his belt. At the same moment a third man next to the youth is reading his cards and signaling what they are to his accomplice with three fingers of his hand….”
    The picture disappeared in Paris in 1899 and, long mistaken for a copy,was rediscovered nearly a century later. It is now at Fort Worth, Texas.
The Cardsharps
is just the sort of low-life encounter that Caravaggio must have seen often in the seedy taverns of the Campo Marzio. For his contemporaries, the idea of portraying such a scene was utterly new and startling. The collector who bought it was Cardinal del Monte, who lived at