The fortune teller

An old fortune teller, surrounded by a number of extravagant characters, reads a soldier’s hand: the reply arouses amazement and consternation among his fellow-soldiers, dismay in the two old men on the right, fear and alarm in the eyes of the unfortunate soldier. The fortune teller is consulting one of the four heavy books lying on his table and a parchment unrolled towards the onlooker, on which appears a verse, written in Hebrew and in Latin, from the Book of Job (37, 7: “He seals up the hand of every man, that all men may know his work") and a series of palms of hands, probably with cabalistic signs next to them. The sentence is clear: the destiny that God wants is written on every man’s hands.

The painting, presumably painted shortly after 1650, is one of the masterpieces of Pietro della Vecchia. It is an enigmatic work and, at the same time, grotesque and bizarre, painted by an eclectic and cultured artist, influenced on one hand by the “tenebrosi”, followers of Caravaggio, and on the other by the great artistic tradition of the sixteenth century in the Veneto: Titian, Romanino, Dosso and especially Giorgione, of whose works Vecchia was a skilled forger.

The painting therefore tackles a philosophical and existential theme in an ironic tone, referring to cabala and magic and showing some of the characters that recur most frequently in the artist’s work: soldiers, pages with feathered caps and pairs of lovers.

The painting arrived in the Civic Art Gallery in 1834, along with other works of art belonging to the collection that the Vicenza nobleman Carlo Vicentini Dal Giglio left to the museum of his home town.