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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 painting, 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