See Naples and Live – 6: Oh Mercy

There are many strange images in Naples depicting everything from the sacred to the profane – and pretty much every possible mixture of the two.

But the picture of a young woman letting an old man suck her naked breast must be among the most remarkable. All the more so because it helps form the centrepiece of a church.

It's part of Seven Works of Mercy by Caravaggio and was commissioned to go above the altar of the Pio Monte della Misericordia. 

I'd seen pictures of the painting and, to be honest, wondered what all the fuss was about. It seemed to be a dark, disjointed and downright odd piece of work.

But when I walked in and saw the real thing, I got it straight away. It's big, bold and utterly overpowering. 

That breastfeeding covers two works of mercy (visiting the imprisoned and feeding the hungry) and comes from the classical Roman story of Pero, a woman who breastfed – and ultimately saved – her father when he was locked up and sentenced to starve to death.

The other manifestations of mercy shown are: clothing the naked, giving shelter to the homeless, giving drink to the thirsty, visiting the sick, and burying the dead. And Caravaggio brings it all back home to Napoli; as Peter Robb says in his excellent book Street Fight in Naples: "... the angels looked as if they'd parked their Vespa round the corner... Mary seemed about to lower a basket for a loaf of bread or a packet of Marlboro..."

There are other paintings in Misericordia, but they only serve to show how far Caravaggio was ahead of – and then an influence on – his contemporaries.

He basically dared to go where other artists hadn't dreamed of going.

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Midnight in Sicily

Peter Robb's sprawling book Street Fight In Naples (see this blog An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Street Fight In Naples) provides some wonderful insights into that city's amazing history, but his later Midnight In Sicily is more focused and even better.

The mafia, politics, violence and corruption loom large – it's about southern Italy after all – but, as with the previous book, there is also much about art.

And especially the remarkable Renato Guttuso, a maverick in the Picasso mould, whose life and – especially – death were bound up with those themes of politics, corruption and organised crime.

His relationship (both artistic and intimate) with his muse, Marta Marzotto, is love story, soap opera, scandal and tragedy, all wrapped up together, and Robb's interview with Marzotto herself is a wonderful piece of theatre.

Guttuso's passionate style managed to make La Vucciria (above), his 1974 study of Palermo's market, as much about hunger as about food. And his many erotic studies of Marta Marzotto (below) encompassed a furious desire as well as an appreciation of beauty.

An Odyssey in the Second Year of the Plague – Street Fight in Naples

 

My fascination with Naples continues from a distance... after the initial shock of the place followed quickly by being seduced by it (see this blog An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague – 10: 8-14 September 2020 and An Odyssey in the Year of the Plague – 11: 15-21 September 2020), I can't read enough about it.

And my appetite was only increased by reading Street Fight in Naples by Peter Robb, a dazzling dollop of Neapolitan history told mainly through works of art.

Two paintings in particular justifiably draw a lot of attention from Robb – and encapsulate the lightness and darkness of Naples. Both are of the city's Piazza Mercato, both are stunning and both are by Domenico Gargiulo... and they were painted within a few years of each other.

The sun-filled one from around 1654 is a massive crowd-scene masterpiece somewhere between photojournalism and Where's Wally? "The radiant sky and the purple hulk of the mountain [Vesuvius] invested the people and their dealings below with vastness and meaning," says Robb.

                                      Piazza Mercato – around 1654 

But a far grimmer picture of the same place captures the scene seven years earlier during what became known as Masaniello's Revolt – a violent popular uprising against oppressive taxation under Spanish rule. Again there is a Where's Wally? element; but this time if you look closely, you will see not the amusing antics of people and and animals on market day, but severed heads, a naked corpse hanging from a pole, and all kinds of chaos.

Masaniello's Revolt in 1647 (painted some time between then and 1652)

And what became of Piazza Mercato? Bombed in the 1940s and redeveloped unsympathetically in the 1950s, it has lost its glory. "Today it is a crowded desolation," says Robb. "Today the area does a desultory business in building and decorating materials, paint and cleaners, children's toys and fireworks."

Lightness, darkness... and madness.This is Naples...