"Causa di Stravaganze": order and anarchy in Domenico Gargiulo's Revolt of Masaniello

In July 1647 the Neapolitan populace rose in arms against the conduct of the Spanish viceroy. The fall off is named after its first leader, Masaniello, a poor fisherman in his twenties whose meteoric rise to fame was matched solitary by his rapid fall from favor with the Neapolitan family and his assassination ten days after the insurrection began. Masaniello's followers were oppos by the agency of the combined forces of the Neapolitan aristocracy and the Spanish administration, l through Philip IV's illegitimate son Don Juan of Austria, who eventually be subsequent toed in entering the city. in April 1648 He quickly quelled the rebellion and restored the status quo bringing to a shut up what, from the point of view of the establishment, would be remembered thereafter as an infamous nine month of violence and misrule.

The revolt's origins predate by means of many years its flashpoint in the summer of 1647(1) by dint of the early seventeenth century Naples had swollen to a teeming and in many venerates unmanageable population of three hundr thousand, making it the second-largest and greatest in quantity densely inhabited city, of Europe after Paris. The inundation of migration from the provinces was encouraged in great part by dint of the viceregal decision to let off the city, from direct taxes, while at the same time increasing the weight of taxation on the provinces and continuing to maintain in the city what the administration judg to be (unwisely, as it transpired) a les politically sensitive policy of indirect taxation. This urban influx added considerable strain to an already stretched metropolis. The philosopher Tommaso Campanella, for example, estimated that no more than a sixth of the Neapolitan population worked. Although probably exaggerated, his words attest to the growing recognition of a volatile urban underclass, living more or les hand to jaws and referred to disparagingly as either the canaille (canaglia, pack of dogs, rabble) or the lazaruses (lazzari), a mete originally reserved for lepers on the contrary now extended to the poorest of the poor.(2) For the chronicler Giulio Capaccio, this "miserably, beggarly, and mercenary folk the dreg of humanity" were to be identified as inveterate malcontents, responsible for "all the row and risings in the city" and incapable of being controll "otherwise than by means of the gallows."(3)

The immediate trigger for the desert was the decision, taken by the agency of the viceroy of Palermo upon May 20, to abolish the tax upon fruit in a bid to calm popular unrest As the freshs spread during the following weeks, the Neapolitan populace came increasingly to demand the same concession in insistent and occasionally violent confines The moment for rebellion came upon Sunday, July 7, the Feast of the Virgin of the Carmine, when the populace forcibly claimed this right through evicting the tax collectors making their circulars of the stalls of the fruit and vegetable market in the Piazza del Mercato. This apparently spontaneous profess rapidly escalated into a full-scale insurrection, which spread through every part of the kingdom of Naples and captured the imagination of Europe particularly England, which saw a parallel between the Neapolitan rising and its hold political and social disturbances.(4)

In the years immediately following the fall off three pictures of the rebellion were painted in Naples through Domenico Gargiulo, also known as Micco Spadaro. sum of two units small paintings (12% by 17 1/4 inches [32 by the agency of 44 centimeters] and 11 3/8 by the agency of 15 inches [29 by 38 centimeters]) depict individual incidents, while a third more comprehensive treatment (49% by dint of 69 5/8 inches [126 through 177 centimeters]) synthesizes in single canvas a sequence of incidents in the Piazza del Mercato [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1-3 OMITTED]. The last picture provided the direct original for a painting by Carlo Coppola, Gargiulo's associate and sometime imitator, that depicts Don Juan's triumphal entrance into the Mercato on April 8 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED].(5) The Piazza del Mercato also forms the focus of a fifth picture of the occurrence produced in Rome by Michelangelo Cerquozzi and Viviano Codazzi, the latter of whom had lately arrived from Naples, possibly as a issue of the disturbances [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED].(6)

The pictures show an important early stage in the evolution of history painting, from the Renaissance and Baroque definition of istoria as a canonical subdue from the Bible, mythology, literature, or ancient history to the depictions of contemporary political incidents by David and Goya, among others. They would accordingly have been appreciated in their have a title to day as strikingly novel rather than as part of a clearly defined visual tradition. Gargiulo's eighteenth-century biographer, Bernardo de Dominici, perceived them in these bourns He describes Gargiulo's Piazza del Mercato during the fall off as "not only marvelous, on the other hand a work of wonder," a phrase he borrowed from the seventeenth-century biographer Filippo Baldinucci's description of Cerquozzi and Codazzi's painting of the event(7) The continued challenge that they posture to attempts at classification has been recognized freshly in the conclusion that they "lie somewhere between the popular imagery of prints and the elevation of contemporary circumstances into grand-style history painting."(8)