As its population climbed inexorably, Naples became caught in a vicious circle that made mass unemployment and grim poverty inevitable facts of life there. The authorities lived in continual fear of social unrest, with good reason. There had been brief, bloody rebellions in 1508 and 1547. To avert the threat of revolution, the viceregal government guaranteed food and provisions even in times of scarcity or famine. Grain was stockpiled in vast quantities to ensure that corn and bread would always be available, at state-controlled prices, to all the inhabitants of the city. Such measures had the inevitable effect of attracting yet more immigrants, thus exacerbating the very crisis the government had intended to alleviate.
In a vain attempt to check the city’s growth, the authorities introduced restrictive building ordinances, which prohibited the construction of new dwellings outside the city walls; the intention was to stem the tide of immigrants by the simple expedient of depriving them of anywhere to live. But workers from the countryside continued to flow into Naples, so the new regulations simply meant that living conditions became ever more cramped. It has been estimated that some 21,000 people were squeezed into every square mile of the city.14
Even the physical appearance of the population was transformed by this wrenching demographic shift. Pressure on the food supply meant that for the majority pasta replaced vegetables and fruit as the staple diet. Despite the best efforts of the government, many people lived in a state of permanent semi-starvation. Neapolitans became shorter in height and notably more prone to the illnesses and deformities caused by malnutrition: goitres in the throat, rotten teeth, rickets and scurvy. The ragged and homeless were themselves seen as a kind of disease afflicting the body politic. The poorest citizens were known as the lazzari. The term literally means ‘lepers’, but in Spanish-controlled Naples it was used to encompass an entire social underclass, a subproletariat of the destitute. At night they huddled under market stalls, in courtyards, beneath porticoes, anywhere shelter could be found. By day they sought refuge in churches or took to the streets to beg. They were everywhere, complained Capaccio, clogging the very arteries of his city. ‘Nothing is more difficult than getting about in Naples, wherever I go and at whatever time.’15
The chronic shortage of housing was made yet more acute by the city’s many churches and monasteries, by the grand scale of its civic buildings and by the determination of the authorities to maintain large areas of park and orchard in the urban centre. Because space was so precious, it was rigorously exploited. Houses in Naples commonly rose to six storeys, twice as tall as those in any other Italian city. The streets were narrow and they were still arranged in the same tight grid-plan formation that had been laid down by the Greek founders of the settlement more than two thousand years earlier. The centre of the city was dark. Overshadowed by unbroken lines of tall buildings, its congested lanes and alleys were rarely penetrated by direct sunlight. Despite the sunshine of southern Italy, most daily life took place in deep shadow, in a form of civic space not unlike the bottom of a well.
THE SEVEN ACTS OF MERCY
Little is known about Caravaggio’s first visit to Naples. The archives of the city have not even yielded his address. He may have stayed on the Via Toledo, in the palace of Luigi Carafa Colonna, Costanza Colonna’s nephew. But it is more likely that he and Cecco were given rooms in Costanza’s own residence at Chiaia, a grand fortified block of a building on the edge of town, close to the sea. He is securely documented as having stayed there during his second visit to Naples, three years later.
According to Bellori, Caravaggio was deluged with work from the moment he arrived in the city, ‘since his style and reputation were already known’.16 Within days of his arrival he had been commissioned by Niccolò Radolovich, a rich grain merchant from Ragusa, to paint a large altarpiece of ‘the Madonna and child, surrounded by choirs of angels, with St Dominic and Francis embracing below, with St Nicholas on the right and St Vitus on the left’. 17 On 6 October he received 200 ducats in advance payment and later the same day opened an account at the Banca di Sant’Eligio, where he deposited the money. Radolovich wanted his picture as soon as possible: the contract specified that the altarpiece was to be delivered by December.
The Radolovich altarpiece has been lost, if it ever existed. None of the artist’s early biographers mention the picture, so perhaps it was never painted. Might Caravaggio have had second thoughts about taking on the type of stiff, static and rather old-fashioned composition prescribed by the contract? The Virgin Mary wafted to heaven in clouds of cherubim: hardly a subject to bring out the best in him. Less than three weeks after agreeing the deal with Radolovich, Caravaggio cashed a money order for 150 ducats drawn on his new bank account. Perhaps he took the money out to give his client a refund.
At around the same time, late October or early November, he took on a more prestigious commission: to paint a monumental picture for the high altar of a new church in the heart of Naples. The church was the Chiesa del Pio Monte della Misericordia, close to the cathedral, on the corner of the Via dei Tribunali and the narrow Vico dei Zuroli. The subject of the altarpiece was to be the Seven Acts of Mercy, the good works encouraged by the Christian spirit of charity, such as feeding the hungry and giving shelter to pilgrims. It was a topical theme in Naples, where the plight of the poor was so brutally visible.
The pauperist strain of Counter-Reformation piety, to which Caravaggio had given such uncompromising expression in his Roman altarpieces, was especially strong in southern Italy. The Pio Monte della Misericordia was a lay confraternity devoted to the care of the sick and the needy, an institution at the front line of attempts to alleviate the urban crisis gripping seventeenth-century Naples. It had been founded in 1601 by seven idealistic young noblemen who were dissatisfied with the narrowness and superficiality of life at the court of the Spanish viceroy. Moved by the plight of the lazzari, they would meet every Friday at the Hospital of the Incurables, ‘to serve and succour those poor invalids with food and sweetmeats’.18 As their confraternity grew and flourished, they broadened its activities to encompass all seven of the traditional Christian acts of mercy. They also built a church. It had been consecrated in the middle of September 1606, a mere fortnight before Caravaggio’s serendipitous arrival in Naples.
The original statute of the Pio Monte had been written in 1603. The document placed great emphasis on the practice of ‘corporal mercy’, by which was meant hands-on charity, as opposed to the spiritual offering of prayer. It also expressed the confraternity’s fiercely independent spirit, insisting on its freedom from ecclesiastical control: ‘finally we wish that our Monte be not subject to the ordinary [i.e. the Archbishop of Naples], but that the workings of the Monte be autonomous and free from the jurisdiction of this ordinary.’19 The papal authorities made the concession, although they insisted on keeping it secret for fear of setting an undesirable precedent.
Caravaggio’s new patrons were powerful and persuasive men, with deep pockets. They offered him 400 ducats, twice the fee that had been proposed for the Radolovich altarpiece. They were evidently determined to get their man. Caravaggio had come to Naples in their time of need, at the exact moment when they were looking for a painter to give permanent visual expression to their sense of charitable mission.
The prime mover of the commission was probably Giovanni Battista Manso, the Marchese di Villa, one of the seven founding members of the Pio Monte.20 Manso was interested in the arts, especially poetry. He was a patron of Giambattista Marino, a poet famous for his restless and unruly nature, who had himself struck up a friendship of sorts with Caravaggio in Rome, and had possibly cast an eye over the scurrilous verses addressed to ‘John Baggage’.21
Manso was sharp and open-minded, with a keen and speculative intelligence. He was a friend of Galileo and regularly visited Tommaso Campanella, freethinking cleric and author of The City of the Sun, during his 27-year imprisonment by the Inquisition. Manso was also friendly with Costanza Colonna’s nephew, Luigi Carafa C
olonna. Together, in 1611, they would found the Accademia degli Oziosi, one of the leading literary academies of Naples. Manso liked to entertain poets and other writers at his villa in coastal Puteoli, a place he fondly described in his biography of the poet Torquato Tasso: ‘on a most beautiful sea-shore … a beautiful house somewhat elevated above all the others and encompassed all around by very beautiful gardens’.22 Many years later Manso would play host to the English poet John Milton on his visit to Naples. Milton described him in a Latin epigraph as ‘a very noble and authoritative man’.23
Tolerant of outsiders and misfits, interested in intellectual innovators, close to the Colonna family – all this indicates that Manso is likely to have been well disposed to Caravaggio. He was first and foremost an author, a connoisseur of literature rather than painting, but this too points to his involvement in the commission, which seems to have reflected a very literary conception of the subject of the acts of mercy. All seven acts were to be depicted on a single canvas, together with the figure of the Madonna della Misericordia, the ‘Virgin of Pity’, descending from heaven to give her blessing. Caravaggio would rise to the challenge of this busily elaborate iconography with one of the most compellingly humane pictures of the seventeenth century.
The painter was deeply responsive to the different worlds through which his stormy life would take him. He had an unerringly keen sense of milieu, a sharp eye for all that sets one place apart from another, whether architecture or mood, the quality of light or the quality of human behaviour. That responsiveness was one of the foundations of his art. It was the means by which he made holy legend seem real and true to those who looked at his pictures, embodied in a painted world that looked and felt like their world. When in Rome, he had brought the Bible and its stories to Rome. When he moved to Naples, he shifted his visions of the sacred past there too.
The Seven Acts of Mercy is set at the bottom of the crowded well of a Neapolitan street corner. It is night-time, but the street is full of people. In the foreground a beggar half kneels and half crouches, light flaring off his pale naked back. His skin is stretched tightly across his shoulderblades, over the curve of his vertebrae and the cage of his ribs. A young man in silk and velvet clothing, wearing a feather in his cap, looks down at the half-naked pauper with an expression of troubled compassion. They are just two in the midst of a throng. Beside them, an innkeeper gives the nod to a sad-faced pilgrim and a sunburned man looks skyward with pained relief as he slakes his thirst with a trickle of water.
To their right, someone really has seen Naples and died. The corpse is being carried away. Only the dirt-ingrained soles of the cadaver’s feet are visible. The face of the dead person’s pallbearer is lost in deep shadow. Behind, a swarthy and bearded sexton in plain white vestments is reciting the funeral office. There is a flickering, mobile quality to the light, especially where it falls on the folds of the priest’s cassock, which has an almost phosphorescent glitter. Its source is the pair of candles that the priest holds aloft, a torch against the blackness of night. A more mysterious light also falls from above, its source hidden.
Smoke rises from the coarse tallow and the priest chants in a deep, melancholy voice. Next to the departing corpse, a dull-eyed woman bares her breast and gives succour to an old man through the grille of his prison cell. Above, a contemplative Virgin Mary cradles her son and looks down on the scene. The Madonna and child are wrapped in the embrace of two intertwined angels.
‘For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.’ The different groups in Caravaggio’s painting represent the different forms of charity listed in the gospel according to Matthew (25:36–7). To the six biblical acts of mercy the medieval Church had added one more: the burial of the dead. It was traditional to represent each of the acts separately. But, having been asked to combine them all in one picture, Caravaggio turned an apparent handicap to his own advantage. For a dark and desperately overcrowded town, he created a dark and desperately overcrowded altarpiece.
With the exception of the burial of the dead, which is implicitly set in the present, each of the acts of mercy is enacted by a figure from history or legend. The sunburned man with a desperate need for water is Samson, whose thirst was miraculously quenched from the jawbone of an ass (Judges 15:18–19). The bearded traveller sheltered by the stolid innkeeper is Christ the pilgrim. The young bravo with a plumed hat, who evokes bittersweet memories of the finely dressed ne’er-do-wells in Caravaggio’s first Roman pictures, is a representation of St Martin of Tours. He has drawn his sword to cut his cloak in half, as the medieval saint had done, to clothe a pauper, in the most frequently recounted episode of his life. The unclothed wretch at the saint’s feet has already been given his piece of cloth, which the pauper grasps in his left hand as if to begin covering his nakedness. The blade of St Martin’s sword glints in the darkness to the left of the beggar’s face. Half lost in the shadows, virtually under the innkeeper’s feet, another curly-headed figure squats with his hands clasped in supplication. The solemn and melancholy saint may be about to give away the second half of his cloak to this second beggar. He gives his charity to two people and is presumably meant to embody two different acts of mercy, not only clothing the naked but visiting the sick. Of all the charitable figures, he has been placed closest to the picture plane, and therefore closest to the congregation in the church of the Pio Monte. Literally, he represents St Martin, but he is also an alter ego for the seven young Neapolitan noblemen who had founded the Pio Monte. Like them, he is an aristocrat helping those who have been struck down by sickness and poverty.
The two figures at the right, the half-undressed woman and the greying old man behind the bars of his cell, are drawn from the legends of ancient Rome. They also embody twin acts of charity, namely feeding the hungry and visiting prisoners in jail. The imprisoned Cimon was starving to death when his daughter, Pero, came to him and nourished him with milk from her breast. The subject was known as the Caritas Romana, ‘Roman Charity’, and seen as a classical prefiguration of the Christian spirit of mercy. Since Caravaggio had visited the Palazzo Doria, in Genoa, on his brief flight to the city in the summer of 1605, he must have known Pierino del Vaga’s fey Mannerist version of the same subject, in which an elegantly dressed young woman in a windswept cloak smuggles her left breast through the grille of a prison cell with a gesture of improbable grace. Caravaggio’s interpretation is harsher, darker, gratingly realistic. Looking around her furtively, as if wary of detection, the dark-haired young woman performs her act of mercy with a troubled and anxious air. The old man who suckles at her breast has been reduced by his plight to a second infancy. Her dress is folded up under his chin like a bib. Two viscous drops of milk are caught in the strands of his beard.
The Seven Acts of Mercy is a picture that collapses time and space, drawing the whole world and all the world’s history into its dark centre. Classical antiquity, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Middle Ages and the present day – every epoch is symbolically represented in the different episodes that crowd the canvas. ‘Naples is the whole world,’ Capaccio wrote, and in Caravaggio’s painting a corner of the city has been transformed into precisely that. This one dark street, this scene of desperation and pain and death, is the painter’s microcosm for the brutality of existence itself. Briefly, it has been blessed and transfigured, made other than cruel experience normally proves. Here, the thirsty drink, the homeless are given shelter, and a sword is used not to kill a man but to put clothing on his back.
The embracing angels, themselves a celestial vision of fraternal love, descend earthwards in a rush, bearing the Madonna and Child with them. The leading angel’s hand reaches down and into the world of fallen humanity – the highest reaching towards the lowest, the hand of the angel extended towards its visual rhyme, the left hand of the wretch at the very bottom of the paint
ing, itself pressed down on the hard and unyielding ground. But a gulf of darkness and confusion separates the angel from the wretch. In that darkness there is space for the shadow of a doubt.
The tumbling angels and Madonna of Mercy are unusually heavy and corporeal, so emphatically realized that the wings of one angel cast the clearest of shadows on the prison wall. Yet the sense of hectic, jostling movement that ripples through the entire composition has the effect of making everything in it seem unsettlingly provisional. At any moment the celestial vision might disappear, the lights that flare gutter and go out, and the world plunge back into impenetrable night.
THE MECHANICS OF EVIL
Caravaggio painted the monumental altarpiece at breakneck speed, in little more than seven weeks. He received the balance of his fee on 9 January 1607, by which time the painting was probably installed on the high altar of the church of the Pio Monte. The confraternity soon came to see it as one of their greatest treasures. At a group of meetings held in the summer of 1613 the congregation decided that the painting could never be sold at any price. By then, several offers of 2,000 scudi or more – five times the original fee for the work – had already been turned down. One of the would-be purchasers was the Spanish poet Juan de Tassis y Peralta, Conde de Villamediana, but he was forced to content himself with a copy painted from Caravaggio’s original.24 In the 1650s, when the complex of the confraternity’s buildings was remodelled, a new centrally planned Baroque church was created with the specific aim of giving Caravaggio’s altarpiece yet more prominence, space and light – a rare instance of an entire building being constructed around a single picture.
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