Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [191]
The sharp-eyed English traveller George Sandys visited Naples in 1611, just after Caravaggio’s time there. He was impressed by the sheer range of foods, fabrics and other materials on sale in the city’s many markets:
The concourse of sundry nations to this haven, doth adde an overabundance to their native plenty. Apulia sends them almonds, oyle, honey, cattell, and cheese. Calabria … silke, figges, sugar, excellent wines, minerals, and matter for the building of ships. Sicilia releeveth them with corne, if at any time their own soile prove ungrateful … Africa furnisheth them with skinnes; Spaine with cloth and gold; Elba with steele and iron; and we with our countries commodities: so that nothing is wanting.7
The city’s traders dealt not only in goods but also in people: there were 10,000 slaves within the Neapolitan population.
According to the phlegmatic and worldly Giulio Cesare Capaccio, long-time secretary of the city’s administration, Naples was living proof that industry rather than piety was the key to a city’s prosperity. ‘It is not fate or the stars that determine the greatness of cities,’ he proclaimed, ‘but commerce and the concourse of people as in Antwerp, Lisbon, Seville, Paris, and Naples.’8 In his drily patriotic book about the city, the Guida de’ forestieri, Capaccio anticipated the later Romantic adage ‘See Naples and die’, asserting that ‘there is nobody who does not desire to see it, and who does not desire to die here. Naples is the whole world.’9 That world included distinct Neapolitan communities of Pisans, Catalans, Ragusans, Germans, Flemings and French. The French and the Ragusans had their own consulates in the city. So too did the English, who ran the city’s textile trade.10
Like the painter’s home province of Milan, Naples was under Spanish rule. The city was the capital of the so-called Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, another part of the immense Spanish empire, which had passed from Philip II to his son, Philip III, in 1598. Travellers approaching from the sea were impressed by the scale and density of the town. Tier after tier of buildings rose up from the half-moon of the bay’s shoreline, stretching into the hills and towards distant Mount Vesuvius, smoking ominously on the horizon. The seaward limits of Naples, like all its boundaries, were marked by high walls of stone. Massive fortifications dominated both skyline and waterfront, embodying Spanish naval and military might. Naples had three castles: the Castel Sant’Elmo, built in the shape of a six-pointed star on the top of the hill above the centre of the city; the Castel Nuovo, which stood beside the shore and was home to the Spanish viceroy; and the Castel dell’Ovo at the south-east corner of the city, so named after the egg-shaped rock on which it was perched.
Naples was a bastion of Habsburg rule over the southern Mediterranean. An army of Spanish soldiers was stationed in its garrisons, a navy of Spanish galleons moored in its harbour. The policy of the city’s rulers was driven by two overriding aims: to safeguard the territories of the Spanish empire and subjugate the Neapolitan aristocracy to the will of the Spanish monarch. Under a succession of sternly autocratic viceroys, those aims had been ruthlessly pursued. The old structures of Neapolitan society had been systematically eroded, as the aristocracy, who had been a thorn in the side of Neapolitan rulers for centuries, were stripped of their powers and forced to renounce their ancient rule as despots on their rural estates. Most had been persuaded to leave their fiefdoms in the countryside and move to Naples itself, where they were compensated for the loss of real power with the sybaritic rewards of life at the court of the Spanish viceroy. The Italian historian Benedetto Croce encapsulated their decline in a single, acerbic sentence of his History of the Kingdom of Naples: ‘Idleness, luxury, rivalry in conspicuous display, the construction of huge palaces,