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By Root 1302 0

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