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By Root 1325 0

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 Colonna. 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