Painted in the 1590s in Rome, Caravaggio’s theatrical representation of the “street-life” scene of a young, well-to-do boy being hustled by two cardsharps introduced a radically new style of painting to late 16th-century Rome. The painter abandoned the flowery, sentimental religious pictures of his day to focus on the real world around him and employed a hyper-realistic, filter-less style of painting to depict it.