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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