Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (59 page)

The sharp-eyed English traveller George Sandys visited Naples in 1611, just after Caravaggio’s time there. He was impressed by the sheer range of foods, fabrics and other materials on sale in the city’s many markets:

The concourse of sundry nations to this haven, doth adde an overabundance to their native plenty.
Apulia
sends them almonds, oyle, honey, cattell, and cheese.
Calabria . . .
silke, figges, sugar, excellent wines, minerals, and matter for the building of ships.
Sicilia
releeveth them with corne, if at any time their own soile prove ungrateful . . .
Africa
furnisheth them with skinnes;
Spaine
with cloth and gold;
Elba
with steele and iron; and we with our countries commodities: so that nothing is wanting.
7

The city’s traders dealt not only in goods but also in people: there were 10,000 slaves within the Neapolitan population.

According to the phlegmatic and worldly Giulio Cesare Capaccio, long-time secretary of the city’s administration, Naples was living proof that industry rather than piety was the key to a city’s prosperity. ‘It is not fate or the stars that determine the greatness of cities,’ he proclaimed, ‘but commerce and the concourse of people as in Antwerp, Lisbon, Seville, Paris, and Naples.’
8
In his drily patriotic book about the city, the
Guida de’ forestieri
, Capaccio anticipated the later Romantic adage ‘See Naples and die’, asserting that ‘there is nobody who does not desire to see it, and who does not desire to die here. Naples is the whole world.’
9
That world included distinct Neapolitan communities of Pisans, Catalans, Ragusans, Germans, Flemings and French. The French and the Ragusans had their own consulates in the city. So too did the English, who ran the city’s textile trade.
10

Like the painter’s home province of Milan, Naples was under Spanish rule. The city was the capital of the so-called Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, another part of the immense Spanish empire, which had passed from Philip II to his son, Philip III, in 1598. Travellers approaching from the sea were impressed by the scale and density of the town. Tier after tier of buildings rose up from the half-moon of the bay’s shoreline, stretching into the hills and towards distant Mount Vesuvius, smoking ominously on the horizon. The seaward limits of Naples, like all its boundaries, were marked by high walls of stone. Massive fortifications dominated both skyline and waterfront, embodying Spanish naval and military might. Naples had three castles: the Castel Sant’Elmo, built in the shape of a six-pointed star on the top of the hill above the centre of the city; the Castel Nuovo, which stood beside the shore and was home to the Spanish viceroy; and the Castel dell’Ovo at the south-east corner of the city, so named after the egg-shaped rock on which it was perched.

Naples was a bastion of Habsburg rule over the southern Mediterranean. An army of Spanish soldiers was stationed in its garrisons, a navy of Spanish galleons moored in its harbour. The policy of the city’s rulers was driven by two overriding aims: to safeguard the territories of the Spanish empire and subjugate the Neapolitan aristocracy to the will of the Spanish monarch. Under a succession of sternly autocratic viceroys, those aims had been ruthlessly pursued. The old structures of Neapolitan society had been systematically eroded, as the aristocracy, who had been a thorn in the side of Neapolitan rulers for centuries, were stripped of their powers and forced to renounce their ancient rule as despots on their rural estates. Most had been persuaded to leave their fiefdoms in the countryside and move to Naples itself, where they were compensated for the loss of real power with the sybaritic rewards of life at the court of the Spanish viceroy. The Italian historian Benedetto Croce encapsulated their decline in a single, acerbic sentence of his
History of the Kingdom of Naples
: ‘Idleness, luxury, rivalry in conspicuous display, the construction of huge palaces, the attendance of large numbers of servants, the abandonment of family and the frequenting of courtesans (a custom copied, apparently, from the Spaniards) led the baronial families, in the course of a few generations, to ruin.’
11

As the power of the barons dwindled, a new class of professionals and entrepreneurs flourished: lawyers, tax advisers, importers and exporters of grain, moneylenders, traders in luxury goods. Many came from Genoa, others from Tuscany, traditional breeding ground of merchants and financiers. Regardless of background, those involved in trade and finance were routinely referred to as ‘Jews’ by the habitually anti-Semitic Neapolitans. The actual Jewish population had been decimated by a systematic campaign of expulsions begun a hundred years before.

The rich dressed in the Spanish manner and travelled through the streets in carriages or covered litters. George Sandys remarked that there were as many litter-bearers touting for work on the streets of Naples as there were boatmen on the busy wharves of London. But the city’s most striking feature was its ubiquitous crowd of beggars and paupers. In every street and in every alley thronged a seething, jostling mass of the poor. ‘Nowhere in the world,’ wrote Capaccio, ‘is there anything so obtrusive and undisciplined, the result of the mixture and confusion of so many races . . . miserable, beggarly and mercenary folk of a kind such as to undermine the wisest constitution of the best of republics, the dregs of humanity, who have been at the bottom of all the tumult and uprisings in the city and cannot be
restrained otherwise than by the gallows.’
12
He likened the Neapolitan
crowd to a constant swarm of insects. Wherever he went, he heard ‘a murmuring . . . as if it were the buzzing of bees’.
13

Despite the city’s prosperity, there was work for only a fraction of its ever-growing population. Every day, every week, every year, an unstoppable flood of rural migrants poured into its already close-packed mesh of streets. They came to escape the harshness and uncertainty of life on the land, where petty banditry was rife and where the failure of one crop could doom an entire family to starvation. Their plight had been further exacerbated by new and punitive royal taxes, exacted by the Spanish from the rural peasantry, who abandoned their smallholdings in droves.

As its population climbed inexorably, Naples became caught in a vicious circle that made mass unemployment and grim poverty inev
itable facts of life there. The authorities lived in continual fear of social
unrest, with good reason. There had been brief, bloody rebellions in 1508 and 1547. To avert the threat of revolution, the viceregal government guaranteed food and provisions even in times of scarcity or famine. Grain was stockpiled in vast quantities to ensure that corn and bread would always be available, at state-controlled prices, to all the inhabitants of the city. Such measures had the inevitable effect of attracting yet more immigrants, thus exacerbating the very crisis the government had intended to alleviate.

In a vain attempt to check the city’s growth, the authorities introduced restrictive building ordinances, which prohibited the construction of new dwellings outside the city walls; the intention was to stem the tide of immigrants by the simple expedient of depriving them of anywhere to live. But workers from the countryside continued to flow into Naples, so the new regulations simply meant that living conditions became ever more cramped. It has been estimated that some 21,000 people were squeezed into every square mile of the city.
14

Even the physical appearance of the population was transformed by this wrenching demographic shift. Pressure on the food supply meant that for the majority pasta replaced vegetables and fruit as the staple diet. Despite the best efforts of the government, many people lived in a state of permanent semi-starvation. Neapolitans became shorter in height and notably more prone to the illnesses and deformities caused by malnutrition: goitres in the throat, rotten teeth, 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 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.