After the first free-standing sculpture of early Renaissance, discussed in this space three weeks ago, our journey through monumental art continues. We’re skipping a few centuries and ending up in the epoch of the Baroque, the Seventeenth Century, with one of the most celebrated artists of the period, Caravaggio, and his Seven Works of Mercy.
The painting is very large (nearly four metres high), but no detail is neglected. The composition is dynamic, and the figures are doing all sorts of things: lying, standing, pulling feet, drinking, stretching, twisting, clasping. All these actions are highlighted by plays of lights and shadows, possibly Caravaggio’s most distinctive trait. Bodies and textures are illuminated by different light sources, and chiaroscuro effects (strong contrasts between light and dark) dominate the surfaces of the picture. This painting therefore embodies the Baroque style well, which, if one had to capture it in just one word, that word would be ‘movement’. Indeed, looking at this painting, one’s eyes shift continually from one figure to the other, enraptured by the hectic activity in the picture.
But what is this hustle and bustle all about? The painting, as much as it may appear to be simply a scene set in a rough Neapolitan street, is in fact packed with allegorical meanings. As the title suggests, it depicts the seven acts of mercy which, according to Matthew’s Gospel, the good Christian should perform towards his neighbours. The theme ties in with the commission and the location of the painting: it is housed in the Church of the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples, a charitable organisation founded in 1601 by seven young noblemen with the aim to intervene actively in society in order to alleviate the poverty of poorer classes. The painting is the altarpiece of the high altar of the church, and constitutes a sort of ‘visual creed’ for the institution. In just one canvas, Caravaggio manages to encapsulate all seven works of mercy, with 15 characters in total. Clockwise, we have two men carrying a dead man to bury him, a woman visiting a prisoner and feeding him, a naked and crippled man (in the foreground) being comforted by a gentleman, an innkeeper welcoming a pilgrim, and a bearded man slaking his thirst. In the upper half of the painting, Mary is portrayed as Our Lady of Mercy, with the Child and two angels. The one on the left is stretching his arm towards the men below, as if wanting to jump down and see what was going on down there.
As we can see, the seven works of mercy are not performed by members of the aristocracy, which was the aim of the Monte della Misericordia, but rather by common people, which Caravaggio depicts in a scene that is everything but bombastic and self-congratulatory. It is as if Caravaggio was giving his own twist to the commission, excluding the world of the wealthy by choosing to portray the kind of people the charity wanted to help, rather than those who carried out the charitable actions themselves. Simply put, in this painting we see the clamour and the complexity of the Baroque coupled with the humblest representation of Seventeenth Century society.
