A City of Crowded Images

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the National Gallery, paintings form 17th century Naples

One of the tests of a great city is its receptivity to the foreigner, its openness to the stranger with unfamiliar ideas. That made Paris what it was and New York what it is. Raphael, appearing in some scrofulous Sicilian hill town in the cinquecento, would hardly have altered the history of cart decoration. Appearing in Rome, he changed the history of art. Something of this kind--the transformation that only urban cultures can produce, sparked by an apparently small event--had occurred in Naples by 1610.

A painter from northern Italy visited that port twice, each time on the run: from a murder charge in Rome in 1606-07, and from the vengeance of the Knights of Malta in 1609-10. He never set up a proper studio with assistants in Naples; he took no pupils, held no salon and had little talent as a courtier. Yet by word of mouth, force of reputation and the example of four or five paintings he executed there, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio completely changed the face of Neapolitan painting at the start of the 17th century. A few months after his second arrival in the city, this paranoid, violent homosexual genius was dead at 37, leaving two generations of painters from Naples to Brussels with a legacy to pick over.

How that legacy was divided and spent, who used it and for what, who spurned it and what the visual arguments about it were--these are the inquiries of an extraordinary exhibition of 113 paintings that opened last month at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and will run there until May 1 and then travel to Paris' Grand Palais. It will not be seen anywhere else in the U.S. "Painting in Naples 1607-1705: From Caravaggio to Giordano" is a smaller, edited version of the exhibition that was seen in 1982 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It contains many loans of the first importance, from Caravaggio's altarpiece of The Seven Acts of Mercy to groups of work by Mattia Preti and Jusepe de Ribera, along with many remarkable paintings by lesser-known artists.

One hesitates, despite the show's size, to use the opprobrious word blockbuster. It is an effort of scholarship. It turns up, and makes sense of, ground unfamiliar to all but the most committed specialists. It brings together work that, in an ordinary lifetime, one could not otherwise see in the same context. In short, there is a real reason for its existence that justifies the expense and risk of bringing the work around the world. Only in recent years, with a cluster of major exhibitions devoted to the 17th century--"France in the Golden Age" at the Met, Claude Lorrain at the National Gallery, Ruisdael at the Fogg, and a few others--have Americans been able to clear their minds of prejudices in favor of the quattrocento and see what pleasure the baroque period holds. This show carries that project further.

One is still apt to think of Naples as a sort of Italian Calcutta: a relentless human condenser, a grinding mill of poverty set on a blue, filthy bay, with the world's most lavishly vulgar sunsets. Since the collapse of the old order and the annulment of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, it has sunk into chaos and stagnation: the loser to North Italy of the Risorgimento. Not so, however, in the early 17th century, when the Spanish viceroys ruled a city of 450,000 Neapolitans, the largest in southern Europe and, on the eve of the catastrophic plague of 1656, three times the size of Rome. The rulers of seicento Naples, along with their satellite nobility, were keen, sometimes obsessive patrons of painting, sculpture and architecture.

The visual arts flourished there like lilies on a dunghill. And they acquired a peculiar tinge from their social background; one might say that Neapolitan painting in the 17th century is the first real example of what overcrowding can do to the life of images. To be a Neapolitan, or even to live in Naples as a foreigner--like such artists as Ribera, a Spaniard, or Belisario Corenzio, a Greek--was then, as now, to live with crowds and noise in the peculiar airlessness of enforced and unwanted intimacy.

A painting like Caravaggio's The Seven Acts of Mercy seems to express this fragmentary, jostled character of Neapolitan life: too many heroic figures on too small a stage, a compression of allegory so extreme that it becomes nearly illegible. Thus instead of seven separate acts of mercy, some of the figures are assigned two at once; the woman suckling an elderly man through a barred window represents both visiting the imprisoned and feeding the hungry. With its curious inconsistencies--the angel is an apparition, but he is also a visibly tough street kid, balancing on a muscular arm like a gymnast--Caravaggio's painting announces the dialogue between realism and ecstatic baroque theater that would preoccupy his followers.

Then there was violence. Naples was soaked in vice and crime, and its sense of social order was threatened by a huge and permanent underclass, the lazzaroni. Brawls, stabbings, muggings and murders were such a commonplace that they generally went unreported, and they form a background to the peculiarly extreme imagery of Neapolitan painting. Where but in such a city would a Spaniard like Ribera feel free to produce such a grotesquely sadistic image as Apollo and Marsyas? In myth, the satyr Marsyas challenged Apollo to a musical contest and lost, so that the god of harmony skinned him alive for his hubris. In the painting, between the shrieking mouth of the satyr and the reflective, almost amused expression of Apollo lies a sadomasochistic contract that cannot have been accidental.

Nor is it very surprising to learn that Ribera and two painter friends (Battistello Caracciolo and Corenzio) ran what amounted to an artists' Mafia in Naples, grabbing the commissions for themselves and frightening rivals with bloodcurdling threats. Poor Domenichino, the Bolognese master who had been invited to decorate the chapel of St. Gennaro in Naples' cathedral, rushed back to Rome in a state of collapse after hearing from this cabal. Grand Guignol abounded, especially in details like the amputated hand in the foreground of Massimo Stanzione's Massacre of the Innocents, which seems ready to scuttle away, like a pink crab, on its own.

Even in its more refined moments, seicento art in Naples was geared to a love of strong sensation and imminent catastrophe: crowds and Vesuvius in the background, diseases of the body, instabilities of the soul, Thanatos and Eros beating the big bass drum. One recognizes in the Magdalens and Madonnas the women that visitors like John Evelyn wrote of, "generally well-featured, but excessively libidinous." Even still lifes by artists like Paolo Porpora and Giovanni Battista Recco have the swollen intensity of painting infatuated with the surface of the world. However, Recco's picture of objects on a kitchen table, grouped around the visual pivot of a Delft dish, is so exquisitely designed and so full of severe visual rhymes and harmonies as to rival the best bodegon paintings of Zurbaran.

At the lower end, of course, some Neapolitan art can be as wearisome as any other self-conscious piece of "life enhancement." Like routine mezzogiorno cooking, all tomato paste and burnt garlic, it was not meant for an educated palate. But the remarkable thing about this show is how, time and again, it surprises one with some unexpected dramatic subtlety. The expression on Salome's face in Preti's The Feast of Herod, for instance, is worthy of Rembrandt in its shadowed play of emotion.

For connoisseurs of enigma, there is A Dead Soldier by an unknown Neapolitan hand (all attributions having failed so far), which inspired Manet's Dead Toreador. The painting is a link between Caravaggio's shadow-theater and, through Salvator Rosa, the world of 19th century romanticism. It shows a young man in half-armor lying stiff and composed on the floor of a cave (some mountain charnel-house, perhaps) surrounded by rainy twilight and the glimmer of bones, with a curl of smoke still issuing from an extinguished votive lamp. A vanitas? A more personal lamentation? Impossible to say; yet there is more real feeling in this restrained image than in many a square yard of post-Caravaggian bombast.

In some respects this is an exhausting show, though not as tiring as it was in London, but that is no disadvantage. Some shows cannot be done in a single visit. This deserves several, not least because it has so much to say about where the line between rhetoric and high pictorial elocution can be drawn.

--By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.