Here's my advice to Calgary: Keep an eye on those I.O.C. cardsharps.
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Clem speculated in dubious investments and openly consorted with cardsharps, forgers and other scam artists.
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From his love of TV westerns, he learned the sleights of hand used by cardsharps.
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It's why the charming gamblers in movies tend to be cardsharps or pool hustlers and rarely sports bettors.
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"Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio," a big Baroque blast of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first exhibition anywhere devoted to a French painter whose theatrically lit tableaus of musicians, cardsharps and saints now stand in slight obscurity.
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The medieval painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti "focused attention" on the evils of bad government; Caravaggio showed us cardsharps and torturers; Goya made heart-rending prints of the evils of war — and none of them ever thought that such ills would end once they'd revealed them.
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The Cardsharps (ca. 1594) by Caravaggio. ' (1635) by Georges de La Tour. Card- sharpers by Candlelight (1845) by Feliks Pęczarski, National Museum in Warsaw.
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Some critics have identified the boy-angel with the ingenuous victim of cheats on the left of Cardsharps, while others have seen a similarity with the profile of the boy cheating him instead.
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Caravaggio's Cardsharps (c. 1594) which later came into the collection of Antonio Barberini. Though Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died when Antonio Barberini was only 3 years old, the Cardinal later became a great admirer of his work and his extensive art collection included Caravaggio's paintings such as Still Life with Fruit, Cardsharps and The Lute Player. Antonio had purchased the art collection of Francesco Maria Del Monte upon the cardinal's death which had included a large number of important works.
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The Cardsharps (painted around 1594) is a painting by the Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. The original is generally agreed to be the work acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in 1987, although Caravaggio may have painted more than one version.
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Though he draws very beautiful women, they are all actually beasts [...]. Pitra treats the other half of the population, men, even worse. I don't know a single drawing of Pitra's that depicts a model husband, a good father and breadwinner of a nice family. On the other hand Pitra has depicted a plethora of fraudsters, cardsharps, gangsters, corrupt politicians, detectives and the oddest of individuals.
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The day after receiving the card Gazzo called the number and nervously arranged a meeting with Walter Scott for the next day. It was sharp and to the point and Gazzo didn't have the courage to ask any questions about cardsharps, cheating or Scott's 'work'. However he was nonetheless thrilled to be so close to his goal. Scott greeted him warmly, making tea and talking about Gazzo's trip from England.
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In the 1990s, Mahon donated his entire 57 piece art collection to various museums in the UK, the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. In December 2007, a painting Mahon bought for £50,400 the previous year (and which was considered to be the work of an anonymous follower of Caravaggio) was authenticated by him as a true Caravaggio. It is an early version of the painting The Cardsharps.
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Aged 17 Scott began to travel the states to find out "what the cardsharps actually do". In December 1919 he joined the Providence branch of the National Conjurers Association, stating on his application he was an amateur magician and 'card manipulator'. It was here he met Edward Gilland McGuire, a fellow magician. McGuire had served in World War I but having been injured returned to Providence and took up an interest in magic.
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I am in his service and > live in his house. I am entered on his household payroll.” Caravaggio's paintings were never in tune with the idealized themes that were prevalent during the time period. Instead, he became more intrigued with the idea of realism and incorporated it into his paintings such as Boy with a Basket of Fruit, The Fortune Teller, The Cardsharps, Bacchus, and even The Musicians, which were all painted within the same time period.
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This book became an instant hit and to this day is considered to be a classic gambling book. What made this book so popular was the fact that it was the first detailed revelation of the secrets of the cardsharps. Other authors, prior to Maskelyne, had written about crooked gambling, but never before had anyone published a work with in- depth, detailed explanation of the secrets of crooked gambling. The first edition of Sharps and Flats was published in London and New York.
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By the 17th century, table games had spread to Sweden. A wooden board and checkers were recovered from the wreck of the Vasa among the belongings of the ship's officers. Backgammon appears widely in paintings of this period, mainly those of Dutch and German painters, such as Van Ostade, Jan Steen, Hieronymus Bosch, and Bruegel. Some surviving artworks are Cardsharps by Caravaggio (the backgammon board is in the lower left) and The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (the backgammon board is in the lower right).
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The work represents an important milestone for Caravaggio.Kimbell Art: Cardsharps He painted it when he was attempting an independent career after leaving the workshop of the Cavaliere Giuseppe Cesari d'Arpino, for whom he had been painting "flowers and fruit", finishing the details for the Cavaliere's mass-produced (and massive) output. Caravaggio left Arpino's workshop in January 1594 and began selling works through the dealer Costantino, with the assistance of Prospero Orsi, an established painter of Mannerist grotesques (masks, monsters, etc.). Orsi introduced Caravaggio to his extensive network of contacts in the world of collectors and patrons.
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1595), Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford circa 1595 (commissioned by Francesco Maria del Monte) The Fortune Teller, his first composition with more than one figure, shows a boy, likely Minniti, having his palm read by a gypsy girl, who is stealthily removing his ring as she strokes his hand. The theme was quite new for Rome, and proved immensely influential over the next century and beyond. This, however, was in the future: at the time, Caravaggio sold it for practically nothing. The Cardsharps—showing another naïve youth of privilege falling the victim of card cheats—is even more psychologically complex, and perhaps Caravaggio's first true masterpiece.
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After establishing a successful studio in Lucca he specialised in cabinet pictures often including allegorical or musical subjects and still lifes, a genre which he introduced to the city.Pietro Paolini, The Cardsharps at Jean Luc Baroni Ltd He received multiple commissions from religious institutions in Lucca as well as prominent local citizens. On 25 November 1651 Paolini married Maria Forisportam Angela di Girolamo Massei, by whom he had two sons: Andrea, who became custodian of the Public Archives, and Giovanni Tommaso.Elisabetta Giffi, PAOLINI, Pietro at Dizionario Biografico Around 1652 (or possibly even earlier) Paolini founded the 'Academy of Painting and Drawing of Lucca', at which he helped train many painters.
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On the wall hangs a painting with a nude reclining female and a Cupid with a bow and quiver in a landscape. The complex iconography of the painting seems to cite from many of the works of Caravaggio such as that of the Cardsharps, the fortune teller in the Capitoline Museums and the Calling of St. Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel in Rome. The scene has many symbolic meanings including those of gambling, deception and love. The blindfolded man in buying the courtesan's favours represents on the one hand, a form of vile, blind love and, at the same time, all those who get involved in the risky game of love.
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The 1594 Fortune Teller aroused considerable interest among younger artists and the more avant garde collectors of Rome, but, according to Mancini, Caravaggio's poverty forced him to sell it for the low sum of eight scudi. It entered the collection of a wealthy banker and connoisseur, the Marchese Vincente Giustiniani, who became an important patron of the artist. Giustiniani's friend, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, purchased the companion piece, Cardsharps, in 1595, and at some point in that year Caravaggio entered the Cardinal's household. For Del Monte, Caravaggio painted a second version of The Fortune Teller, copied from the Giustiniani but with certain changes.
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The Fortune Teller is one of two known genre pieces painted by Caravaggio in the year 1594, the other being Cardsharps. The Fortune Teller is believed to be the earlier of the two, and dates from the period during which the artist had recently left the workshop of the Giuseppe Cesari to make his own way selling paintings through the dealer Costantino. The subject of the painting was not unprecedented. In his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari notes that one of Franciabigio's followers, his brother Agnolo, painted a sign for a perfumer's shop "containing a gipsy woman telling the fortune of a lady in a very graceful manner".
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The three adjacent Caravaggio canvases in the Contarelli chapel represent a decisive shift from the idealising Mannerism of which Cesari was the last major practitioner, to the newer, more naturalistic and subject-oriented art represented by Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci: they were highly influential in their day. In some ways, most of the plebeian, nearly life-sized inhabitants of Levi's money table are the equivalent, if not modeled by those persons in other Caravaggio paintings, including Caravaggio's famous secular genre painting of The Cardsharps (1595). In this painting, the gloom and the canvassed window appears to situate the table indoors. Christ brings the true light to the dark space of the sitting tax-collectors.
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It eventually disappeared in the 1890s, and was rediscovered in 1987 in a private collection in Zürich; it was subsequently sold to and is currently in the collection of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The British art historian Denis Mahon acquired a copy of Cardsharps at auction in 2006. Although it had been sold by Sotheby's as being a copy of the work in the Kimbell Art Museum and by an artist other than Caravaggio, Mahon argued that it was a replica by Caravaggio himself. There is a pentimento, in which full detail of the face of one of the cheats had been sketched in spite of being painted over by the page's hat.
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Barberini continued the patronage of the arts started by his family members before him. He was, if only for the purpose of maintaining the wealth of the Barberini a collector of art and became the owner of the art collection previously owned by his uncle Antonio Barberini which included at least three paintings by Caravaggio.The Singing 'Lute-Player' by Caravaggio from the Barberini Collection, Painted for Cardinal Del Monte by Denis Mahon (The Burlington Magazine, 1990)The Cardsharps; provenance - Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas Barberini also commissioned paintings by Niccolò Tornioli. In 1653, Barberini reopened the Teatro delle Quattro Fontane after it had been closed for more than 10 years while his uncles and father had been in exile.
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Caravaggio, The Cardsharps (), depicting card sharps A gambling stand in Paris Gambling (also known as betting) is the wagering of money or something of value (referred to as "the stakes") on an event with an uncertain outcome, with the primary intent of winning money or material goods. Gambling thus requires three elements to be present: consideration (an amount wagered), risk (chance), and a prize. The outcome of the wager is often immediate, such as a single roll of dice, a spin of a roulette wheel, or a horse crossing the finish line, but longer time frames are also common, allowing wagers on the outcome of a future sports contest or even an entire sports season. The term "gaming" in this context typically refers to instances in which the activity has been specifically permitted by law.
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At this point Caravaggio left off the Martydom and turned his attention to the companion piece, the Calling. This drew on his own earlier genre-pieces, Cardsharps and The Fortune Teller, but writ large. Apparently re-inspired, or perhaps with renewed self-confidence, Caravaggio turned back to the Martydom, but this time working in his own idiom. The third version dropped the architecture, reduced the number of actors, and moved the action closer to the viewer; more than this, it introduced the dramatic chiaroscuro which picks out the most important elements of the subject, in much the same way a spotlight picks out the action on a stage, but centuries before spotlights were imagined, and chose to represent the moment of greatest drama, as the murderer has plunged his sword into the fallen saint.
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Caravaggio's version is much more intimate and marks a sharp change of key: the saint, who has the features of Del Monte, seems to sink back peacefully into the arms of a boy (who bears a marked resemblance to the boy in Boy Peeling a Fruit and to the winged Cupid on the far left of The Musicians, and even more to the boy being cheated in Cardsharps) wearing a sheet and some stage-prop wings. There is very little to indicate the subject beyond the saint's Franciscan robe - no sign of the Stigmata, or blood, except the wound in his heart, nor of the fearsome seraph. Yet the atmosphere remains genuinely spiritual, the two figures lit by an unearthly effulgence in the dark night-time landscape where strange glimmerings flicker on the horizon. The scene is at once real and unreal.
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The Cardsharp with the Ace of Diamonds by Georges de La Tour, c. 1620–1640. Whether through Costantino or Orsi, Caravaggio came to the notice of the prominent collector Cardinal Francesco Del Monte, who purchased Cardsharps and became the artist's first important patron, giving him lodgings in his Palazzo Madama behind the Piazza Navona,The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) (1571–1610) and his Followers then as now one of the principal squares in Rome. From Del Monte's collection the work entered the collection of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, nephew of the Pope Urban VIII (whose pre-elevation portrait, Portrait of Maffeo Barberini, Caravaggio would paint in 1598), in Rome and was passed through the Colonna-Sciarra family.Note: Barberini's sister-in-law was Anna Colonna and his grand-niece married a Colonna family member also.
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These elements, and the considerable number of pentimenti (incisions made in the paint with the brush-handle, a common working method seen also in Leonardo's Salvator-Mundi), set the Badminton House painting apart from the Hermitage version. It is slightly larger than the Hermitage work, whose original edge cuts the flowers on the left and the scroll of the violin, and painted with denser brushwork. This painting would seem to be the one described in the 1627 inventory of Del Monte's collection. It was not the painting described in 1628 by the heirs as ‘Un giovane che sona di clevo’ (without an attribution) which was sold together with Caravaggio's 'St Catherine and the 'Cardsharps (named specifically as by Caravaggio) and various other paintings to Cardinal Antonio Barberini, which has come down to us in the work in the Wildenstein collection, at present on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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The work was in the collection of Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavaliere d'Arpino, seized by Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1607, and may therefore date to the period when Caravaggio worked for d'Arpino "painting flowers and fruits" in his workshop; but it may date from a slightly later period when Caravaggio and Minniti had left Cavalier d'Arpino's workshop (January 1594) to make their own way selling paintings through the dealer Costantino. Certainly it cannot predate 1593, the year Minniti arrived in Rome. It is believed to predate more complex works from the same period (also featuring Minniti as a model) such as The Fortune Teller and the Cardsharps (both 1594), the latter of which brought Caravaggio to the attention of his first important patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte. Vittorio Sgarbi notes certain Murillesque portraiture qualities in the painting that could easily point to other painters in the Arpino workshop.
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More recently Caravaggio biographer Peter Robb has identified him as Caravaggio's companion Mario Minniti, the model for several other paintings from this period including The Cardsharps and one of the two versions of The Fortune Teller. All three versions demonstrate the innovative approach to light that Caravaggio adopted at this time. Caravaggio's method, as described by Caravaggio's contemporary Giulio Mancini, was to use "a strong light from above with a single window and the walls painted black, so that having the lights bright and the shadows dark, it gives depth to the painting, but with a method that is not natural nor done or thought of by any other century or older painters like Raphael, Titian, Correggio and others." The room itself seems to be the same as that in the Contarelli Chapel Calling of Saint Matthew, and the beam of light across the rear wall has an upper limit that would appear to be the shutter of the window above the table in the Calling.
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The affected pose may have been the inevitable result of the experiment Caravaggio appears to have been undertaking here: observing and recording acute emotions – surprise and fear – in a situation where real surprise was impossible and where the pose had to be held for a considerable period. Critics of Caravaggio's insistence on painting only from life would later point out this limitation of his method: it lent itself to marvelously realistic (if theatrical) static compositions, but not to scenes involving movement and violence. It would only be in his late period, when he seems to have worked more from imagination, that Caravaggio would be able to completely overcome this problem. Nevertheless, Boy Bitten by a Lizard is an important work in the artist's early oeuvre precisely because it shows a way out from the airless stillness of very early works such as Boy Peeling a Fruit and Sick Bacchus, and even the implied violence but actual stasis of pieces such as Cardsharps.
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The anatomical anomalies in the Wildenstein and Badminton House paintings, like the slightly out of line eyes, or the hesitations in the profile of the hand, are resolved in the Hermitage picture. By contrast, the Hermitage version is more cursory in the drapery, less insistent in the detail, and it does not have the magnificent reflections in the carafe, which were specific to the alchemical context of the original. This is also the reason for the jealousy with which the group of pictures was regarded by Caravaggio's patron Del Monte, and for the misunderstanding that the pursuit of natural philosophy incurred in the Rome of his day. Apollo Lute Player (detail of flowers covered in dew as described by Baglione in 1642) The Wildenstein version was sold by Del Monte's heirs to Cardinal Antonio Barberini in 1628, when it was described as "Un giovane che sona di clevo" (without an attribution) and included with St Catherine and the Cardsharps (named specifically as by Caravaggio) and various other paintings.
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