Lucky Sevens: Caravaggio’s ‘Works of Mercy’

First, let’s review the Corporal Works of Mercy, which are seven in number:

1. To feed the hungry
2. To give water to the thirsty
3. To clothe the naked
4. To shelter the homeless
5. To visit the sick
6. To visit the imprisoned
7. To bury the dead

There’s a church in Naples, Italy, devoted to them. And its founding is a lovely story.

In 1601, seven (how appropriate) young Neapolitan noblemen, all in their 20s or 30s, joined together to form Pio Monte della Misericordia (the Pious Mount of Mercy). And on every Friday, they gathered at the Hospital for Incurables (Ospedale degli Incurabili) to minister to the sick. Then they decided to elevate their commitment by founding the Mount – and a church with it. The charitable institution and the church survive to this day; the hospital is long gone.

But when the construction of the church was finally completed, an altarpiece was needed, so one of the seven young nobles, Giovan Battista Manso, a patron of the arts (and a friend of the poets Torquato Tasso and Giovan Marino, and the scientist Galileo Galilei), knew that a certain young painter, Michelangelo Merisi, had just arrived in Naples.

We know him, of course, by the name of his birthplace, Caravaggio, and he was on the run from the law for having murdered (on May 29, 1606), a young Roman nobleman, Ranuccio Tomassoni (noble only in the sense of his family’s “dignity”). Giovan Manso did not care about that, and he was happy to shelter Caravaggio – if he would paint an altarpiece for the Pio Monte della Misericordia. Besides, Caravaggio had been spirited to Naples by the Colonna family, and though I don’t wish to evoke vile stereotypes, that bunch stepped right out of a Baroque-era version of The Godfather.

Of course, what we think of today as “the law” was rather ad hoc in the 17th century

Caravaggio didn’t hesitate to accept the commission. Work was his drug. Besides, Manso and the Monte didn’t nickel-and-dime the artist. His fee is estimated to have been in the range of $150,000 to $220,000 in 2026 U.S. dollars! That’s more than a fair wage for the amount of time the painter spent creating it between September 23, 1606, and January 9, 1607. Three months and a skosh, for heaven’s sake.

The painting is extraordinary. It is also, perhaps, the most difficult to “see.” Caravaggio was the preeminent tenebrist. That term comes from the Italian word tenebroso, meaning dark or brooding or mysterious, and the words tenebrist or tenebrism likely weren’t used in the 17th century – may, in fact, be 20th-century coinages. But I think we can be confident that when Giovan Manso – or if not he another – first saw the finished work, there was a whispered, “Tenebroso.”

Being an art lover but not an art historian, I can only speculate that Caravaggio’s development of the technique (and he was surely its master) had something to do with his love of the human figure and the drama in humanity, and with his rather unique process (working quickly, painting directly on canvas without sketching), and (here I speculate) looking over his shoulder to see if the law was about to kick down the door.

Whatever the reasons, the results were always stunning, and you see it from his earliest work all the way to the last: from Boy Peeling Fruit (c. 1592) to Martyrdom of Saint Ursula (1610). But it was never so stunning or as impenetrable as in The Seven Works of Mercy.

Let’s break down The Seven Works of Mercy into four parts: top, middle (right and left), and bottom.

At the top, we see Mary, the Mother of God, and her infant Son borne aloft by angels.

For Caravaggio, there was often a blurring of the sacred and the profane, because – our Lady and her Son excepted, being sinless – all humanity is held in tension between salvation and damnation. Each of us is in need of divine mercy.

At center right is a complicated scene, and one it’s not possible to fully display. Most obvious are the three figures. One is a priest with a torch who, in the Milanese darkness, is leading two men carrying a corpse to be buried. This is No. 7: To bury the dead. (All we see of the corpse are his feet.)

The next shows Nos. 1 & 6. And this is Caravaggio at his most creative and shocking. He has chosen an ancient Roman story (“Roman Charity”) about Cimon and Pero by Valerius Maximus, written during the time of Christ. Cimon, a man arrested for stealing a loaf of bread and sentenced to death by starvation, is visited by his daughter, Pero, who daily comes to the prison and surreptitiously breastfeeds him: feeding the hungry and visiting the imprisoned.

The next (far left in the main image) is both hard to see and, again, an astonishing leap of artistic genius: Mercy No. 2, water for the thirsty. It’s Samson drinking from the jawbone of an ass!

The rest of the image shows a young man (to the right) with a plumed hat. That’s St. Martin of Tours, who is in the process of giving his cloak to a sick man, whom you can see in the main image, half-naked and reaching up to receive the burgundy cloak: Nos. 3 & 5, clothing the naked while visiting the sick.

And, on either side of thirsty Samson, we have an innkeeper and a pilgrim. We know the man on the right is a pilgrim because of the scallop shell affixed to his hat. No. 4: To shelter the homeless.

After finishing the Seven Works, Caravaggio did a few more paintings in Milan before heading to Malta, where he painted the extraordinary Beheading of John the Baptist. He became a Knight of Obedience there in July of 1608. Alas, he shortly thereafter got into a fight, was imprisoned, escaped, and fled to Sicily, found work there (The Burial of Saint Lucy, The Raising of Lazarus, and The Adoration of the Shepherds), each work darker, more brooding, and more mysterious than ever.

Back in Milan in 1609, his paintings became (so it seems to me) more rushed and definitely full of pain and death. Was it foreboding?

There were more brushes with the law. He became sick with a fever. Was it caused by Staphylococcus, an infection from an earlier wound? And where was he heading when he took a ship from Sicily to Porto Ercole (Port Hercules), a lovely seaside town a little over 90 miles from Rome? Was he ready to return to Rome and an expected pardon from Pope Paul V?

Non importa. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio died there, July 18, 1610.