The Cardsharps (I Bari), c.1595/96 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

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We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting The Cardsharps (I Bari) is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The scene is compact, staged close to the picture plane as though we, too, lean over the gaming table. At left a well-dressed youth, intent and trusting, fans his cards; the velvet of his dark doublet absorbs light, his lace cuffs glow. Opposite him, angled toward us, is a lithe boy in a striped, yellow-black jerkin laced with red, plumed cap cocked jauntily; behind his back, half-drawn from his breeches, a concealed card flashes white. Between them looms the older fixer, a figure of calculation: gloved hand raised in a subtle semaphore, exposed fingertips ready to read the tells in a marked deck, eyes slicing sideways toward his accomplice. Scattered on the patterned cloth lie counters and slips, small but crucial evidence of the stakes. The drama turns on divided attention—absorption, collusion, anticipation.

Color orchestrates the moral temperature. The young victim’s deep claret clothing, nearly swallowing illumination, sets a register of inwardness; across the table, the cheat’s parti-colored costume—sulfur yellow, black bands, a slash of carmine girdle—announces theatricality and risk. The central figure’s striped sleeve mediates, knitting the chromatic extremes while his muted olive glove cools the temperature of deceit. Flesh notes, carefully modulated from pearly youth to weathered adult, carry psychological gradation. Accents—the pink and cream feathers, the bright card edge, the pale laces—punctuate the subdued ground, focusing vision where narrative hinges.

Caravaggio’s handling here, from the mid-1590s, is comparatively tight, before the later bravura swarths of loaded pigment. Surfaces are built with controlled layering: thin, absorbent darks; small, higher-key strokes catching rims of lace or the grain of kid leather; wet-in-wet transitions in faces that sustain an uncanny immediacy. Illusion depends less on minute description than on calibrated contrasts of value and texture—the bloom of youth set against worn glove, the nap of velvet against polished tabletop. Light is neither generalized nor symbolic but directional, raking across forms to isolate clues, as a stage director might freeze action in a spot.

Compositionally the painting is a lesson in triangulated deceit. The three heads form a shallow arc, yet the true vectors are the hands: from the boy’s cards to the gloved signal to the hidden card, a covert loop bypassing the innocent player. Caravaggio compresses depth; shoulders overlap, cropping pulls figures forward, denying us the comfortable detachment of spectatorship. We become, uncomfortably, potential witnesses—or marks. The table edge is the proscenium, and we stand in the pit.

Rome in the 1590s offered a market for lively, contemporary subjects; gaming, fortune-telling, and low-life encounters circulated among collectors alert to novelty. Newly arrived from Milan, the young painter used such scenes to demonstrate an unvarnished naturalism and a capacity for psychological narrative that differed from the idealized manners still influential in late Mannerism. This painting quickly attracted the attention of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who acquired it and drew the artist into a patronage network that would lead to major ecclesiastical commissions and to the broader dissemination of his radically observed art.

The treatment of fraud and credulity here proved fertile. Variants and thematic descendants spread through European collections; one thinks of later French interpretations, including Georges de La Tour’s exploration of cheating at cards. Yet what remains distinctive is the refusal to moralize overtly. Instead the painter offers an episode—observed, finely calibrated, morally ambiguous—in which human vulnerability is neither ridiculed nor excused, merely exposed under an unforgiving light.