Dress historian Elizabeth Currie on the beautiful Baroque era paintings that capture the clothing and lives of working people

Among a group of figures huddled around a table in a darkened tavern [main pic, above], a soldier looks directly at the viewer, raising his glass in a toast. A circle of deceit unfolds on the left-hand side of the painting, where a brightly clothed Romani woman reads the palm of an apprehensive-looking youth. Intent on her subject, she seems oblivious to the man behind her stealing a chicken from under her cloak. He, in turn, fails to notice the child gently extracting his purse.

This is storytelling on a majestic scale, as the canvas by the French artist Valentin de Boulogne measures approximately 150 × 250 centimetres (59 × 98 in). By the time it was painted in around 1620, Valentin was well established in Rome among a circle of artists adept at creating genre scenes with the same cast of characters, strongly influenced by the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

The representation of dress in many of these compositions epitomizes their blend of social observation with moral and allegorical themes. Hailed for their innovative and experimental nature, Baroque genre scenes of working people and everyday activities nonetheless owed a debt to various earlier works. For decades, artists had been interested in breaking away from the rules of decorum that governed images of the elites, such as the need for composed facial expressions and gestures. They included Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), whose ‘grotesque’ head studies were frequently copied and percolated into the wider iconographic repertoire of the time.

One of his sketches, currently titled A Man Tricked by Gypsies (c. 1493), was known in artistic circles in Milan in the 1580s, when Caravaggio was in the city. It is possible that it provided inspiration for the popular Baroque theme of multilayered deceptions. It appears to show a man holding out his palm to have his fortune told by one woman, while another reaches around him to steal his purse.

These new character types fulfilled a desire for variety, especially in works that required large groups of figures, while giving artists an opportunity to demonstrate their range and ingenuity. By the 1580s commonplace subjects achieved prominence in large-scale Italian paintings. Flemish artists such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Joachim Beuckelaer and Pieter Aertsen had already pioneered similar depictions of humble activities and locations.

In northern Italy, artists including Vincenzo Campi, Bartolomeo Passerotti and the Bolognese Annibale Carracci, whose later work in Rome was often contrasted with that of Caravaggio, also began to create paintings in the same vein.

One early example painted by Vincenzo’s older brother Giulio Campi, The Chess Game (c. 1530–32) [above], encapsulates the kind of transgressive sociability explored more fully in tavern scenes by Caravaggio and his followers. Unlike the sedate nature of most images of board games from this time, the scene shows a very mixed group of players and onlookers in an undefined location.

Some knowledge of dress is necessary to identify the characters involved. It has been suggested that the male figure in armour symbolizes Mars and the female figure, whose chest is accentuated by a semi-transparent embroidered linen partlet, is Venus. Clearly associated with desire, she might also represent a courtesan.

There are many documented cases of sex workers wearing male-gendered garments, exemplified here by her slashed leather sleeves. Areas of the body that ‘respectable’ women would normally conceal are prominently on display, for example her naked wrist encircled by a black lace tie, hovering in the centre of the composition. Rather than being chaperoned by female companions or a trusted, lifelong servant, she is surrounded by a variety of men and girls, while her eyes turn to a jester in a striped outfit, who contributes to the prevailing impression of impropriety.

Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps (c. 1595) and The Fortune Teller (c. 1596) represented a turning point for the Roman art market. It is thought they were sold through a dealer, meaning Caravaggio was confident enough of their appeal to paint the canvases speculatively. He produced another version of The Fortune Teller shortly afterwards. According to his biographer Giulio Mancini, the first canvas sold for 8 scudi. It has often been remarked that Caravaggio might have hoped to receive more, yet it was a reasonable sum of money given that artists could rent lodgings in Rome for around 30–40 scudi a year. The increasing popularity of these subjects is reflected by the fact that a copy of The Cardsharps by another painter was valued at 200 scudi two decades later.

This is an extract from Street Style: Art and Dress in the Time of Caravaggio by Elizabeth Currie (Reaktion Books, £30). Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Elizabeth Currie is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” when the historical fashion expert will be talking about the hidden lives of the street people depicted by Caravaggio and his followers. That’s Thursday 19 February at 6pm. Book tickets here.
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