Battistello Caracciolo

In late 1606 Caravaggio, on the run after killing a man in Rome, turned up in Naples. He stayed only months, but his dark, sharply lit naturalism landed on the city like a shock, and no local painter took it up faster or more seriously than Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, known to everyone as Battistello.

Trained first in a softer local manner, Battistello changed course almost overnight. By 1607 he was painting figures pulled out of deep shadow by a single hard light. His Liberation of Saint Peter, made in 1615, still hangs in the Pio Monte della Misericordia, the Naples charity church, in the same room as Caravaggio's own Seven Works of Mercy, a follower placed beside the source.

He went on to fresco vaults across Naples, including the chapel of San Gennaro at the Certosa di San Martino, the great monastery above the city. He died there in 1635, having outlived by 25 years the painter whose brief visit had redirected his art.