Provenance
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, then as now a main square 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. It eventually disappeared in the 1890s, and was rediscovered in 1987 in a private European collection; it was subsequently sold to and is currently in the collection of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
British art historian Denis Mahon discovered in December, 2007, that a copy of Cardsharps previously believed to have been the work of someone else was actually Caravaggio's own. The 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 pointed to the extreme unlikelihood that it was done by a copy artist.
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