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intense and troubling realism. The shock of their initial reaction can still be sensed in an account of The Flagellation, written more than a hundred years later, by the Neapolitan art historian Bernardo de Dominici: ‘This work when it was shown to the public attracted much attention, in particular the figure of Christ which was taken from a common and not a noble model as is necessary for the representation of God made Man: everyone, from the amateurs to the professors, was shocked by his new manner: the use of deep and terrible shadows, the truth of the nakedness, the cold light without reflections.’27

Apart from his irrelevant complaint about the supposedly ignoble Christ – actually one of the painter’s most gracefully sculptural figures – de Dominici’s remarks epitomize the Neapolitan response to Caravaggio’s art. Pictures such as the Seven Acts and The Flagellation were greeted with stunned admiration, bordering on bewilderment. They created a sensation and transformed Neapolitan painting virtually overnight. Caravaggio’s extreme chiaroscuro and his brutal sense of reality were the catalyst for the birth of a new school of tenebristic painting in Naples. And through this city at the crossroads between Italian and Spanish art, Caravaggio’s starkly powerful new style was transmitted to Spain itself. There it would have an even deeper transformative effect on native traditions. The work of the greatest Spanish religious painters of the seventeenth century, Ribera and Zurbarán, is unimaginable without the influence of Caravaggio. The gruesome particularity of Baroque Spain’s polychrome statuary, so bloodily realistic in its conjurings of saints martyred and Christ crucified, is also deeply Caravaggesque in spirit.28 The painter’s years of exile and displacement are reflected, obliquely, in the westward spread of his influence.

Two further altarpieces survive from this period. The Crucifixion of St Andrew, which now hangs in the Cleveland Museum of Art, may have been even more directly responsible than the Seven Acts or The Flagellation for the dissemination of Caravaggio’s influence in Spain. Bellori records that the picture was acquired by the Spanish viceroy in Naples, Don Juan Alonso de Pimentel y Herrera, Conde de Benavente, and taken by him to Valladolid on his return home to Spain in 1610. Its presence is confirmed by an entry in an inventory of the contents of the palace of the counts of Benavente drawn up in 1653, where it is described as ‘a large painting of a nude St Andrew when he is being put on the cross with three executioners and a woman, with an ebony frame’ and attributed, in a marginal annotation, to ‘micael angel caraballo[sic]’.29

The Crucifixion of St Andrew was almost certainly commissioned directly from Caravaggio by the Conde de Benavente himself. The viceroy had a special devotion to the saint, having played a significant role in the early seventeenth-century renovation of the crypt of St Andrew in the cathedral of Amalfi. In 1610, the year of his departure from Naples, he is reported to have made a special pilgrimage to Amalfi, ‘moved by devotion to visit the tomb of St Andrew’.30 It seems highly probable that he commissioned Caravaggio’s painting as an aid to his own prayers, and that it was destined from the start for the private chapel of his palace in Spain.

The picture is a harsh and daringly abbreviated depiction of a withered old man dying the cruel death of a martyr. Its true subject is not actually ‘St Andrew when he is being put on the cross’, as the writer of that Spanish inventory understandably assumed, but the miracle that occurred when his would-be executioners attempted to take him off it. According to The Golden Legend, the saint met his death in Patras, in Greece, after incurring the wrath of the Roman proconsul Aegeas. To prolong his agony, Aegeas ordered that Andrew be tied rather than nailed to the cross. For two days he hung there in the scorching sun, continuing to preach his forbidden Christian message to a crowd of twenty thousand. On the third day, the people grew