The Seven Works of Mercy

Caravaggio painted this in 1607, freshly arrived in Naples with a price on his head. He had killed a man in Rome the year before and fled south, and here a young charitable brotherhood, the Pio Monte della Misericordia, gave him a commission that would normally fill seven separate pictures, one for each act of mercy. He crammed all seven into a single dark street. A man tips his flask to a beggar. Another gives away his cloak. In the corner a woman leans through prison bars to feed her starving father from her own breast, an old Roman story of mercy, while just behind them two bare feet stick up as a corpse is carried off to burial. It still hangs over the altar it was made for, in the church of that same brotherhood, which is still running its charity today.