Part One: Caravaggio, Naples, and the First Inheritance

Overview

Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, known as Battistello, was born in Naples in 1578 and died there in December 1635. In 1598 he married Beatrice di Mario da Gaeta, with whom he had a large family, and by the beginning of the new century he was already active in the decorative culture of late-Mannerist Naples. His earliest documented commission, in 1601, concerned painted putti on the façade of the Monte di Pietà, now almost entirely lost. His formation appears to have taken place in the orbit of Neapolitan painters such as Belisario Corenzio, Fabrizio Santafede and Francesco Imparato.

Caravaggio’s arrival in Naples at the end of 1606 marked the decisive turning point in Battistello’s career. He was among the first Neapolitan artists to absorb the lesson of the new naturalism, and his closeness to Caravaggio was still recognised decades later. In the 1659 inventory of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s collection in Vienna, the painter of Cristo nell’orto degli ulivi, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, was identified as “Michelangelo Caraccio”: a telling error, which gives Battistello part of the name of Michelangelo Merisi and reveals how closely he was associated with the great Lombard painter. His Immacolata Concezione con san Domenico e san Francesco di Paola, painted for Santa Maria della Stella in 1607–08, was his first major public statement in this new idiom. The Liberazione di San Pietro dal carcere, painted in 1615 for the Pio Monte della Misericordia, confirmed his early maturity and his growing importance within the religious institutions of Naples. Around the same years he painted other ambitious works, including the Trinitas terrestris for the Pietà dei Turchini.

Battistello’s reputation was not confined to devotional painting. He moved in cultivated circles and was connected with Giovanni Battista Manso, Marchese di Villa, a literary patron and founder of the Accademia degli Oziosi. Through this milieu Battistello stood close to figures such as Giambattista Marino and Giambattista Basile. Basile dedicated a poem to him in his Madrigali e Ode of 1617, and Battistello’s lost portrait of Basile is known through an engraving. These connections suggest an artist whose career was embedded not only in workshop practice and ecclesiastical patronage, but also in the literary and aristocratic culture of early seventeenth-century Naples.

From the later 1610s Battistello’s career broadened beyond Naples. In 1614 he had been in Rome, where he came into contact with Orazio Gentileschi, and in 1618 he worked for the grand-ducal court in Florence, painting the Riposo nella fuga in Egitto now in Palazzo Pitti. He also travelled to Genoa under the patronage of Marcantonio Doria, Caravaggio’s former patron, for whom he worked on the now-lost fresco decoration of the Doria villa, or casino, at Sampierdarena. After these journeys he returned to Naples, continuing to develop a language rooted in Caravaggio’s example but increasingly modified by Roman, Florentine and Genoese experience.

(Credit: Wikipedia).

The Lavanda dei piedi, painted in 1622 for the choir of the Certosa di San Martino, marks the first major success of Battistello’s mature phase. During the 1620s and early 1630s he became one of the leading painters of major ecclesiastical and institutional commissions in Naples, working for the Gesù Nuovo, Santa Maria la Nova, San Diego all’Ospedaletto and, above all, the Certosa di San Martino. His brief involvement with the decoration of the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro in the Duomo was less successful, and appears to have ended with his removal from the commission; but his decorations for the chapels of the Assumption and of San Gennaro at San Martino belong to the central achievements of his later career.

In his final years Battistello remained responsive to the changing artistic climate of Naples, which included the presence of painters such as Ribera, Domenichino and Lanfranco. His career traces one of the central transformations of early seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting. Formed within the local tradition of late Mannerism, he responded to Caravaggio’s insistence on painting from life and to the unidealised authority of bodies caught in sharp, selective light. He subsequently moved towards a Baroque pictorial language shaped by the experience of travel, the demands of fresco and the scale of institutional patronage.

Part One: Caravaggio, Naples, and the First Inheritance

Stefano Causa has called Battistello Caracciolo il più infedele dei Caravaggeschi, “the most unfaithful of the Caravaggists”. The phrase acknowledges the determining importance of Caravaggio while also suggesting the limits of viewing Battistello entirely through his example. Battistello belongs among the foremost caravaggeschi of Naples, but the term describes only one aspect of his formation and practice. The limits of the label are also evident in his working methods: unlike Caravaggio, he made preparatory drawings, devised extensive decorative schemes and continued to work in fresco. His later development was shaped by encounters with Ribera and Lanfranco, as well as by sculpture and by the particular demands of public decoration. His career consequently occupied a broader and more varied artistic field than the designation “Caravaggist” alone can convey.

In Naturalismo deciduo. Un racconto di Battistello Caracciolo, his essay for the 2022 Capodimonte exhibition catalogue, Causa begins from Longhi’s famous image of Battistello as the “grave bronze patriarch” of the Neapolitan Seicento, but turns that monument into a more historically mobile figure. In this account, Battistello’s Caravaggism should not be treated as a permanent identity. It is the strongest and most obvious aspect of his formation, running broadly from the Immacolata Concezione con san Domenico e san Francesco di Paola in Santa Maria della Stella, painted in 1607–08, to the Lavanda dei piedi in the choir of the Certosa di San Martino in 1622. After that point, however, Caravaggio remains present without being sufficient to explain the work. Battistello’s later painting opens onto other demands and other models: fresco, public decoration, the practice of the workshop, the example of Lanfranco and Ribera, and the re-emergence of sixteenth-century Neapolitan painting as a living influence.

(Credits: Wikimedia Commons and Catalogo Generale dei Beni Culturali).

This does not diminish Caravaggio’s importance for Battistello; it allows us to see that importance as just part of a higher resolution image. In Sulla prima ora del caravaggismo a Napoli, his essay for the 2019 Capodimonte exhibition catalogue Caravaggio Napoli, Augusto Russo usefully keeps the Caravaggio question at the centre. He presents Battistello as the first and most alert representative of a specifically Neapolitan Caravaggism: not one follower among others, but the painter who grasped the new direction before the rest. Yet even here the story does not begin abruptly with Caravaggio’s arrival in Naples at the end of 1606. Russo allows for the possibility that Battistello had already encountered Caravaggio’s Roman works, perhaps during a journey connected with Belisario Corenzio and the Jubilee year of 1600. A drawing associated with Belisario Corenzio after the Vocazione di san Matteo suggests how rapidly news of Caravaggio’s Roman breakthrough could circulate between Rome and Naples. Battistello’s Caravaggism may therefore have begun as an informed response to the Roman Caravaggio before it became a direct encounter with the Neapolitan works.

There is no denying the radical impact that Caravaggio created in Naples, but his arrival did not simply overturn the local traditions within which painters had already been formed. Battistello had been trained within the late-sixteenth-century decorative and fresco culture of Naples, in a world shaped by Belisario Corenzio, Fabrizio Santafede, Girolamo Imparato, Francesco Curia and the Romanising habits of the previous generation. Moreover, as we have already indicated, he is first documented in 1601, working under Corenzio on the fresco decoration of the Monte di Pietà.

The scale and influence of Corenzio’s activity in Naples should not be underestimated. In the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Francesco Abbate speaks of the indubbia egemonia Corenzio had established in the city: a dominance measured less by isolated masterpieces than by the sheer reach of his fresco campaigns and sacred commissions. This orbit gave Battistello a command of fresco, which he would exploit throughout his career in a way neither Caravaggio nor Ribera did, and it also grounded him in drawing, a practice to which he remained consistently attached. Naples around 1600 was not inert or provincial. It possessed a cultivated decorative culture, visible in collaborative projects such as the ceiling of Santa Maria la Nova, and sustained by fresco, colour, sculpture, prints, Roman models and elaborate workshop practice. The radical changes brought by Caravaggio were therefore assimilated into an already complex local language; they did not sweep away everything that had come before.

The recovery of Battistello as a draughtsman is crucial to this broader argument. Marina Causa Picone’s important 1993 article, “Giunte a Battistello. Appunti per una storia critica di Battistello disegnatore”, published in Paragone. Arte, did more than assign further sheets to the painter: it gave Battistello’s drawings a critical shape. The drawings could now be related not only to major works such as the Liberazione di san Pietro dal carcere and the frescoes in the Palazzo Reale, but also to Raphaelesque models known through Raphael and Marcantonio Raimondi. What emerges is a different kind of artist: one who prepared and varied figures on paper, used drawing to think through pose, light and bodily emphasis, and retained a live awareness of older graphic habits even while becoming one of the central painters of Neapolitan Caravaggism.

Ippolita Di Majo’s later study of the Stockholm collection further developed this picture. By separating a group of Battistello drawings from the so-called Francesco Curia album in the Tessin collection, she showed how closely his graphic language remained tied to late-Mannerist Neapolitan practice while simultaneously developing beyond it. Against Curia’s lighter, more pointed line, Battistello’s sheets show fuller volumes, heavier limbs, stronger contour, rapid parallel hatching and a melancholy plasticity that Di Majo sees as characteristic of him. The distinction is one of weight and structure as much as attribution. Battistello’s naturalism is not simply an effect of Caravaggio’s darkness; it is built through drawing, through the conversion of older graphic habits into a more solid, synthetic and seventeenth-century language.

The Stockholm works also reveal a working method based on variation, transfer and reuse. Some sheets are figure studies; others are rapid compositional sketches for whole paintings or frescoes, including the Sant’Ignazio in gloria e le opere dei padri gesuiti, the Storie della Vergine and Storie di san Gennaro at the Certosa di San Martino, and the frescoes in the Cappella Severino at Santa Maria la Nova. Di Majo’s examples suggest that Battistello used drawing to test poses, redistribute groups, convert Caravaggesque memories into new dramatic situations, and carry motifs from one project to another. The drawings therefore complicate the image of Battistello as simply a Neapolitan Caravaggist. They show an artist whose naturalism was constructed through a sustained graphic practice, rooted in earlier local habits but increasingly directed towards breadth of form, dramatic light and large-scale pictorial invention.

De Dominici’s story of Battistello as Caravaggio’s pupil, imitator and copyist is a revealing myth, but too simple as biography. It imagines Battistello choosing the newly arrived Caravaggio as his true master and allowing his earlier training to fall away. Russo accepts the underlying insight: Caravaggio did represent for Battistello a passionate new beginning, almost an act of artistic contestation. But modern research makes the sequence less linear. Battistello’s later turn towards Bolognese and more classicising currents should be understood as a correction or enlargement of his early naturalism, not as a renunciation of Caravaggio. From the start, his Caravaggism was layered over an existing Neapolitan formation.

That selective, layered response is already visible in the way Battistello absorbs the two great paintings by Caravaggio then available in Naples. Russo identifies these as the Sette opere della Misericordia, completed early in 1607, and the Madonna del Rosario, whose importance for the Neapolitan painter was first recognised by Longhi. They were the works that most decisively allowed Battistello to “infuse Caravaggio into his imagination”, in De Dominici’s phrase, but they offered very different kinds of example. The more radical altarpiece for the Pio Monte made itself felt through the force of its dark tonal structure and through the selective adaptation of its compositional and figural inventions, while the Madonna del Rosario was more readily approachable in its syntax and colour. Battistello’s Immacolata Concezione may be understood as emerging from these two modes of Caravaggesque influence.

(Credits: Wikipedia).

The Immacolata Concezione con san Domenico e san Francesco di Paola, painted for Santa Maria della Stella in 1607–08, is Battistello’s first fully signed and public work in which Caravaggio’s example is brought to bear on the older Neapolitan altarpiece tradition. It is one of the earliest naturalistic altarpieces in Naples, but its sources are mixed. The crowded, episodic difficulty of Caravaggio’s Sette opere della Misericordia meets the more assimilable late-Roman language of the Madonna del Rosario, especially in the three-quarter-length saints who point towards the Virgin and mediate between viewer and vision. At first sight, the work still preserves something of the inherited Raphaelesque altarpiece, familiar from the sacre conversazioni of the previous generation. Yet the structure no longer breathes with the same ease. Battistello darkens the field, brings the figures into closer relation, and uses light less as a general clarifying medium than as a means of stressing particular faces, gestures and devotional emphases. Saints, angels, symbolic apparatus and even the dragon are gathered into a denser and more urgent pictorial order.

As Causa observes, Battistello is not passively imitating Caravaggio’s Neapolitan masterpieces. What he confronts in the Sette opere della Misericordia is Caravaggio’s extraordinary command of a dynamic structure that seems always on the verge of breaking apart, yet never does. Multiple actions, bodies, gestures and divine presences are brought to the edge of confusion, yet the painting holds because that very risk is contained by our awe at Caravaggio’s personal vision and invention. In the Immacolata Concezione, Battistello tries to answer that example without pretending that Caravaggio’s freedom can simply be reproduced. The dragon, angels, saints and symbolic objects occupy the same crowded field, but they are held in a more deliberate order. Rather than risk confusion by imitating the hazardous freedom of the Sette opere, Battistello develops a modified compositional language: compressed, Caravaggesque, but more visibly governed.

This helps clarify the particular kind of Caravaggism at work in Battistello’s Immacolata Concezione. Some of its Caravaggesque signs are powerful, but they remain partly exterior: reddened hands, real boys posing as angels, wings treated almost like theatrical attachments, and bodies lit with the selective force associated with Caravaggio’s darkened pictorial spaces. These devices intensify the naturalistic character of the painting, but they do not mean that Battistello has fully internalised Caravaggio’s revolution. The work remains a hybrid. Its observed bodies and dramatic lighting are attached to a traditional iconographic and theological structure: the Virgin, the saints, the dragon, the animated skeleton, and the whole machinery of sin and redemption. In Caravaggio, theological meaning can seem to pass into the immediacy of bodies observed dal vero, faces drawn from the contemporary street, and actions that retain the dangerous energy of events still unfolding. In Battistello, naturalism is powerful, but it remains visibly bound to inherited signs and sacred design. His Caravaggism is therefore serious but partial: he takes over darkness, posing, light and bodily truth, but translates them into something more controlled, more reserved and more silent.

As Causa observes, the dragon in the work is a revealing case. Caravaggio would hardly have painted such a creature, except perhaps as a grotesque enlargement of the serpent in the Madonna dei Palafrenieri. Battistello, however, paints an impossible animal as if it were observed fact. Its scales, nostrils and tongue are given a physical credibility that makes older painted dragons look almost childish. In this sense the painting does something more complicated than import Caravaggesque darkness into an inherited devotional scheme. It applies the pressure of naturalism to a type of symbolic image that Caravaggio himself would have avoided.

Nor is the Immacolata Concezione only an exercise in darkness and compression. Causa’s point is not simply that Battistello relieves the late Caravaggesque language of ellipsis, abbreviation and shadow with passages of colour and surface. The painting also looks ahead. In those “refreshing pauses of fine painting”, including the angel on the left who seems to take his leave while chatting with another, and above all in the astonishing red of the Virgin’s robe, Causa sees a naturalism of colour in which later Neapolitan painters could recognise a path of their own. Stanzione, Vaccaro and Guarino are therefore not incidental names here, but witnesses to what the painting made possible: a Caravaggism that did not abandon compression, but allowed colour, fabric, incidental human exchange and painterly pleasure back into the field. Battistello remains deeply engaged with Caravaggio, even acting as a kind of interpreter of the Lombard master’s Neapolitan altarpieces; but the adjustment is not only structural. It opens Caravaggism towards a richer and more sensuous Neapolitan Seicento.

(Credit: Wikipedia and Catalogo Generale dei Beni Culturali).

Russo’s discussion of Battistello’s relation to Caravaggio begins with Le sette opere di misericordia. Radiographic studies revealed an earlier arrangement of the heavenly group in Caravaggio’s altarpiece, and something close to this provisional solution seems to recur in Battistello’s Madonna col Bambino in gloria at Catanzaro. Vincenzo Pacelli therefore proposed that Battistello may have seen the altarpiece while it was still in progress, perhaps registering an arrangement that Caravaggio subsequently altered before bringing the work to completion. Russo treats the suggestion with appropriate caution, but values it for the possibility it raises: that Battistello may not merely have studied Caravaggio’s finished inventions, but at times stood close enough to their making to absorb choices that never reached the completed surface. The issue lies, as Russo puts it, between adherence and participation, between the imitation of a completed Caravaggesque image and a more direct proximity to Caravaggio’s act of invention.

Battistello’s response to Caravaggio can also be followed on a smaller and more intimate scale in the figure paintings of his first Caravaggesque phase. Here the elaborate doctrinal components of the Immacolata Concezione fall away: no dragon, no skeleton, no crowded theological apparatus. In works such as the San Giovanni Battista in a New York private collection, and in other youthful Baptists, adolescent Bacchuses, Ecce Homo subjects and Salomè figures, Battistello tests what can be done with a single figure, a close-up body and a strongly directed light. Sacred and mythological identity begin to blur into the presence of the studio model; saint, pagan youth and street boy are held together without being fully reconciled.

(Credit: Galerie Canesso, Paris and Wikimedia Commons).

That ambiguity prevents these works from being merely textbook Neapolitan Caravaggism. Battistello’s adolescents are not simply Caravaggio’s sensuous, equivocal youths translated into a local idiom. They are rougher, more abrupt and more closely tied to the physical pressure of the model before the painter. This is why Causa can extend the observation into a longer Neapolitan pattern, not as a demonstrable chain of influence but as a recurring pictorial possibility. One later point of contact is Preti’s Scena di carità con tre fanciulli mendicanti, where boys from the urban margins are brought close to the surface of the picture and made to address the viewer directly. From there the line can be extended, somewhere between analogy and direct descent, towards Kiprensky, Gemito and Mancini. What persists is not a single inheritance, but a Neapolitan way of allowing sacred, charitable or mythological subjects to be unsettled by the presence of figures that refuse to remain wholly inside their assigned roles.

(Credit: Mattia Preti, il Cavalier Calabrese, catalogo di Giglio Italiano).

Russo places Battistello’s most radical Caravaggesque experiments around the threshold of 1610. The Crocifissione from the Annunziata, now at Capodimonte, shows him confronting a precise Caravaggio model, the Martirio di sant’Andrea now in Cleveland. Yet the response is selective. Battistello does not take over the old woman with the goitre, one of the details in Caravaggio’s painting that might have appealed strongly to northern painters because of its expressive grotesquerie. It does not belong to his conception of the scene. Even at his most Caravaggesque, he is choosing, suppressing and reordering, not merely imitating.

The Battesimo di Cristo in the Pinacoteca dei Girolamini, probably painted not long after 1610, belongs to the same severe moment. Russo sees it as almost an emblem of Battistello’s understanding of the late Caravaggio. Its darkness, meagre colour and lack of environmental detail bring it close to the final Caravaggio of the Martirio di sant’Orsola and the Negazione di Pietro: a painting reduced almost to bare human and spiritual fact. Russo’s phrase pittura della rinuncia is especially helpful. Late Caravaggio becomes a painting of renunciation: a withdrawal from abundance, rich colour, elaborate setting, descriptive incident, decorative satisfaction and perhaps even narrative fullness. In the Battesimo, Battistello briefly follows him into that territory. He understood this art of reduction more deeply than other Neapolitan painters, but only temporarily. It was an extraordinary moment of comprehension, not the settled direction of his whole career.

(Credits: Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia).

Yet the painting is not simply an imitation of Caravaggio. Battistello measures himself against the severe late Caravaggio, but his own temperament is different. He loosens the inherited framework of drawing and moves towards a more summary, synthetic handling, yet he never acquires Caravaggio’s fierce freedom of brushwork. What is specifically his is the emotional temperature: distilled pathos, monumental calm, and an absence of explosive violence. His figures are not dramatic protagonists in Caravaggio’s sense, but Causa’s “sad men of the seventeenth century”: grave, inward and physically present.

Battistello’s early response to Caravaggio was not isolated. Carlo Sellitto, his near-contemporary, worked close enough to the same field for their languages occasionally to overlap: an Adorazione dei pastori by Sellitto at Santa Maria del Popolo agli Incurabili, for example, has at times carried an attribution to Battistello. Both painters came to Caravaggio from within a Neapolitan culture still marked by late-Mannerist habits, and neither can be treated as a pure Caravaggist. Sellitto’s brief career, ending in 1614, suggests a more gradual assimilation, moving from the legacy of Imparato and the older maniera towards a sharper naturalism, and then, in works such as the Santa Cecilia of 1613 or the Santa Candida Brancaccio in Sant’Angelo a Nilo, towards a softer atmosphere perhaps touched by Guido Reni. Battistello’s own development was no less mixed, but in works such as the Battesimo di Cristo of the Girolamini he could move further into the compressed structures and stark lateral light of Caravaggio’s late Neapolitan paintings. The difference is one of emphasis rather than kind: Sellitto’s Caravaggism appears more gradual and transitional, Battistello’s at certain moments more abrupt and concentrated.

Battistello’s early Caravaggesque language was also being adapted to fresco. In the Storie del Gran Capitano Consalvo di Cordova at the Palazzo Reale, connected with a 1611 payment but still debated in date, Battistello appears in the less familiar role of history painter. The cycle shows Caravaggism being stretched into an unexpected public and celebratory form. Its difference lies not only in the use of fresco, a medium foreign to our usual mental image of Caravaggio, but also in the subject: Spanish viceregal history drawn from the early sixteenth-century Mezzogiorno and adapted to the ceremonial setting of the royal palace. Battistello works in continuity with the vigorous local fresco tradition associated with Corenzio and other mural painters, while transferring into public decoration some of the devices associated with his smaller and more concentrated paintings: compact figure groups, emphatic gestures, abrupt exchanges of look and action, and a newly naturalistic weight of presence.

(Credit: Wikipedia).

In the Incontro di Consalvo con gli ambasciatori, the surviving drawing and the relatively well-preserved fresco suggest a sober, chronicle-like approach to historical narrative, without the usual machinery of heroic celebration. Following Ferdinando Bologna, Causa sees in this an anti-rhetorical gravity that anticipates, at distance, the factual restraint Velázquez would later bring to the Resa di Breda. Battistello’s public history is not theatrical or triumphalist, but grave, measured and unusually attentive to the weight of circumstance. One figure in the cycle has sometimes been imaginatively associated with Caravaggio himself: a dark, penetrating, weathered face, with black hair, moustache and pointed beard. The identification is necessarily uncertain, but suggestive, and perhaps more than merely fanciful: it makes Battistello’s relation to Caravaggio feel almost immediate and personal, rather than merely stylistic. His presence is not simply a matter of borrowed lighting or naturalistic force; it seems to inhabit Battistello’s earliest public historical painting.

The Palazzo Reale frescoes also have chronological importance. Causa places them within a group of Battistello’s early works, comparing them above all with the Turin Qui vult venire post me, or Cristo portacroce con il Cireneo, documented in 1614. The picture’s Latin title, drawn from Christ’s command that those who follow him must take up the cross, makes it not only a foreshadowing of the Passion but an image of discipleship. Its close-up figures, ragged clothing and dirty foreground feet also show Battistello rethinking Caravaggio’s late Neapolitan models, including the Madonna del Rosario in Vienna. If the Turin picture belongs near the Palazzo Reale cycle, the two works show Battistello moving between different forms of early Caravaggesque practice: intimate devotional drama and the more public, ceremonial language required by fresco and courtly historical painting.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

The Pio Monte della Misericordia offers one of the clearest examples of the next stage in this process. Causa sees the chapel as a place where Caravaggio’s dangerous invention was almost immediately made usable for institutional, devotional and decorative purposes. Caravaggio’s Sette opere della Misericordia had proposed a nocturnal, compressed and conceptually explosive model, in which several acts of mercy unfold simultaneously within a single irregular field. The surrounding altarpieces show how quickly Neapolitan painters and patrons began to absorb, clarify and regularise that model. Caravaggism, in this context, was not simple discipleship. It was a negotiation: the radical impact of Caravaggio was filtered through decorum, narrative clarity, inherited style and institutional need.

This is the setting in which Battistello painted the Liberazione di san Pietro dal carcere for the Pio Monte, signed and documented in 1615.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Hung almost opposite Caravaggio’s Sette opere della Misericordia, it inevitably enters into dialogue with the earlier Neapolitan masterpiece. Yet it is not a simple continuation of Caravaggio’s severity. For Causa, the problem had changed. If, in the Immacolata Concezione, Battistello had attempted to remake Raphael from nature, here he attempts something still more complex: to remake Caravaggio through Raphael. The relevant precedent is Raphael’s Liberazione di san Pietro in the Vatican Stanze, the celebrated fresco of miraculous nocturnal light. Battistello does not simply borrow Raphael’s prestige. He translates the fresco’s order, luminous structure and sacred decorum into a Neapolitan Caravaggesque idiom. The result is one of the great acts of controlled naturalism in early Seicento Naples: Caravaggio recast through Raphael, his dramatic naturalism brought into a more measured sacred order.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Russo gives the Liberazione a slightly different emphasis by stressing Battistello’s Roman experience. Documented in Rome at the beginning of 1612, Battistello seems to have encountered Orazio Gentileschi’s work at first hand, while also responding to the example of Guido Reni. On his return to Naples, this refinement found what Russo nicely calls an “occasione di stoffa” in the Pio Monte picture. The phrase is exact because the angel’s luminous white fabric becomes the place where Battistello most visibly departs from Caravaggio’s harsher principle of the “attimo folgorato”. Caravaggesque light remains present, but it is slowed, polished and spatially elaborated. The carefully profiled helmet of the soldier in penumbra, almost a stage prop recalling the earlier Negazione di Pietro, stands out against the enriched white of the angel and becomes a refined perspectival cue.

The painting therefore cannot be placed neatly on one side of a divide between adherence to Caravaggio and departure from him. It is both a powerful Caravaggesque cimento and a personal deviation from Merisi’s method. Russo deepens the connection by recalling the suggestion that Battistello’s Liberazione may preserve, however indirectly, something of the conception of Caravaggio’s lost Resurrezione di Cristo for the Fenaroli chapel. That connection cannot be proved visually, since Caravaggio’s painting has disappeared; it depends instead on early descriptions, especially the account left by Charles-Nicolas Cochin, the French engraver and art writer who saw the work in Naples in the mid-eighteenth century. Cochin describes a Christ who does not rise triumphantly into the air, but passes among the guards with a hesitant, almost fugitive humanity.

This is why Causa reopens the painting against its orthodox Longhian reputation. In the first half of the twentieth century, and especially through the exhibitions and critical writings that shaped the modern rediscovery of Caravaggio and his followers, the Liberazione came to be seen as one of the exemplary monuments of Neapolitan Caravaggism. Its inclusion in Longhi’s 1951 Milan exhibition helped fix Battistello’s reputation as one of the principal Neapolitan followers of Caravaggio. Yet that reading begins to fracture as soon as one attends to details already noticed by earlier critics: above all the angel’s silken robe, its polished surface and its silvery luminosity. Aldo De Rinaldis had even brought in Pietro Bernini as a possible comparison as early as 1929, a striking intuition at a time when Neapolitan sculpture had not yet been fully integrated into the discussion. Others sensed in the robe a refinement that looked forward to Bernardo Cavallino, while Ortolani wrote of its argentine light. Such observations suggest that the seven years separating Battistello’s painting from Caravaggio’s Sette opere della Misericordia had not passed without consequence.

The Liberazione is therefore Caravaggio already mediated, refined and redirected. Its darkness and dramatic subject still look back to Merisi, but the angel’s robe, silvery light and polished surface point towards Raphaelising discipline, Gentileschi’s refinement, sculptural suggestion and the later elegance of Neapolitan painting. Causa’s warning is useful: if one still wants to call the painting Caravaggesque, it should be said almost sottovoce.

For Causa, the Liberazione is the local culmination of this mid-1610s moment: the most coherent Neapolitan answer to Caravaggio’s Sette opere della Misericordia. It offers not a simple continuation of the raw, destabilising Caravaggio of the high altar, but a Caravaggio recast through Raphael, through sixteenth-century normative models, and through a more ordered sacred language. This is why Causa wants the painting understood within a wider Neapolitan culture, rather than within painting alone. His parallels with Basile’s return to Bembo and Della Casa, or with Trabaci’s learned court music, need not be pressed too far here; their importance is that they place Battistello within a broader climate of disciplined return to authoritative models. In each case, tradition is not treated as a retreat, but as a way of gathering force for a new advance. Yet this equilibrium was fragile. Beyond the Liberazione, Neapolitan painting would soon be pulled into a darker, denser and more materially compelling current.

Proceed to Battistello Caracciolo: Painting after Caravaggio in Naples, Part 2. The bibliography is at the end of Part 3.

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Part Two: Ribera, Lanfranco, and the Wider Neapolitan Field

That darker current was associated above all with Ribera. His arrival in Naples around 1616 did not simply displace Caravaggio, but changed both the character and the reach of the local naturalist tradition. Causa’s distinction between the two painters is less a judgement of artistic greatness than of historical effect. The late Caravaggio appears, in this account, as a kind of terminal intensity, so stripped, radical and singular that his example could be followed only with difficulty. Ribera, by contrast, offered a heightened, corporeal and materially insistent language that other painters could more readily adopt and develop. In his wake, Neapolitan naturalism acquired a greater physical weight, a richer sense of texture and a denser handling of paint. Yet the very breadth of Ribera’s influence carried its own risk: his authority could make the later tradition appear more uniformly concerned with the physical presence of the body and the expressive handling of paint than it really was.

Battistello was among the first to respond to this change. Causa measures the shift by placing two altarpieces side by side: the Liberazione di san Pietro dal carcere, painted in 1615 for the Pio Monte della Misericordia, and the Trinitas terrestris, commissioned in 1617 by Sebastiano and Santolo Manso for the chapel of San Giuseppe at Santa Maria Incoronatella della Pietà dei Turchini. The Liberazione still belongs to the moment of Caravaggio mediated through Raphael and Gentileschi. The Trinitas terrestris, by contrast, already registers the impact of Ribera’s arrival. It remains dark and turbulent, with Caravaggesque echoes in the arrangement of the angels above, but its decisive novelty appears in the head of Saint Joseph. Here Battistello moves away from some of his earlier synthetic simplification and attends more closely to the texture and surface of aged flesh.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

The head of Saint Joseph in the Trinitas terrestris seems specifically related to Ribera’s San Pietro in the Quadreria dei Girolamini. Causa also measures Battistello’s stylistic shift against Ribera’s three-quarter-length Sant’Andrea and the surviving apostle paintings in the same collection. Seen in relation to these works, the Trinitas terrestris reveals a denser and more tactile naturalism: roughened skin, the grave head of an old man, and paint handled with greater material emphasis. Ribera does not replace Caravaggio so much as modify Battistello’s Caravaggism from within, giving it greater weight, age and physical presence.

(Credit: Wikipedia).

The same influence extends to the large Madonna di Ognissanti, or Madonna col Bambino e santi, made for Stilo in Calabria and usually dated at around 1618–19. In Causa’s reading, its crowded company of saints belongs to the same recalibration as the Trinitas Terrestris. Here too, the silvery control of the Liberazione has given way to a denser, more tactile and more emphatic sacred vision. This is no longer Battistello simply domesticating Caravaggio. It is Battistello registering the force of Ribera’s example, a pictorial language powerful enough to alter the terms of Neapolitan naturalism. The Stilo altarpiece is also significant because it carries that development beyond Naples itself, showing how Battistello’s Riberesque turn could take shape within the wider artistic geography of the southern kingdom.

The Compianto sul Cristo morto at Baranello belongs to the same unsettled moment. Its location in Molise has probably contributed to its relative marginality in accounts of Battistello, while its title has also varied. It has sometimes been called a Deposizione, but since no cross is shown, it is more accurately described as a Compianto or Pietà, with the dead Christ lying on a sheet among the Virgin, Saint John and the Magdalene, all emerging from darkness. The painting was once associated with Annibale Carracci, and that earlier attribution is understandable, since older sixteenth-century and Carraccesque structures remain visible. Causa’s point, however, is that the energising force is now Ribera: a heavier surface, stronger contrasts and a more insistent physicality. The picture becomes a hinge work, still tied to an inherited devotional composition but driven by a darker and more material naturalism.

(Credits: Restituzioni and Ars Europa).

Causa also adds an important caution. Battistello’s response to Ribera should not be imagined as a simple one-way transmission from the Spanish master to the Neapolitan painter. The local field was more densely interactive than that. Filippo Vitale is especially important here. In his Liberazione di san Pietro dal carcere at Nantes, Vitale rethinks Battistello’s earlier version at the Pio Monte della Misericordia. He tightens the framing around the two protagonists, concentrating the scene’s dramatic urgency in their weathered faces and emphatic gestures, whose almost expressionistic force is heightened by a handling of paint rougher and less luminous than Battistello’s. Neapolitan naturalism in these years was therefore not merely the afterlife of Caravaggio or the triumph of Ribera. It was a local exchange in which painters sharpened, roughened and redirected one another’s solutions.

Russo’s account of Vitale helps further to define his place within this local exchange and the particular form of naturalism he represents in Naples during the later 1610s. Here Vitale belongs to the same early Caravaggesque generation as Battistello, but his realism has a different intensity. The main fixed points in his early career are the ceiling of the Annunziata at Capua, on which he worked between 1617 and 1619, and the Santi Gennaro, Niccolò di Bari e Severo, dated 1618 and now at Capodimonte. Together, they reveal a painter drawn to a dense, unsmoothed bodily presence. In works such as the Martirio di San Sebastiano, the Santo Stefano condotto al martirio, the Sacrificio d’Isacco at Capodimonte, and related half-length figure groups, Vitale avoids complex architectural space and tightens the picture around the bodies themselves. Russo’s description suggests a concentration on a plane of truthfulness: the image does not open out into elaborated space, but closes in upon the immediate physical reality of the figures.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons and Artnet).

The comparison with Battistello’s Liberazione is therefore revealing. In the Nantes painting, Vitale compresses and roughens the composition of the Pio Monte altarpiece. Battistello’s version is more luminous and refined, while Vitale gives greater weight to taut bodies, forceful expressions and a harsher treatment of form. Nor can Vitale be understood simply as a follower of Ribera. Compared with Ribera’s Sant’Andrea in the Quadreria dei Girolamini, his treatment of flesh is drier and more compact, with less sustained attention to the varied textures of skin. His naturalism emerged instead from a difficult convergence of influences: Battistello’s Caravaggism, Ribera’s arrival, Sellitto’s legacy and the continuing presence in Naples of painters from northern Europe. The result is a manner that remains distinctly his own, severe, physically concentrated and resistant to polished finish.

This makes Vitale useful for understanding Battistello’s position. Early Neapolitan naturalism was not a single current flowing from Caravaggio to Ribera and then into the local school, but a crowded field of adjacent solutions. Battistello developed a severe but increasingly refined Caravaggism, Sellitto a more mediated and atmospheric response, Vitale a compact and unsmoothed bodily realism, and Ribera a more tactile and investigative treatment of painted surfaces. There may also have been lingering currents of northern Caravaggism, associated with painters such as the Master of the Emmaus at Pau or Cecco del Caravaggio. Russo remains cautious about precise priorities, especially around Ribera’s arrival and the possible presence of Cecco in Naples. That caution is useful because it prevents the early Neapolitan field from being reduced to a clean sequence of influence. Battistello developed instead within a convergence of local, Spanish, Roman and northern pressures, as painters repeatedly absorbed, corrected and intensified one another’s solutions.

Causa gives this transformation an anthropological as well as a stylistic dimension. The change concerns not only light, paint and surface, but also the kinds of human beings who populate Battistello’s paintings. His figures become older, weightier, more strongly characterised and more physically specific. Causa sees this development as shaped partly by Ribera’s heroic old men and partly by Battistello’s possible contact with the northern Caravaggesque painters active in Naples, including Louis Finson and the anonymous Master of the Emmaus at Pau. It is within this latter context that he places Battistello’s Cristo tra i dottori, now in a private Neapolitan collection and probably datable to around 1620 or slightly earlier. The painting bears Battistello’s initials on the book held by the elderly figure at the right. It suggests that the changing physical and human character of Battistello’s naturalism arose from several currents acting upon him at once.

The Florentine episode around 1618 is revealing, but not radically transformative. At the Medici court, Battistello seems to have worked especially as a portraitist, perhaps producing now-lost likenesses of Grand Duke Cosimo II and Maria Maddalena d’Austria. The surviving Riposo durante la fuga in Egitto col Battista in the Cappella delle Reliquie at Palazzo Pitti gives substance to the stay and places him in contact with early Seicento Florentine painting. Yet for Causa the episode does not fundamentally redirect Battistello’s career. It belongs rather to the moment when his original Caravaggesque force is beginning to lose momentum and to seek other forms of renewal.

(Credit: Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons).

The more unsettling Florentine work is the Salomè con la testa del Battista in the Uffizi, now tied to the Medici context and documented in the collection of Prince Leopoldo by 1638. Causa calls it one of Battistello’s last Caravaggesque blows. As Russo observes, this subject was highly important within early Neapolitan naturalism. The Salomè theme became especially useful because it was prestigious, repeatable and morally uneasy, allowing painters to measure themselves against Caravaggio’s prototypes, now in London and Madrid, while also producing variations suited to collectors and connoisseurs. Caravaggio’s own versions are based on severe three-figure concision: Salomè, the executioner, and the severed head of the Baptist. Neapolitan painters did not simply copy this structure. They received it as a formula to be altered, expanded and recombined.

(Credits: Wikipedia).

Sellitto’s Salomè e Erodiade che presentano la testa del Battista a Erode, attributed by Gianni Papi, shows how early this process could begin. Since Sellitto died in 1614, the painting must belong to the first phase of Neapolitan Caravaggism, yet Russo finds it somewhat atypical in its Roman-inflected character. The sacred subject is treated almost as a worldly chamber scene, poised between evangelical narrative and genre painting. That hybridity helps define the broader field into which Battistello’s own Salomè pictures belong.

Battistello’s versions in Seville and in the Uffizi are therefore not simple imitations of Caravaggio, but acts of poetic recombination. The Seville painting carries a mood of incredulity and resignation; the Florentine version, generally linked with the Medici context around 1618, aims at a more seductive and insinuating effect through Salomè’s gaze and the careful handling of fabric. Russo’s phrase pensoso arrangiamento is exact. Battistello rearranges inherited material thoughtfully, often softening Caravaggio’s implacable three-figure compression by adding a fourth figure around the Baptist’s severed head. The result is more mediated and conciliatory, but not weaker. Violence is no longer concentrated in the blunt fact of presentation alone; it circulates through glances, fabrics, bodily nearness and the uneasy social atmosphere of the scene.

In a private-collection version Battistello returns to the three-figure format, responding especially to Caravaggio’s London Salomè. Yet even there the emphasis shifts. Battistello is less interested in Caravaggio’s stark dramatic severity than in the ambiguous innocence of the young woman’s expression. By setting her against a zone of brightness in the background, he offers what Russo calls a mental rather than physical homage to the way light enters the studio: not a literal copy of Caravaggio’s illumination, but a reflective rethinking of its poetic effect. His relation to Caravaggio is therefore close but not submissive. Caravaggio provides the concentrated chamber format, the small group of figures, the severed head and the moral pressure of the scene. Battistello takes over these elements but loosens their effect, replacing Caravaggio’s tense compression and implacable drama with a more reflective arrangement, in which violence gives way to ambiguity, seduction and pictorial meditation.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons, il Sistemone).

Comparison with the young Massimo Stanzione makes the distinction clearer. His private-collection Salomè, probably datable to around or just after 1620, depends on Caravaggio’s Madrid Salomè but opens its tightly bound design into a broader horizontal opposition. Salomè is presented frontally, while the executioner turns his back as he puts away his sword. That back becomes a powerful exercise in naturalistic observation and chiaroscuro. Where Battistello recombines Caravaggio’s example in a reflective and emotionally nuanced way, Stanzione sharpens and theatricalises it. He transforms Caravaggio’s compact arrangement of three figures into a more rhetorical structure, organised around the contrast between the woman’s frontal presence and the executioner’s turned back, and between pictorial concentration and staged eloquence.

In the Uffizi Salomè, what matters is not simply the subject’s violence, but the way that violence is held in glance, surface and proximity. Salomè’s insinuating, climbing look introduces a murky, knowing and almost eroticised note into an artist too often confined to the role of grave bronze patriarch. The comparison with Artemisia Gentileschi is useful only if handled carefully. Causa’s point is not to diminish Artemisia, but to suggest that Battistello’s Salomè does not announce itself as personal drama. Violence and complicity circulate more obliquely within the image, making the painting one of the last powerful survivals of his Caravaggesque imagination even as the larger energy of that mode is beginning to exhaust itself.

As Causa elucidates, Lanfranco opens another route out of Caravaggism. In the Cappella Bongiovanni in Sant’Agostino in Rome, he had created a new model for sacred painting: expansive, narratively organised, and structured across altarpiece, side canvases, lunette and vault. For art in Naples this was significant because it offered a way beyond the increasingly exhausted formula of compressed Caravaggesque naturalism. Caravaggio had given Neapolitan painting immediacy, darkness and physical power; Ribera had thickened that inheritance into a denser and more tactile and repeatable ‘super-style’. Lanfranco reintroduced amplitude, narrative articulation, spatial breadth and the compositional intelligence of sixteenth-century painting.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

This helps explain why mature Battistello can sometimes seem close to painters such as Pasquale Ottino and Alessandro Turchi without requiring direct influence between them. The affinity lies rather in a shared Roman and Lanfranchian root: a set of solutions that move beyond strict Caravaggism while retaining dramatic force. In this sense Lanfranco “shows Caravaggism to the door” not by rejecting it crudely, but by emptying it out from within. Its compressed naturalism is replaced by broader sacred theatre: grouped figures, episodes, gestures, architectural settings and compositional hinges.

Battistello’s Miracolo di sant’Antonio da Padova and Madonna delle anime purganti, now at Capodimonte, belong to this shift. They do not simply continue Caravaggio, nor are they only responses to Ribera’s material force. They put Lanfranco’s larger compositional ideas back into circulation within Neapolitan painting. The field around Battistello is therefore no longer organised by the single question of how to absorb Caravaggio. By the 1620s, the problem is how to hold together Caravaggesque gravity, Riberesque density, Roman narrative breadth and the demands of large public religious painting.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

The late Madonna col Bambino e Sant’Anna in Vienna makes this Lanfranchian enlargement especially visible because it is not a fresco or chapel decoration, but a cabinet picture. Battistello tries to carry into a smaller format the breadth, architectural presence and upward view associated with larger sacred painting.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

The half-figures are seen from below and set against emphatic architectural profiles; heads, bodies and fabrics seem thickened, monumentalised and almost swollen. Causa’s phrase “confezione ipertrofica e massiccia” is exact: the painting is no longer spare, nocturnal or immediate in the manner of early Caravaggism, but massive, overcharged and stylistically burdened. Seen beside other Caravaggesque pictures in Vienna by Orazio Gentileschi, Valentin or Saraceni, Battistello’s work looks less like an act of concentrated naturalism than an attempt to force Caravaggism into a broader and heavier pictorial structure.

Saint Anne’s head gives the picture its strangest force. To describe its effect, Causa introduces a comparison with the eighteenth-century Neapolitan painter Gaspare Traversi. He is not proposing a strict line of descent, but using the later artist to make Battistello’s physiognomic intensity more visible. Longhi taught modern viewers to see Traversi as a late aftershock of Neapolitan Caravaggism, and Causa’s comparison encourages us to recognise something related in Battistello’s Saint Anne: an acute, almost grotesque presence that exceeds the merely devout or domestic. Her face has the character of a life closely observed and marked by age and experience. Late Battistello is therefore not simply exhausted. He remains dense, resistant to easy resolution, physiognomically alert and sometimes powerfully strange.

The Lavanda dei piedi, painted in 1622 for the choir of the Certosa di San Martino, marks Battistello’s entry into the patronage of the Carthusian monks. It is also one of the last great expressions of his conscious Caravaggism.

(Credits: Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons).

The painting was conceived in relation to its architectural setting: the columns in the painted background seem to extend the real space of the adjoining chapel, giving the image an illusionistic continuity with the building around it. Causa reads this as a further development of Battistello’s response to the late Caravaggio. The work recalls the vast, dark, almost unreadable space of Caravaggio’s Flagellazione, but also the Maltese and Sicilian works, where the physical setting is no longer a neutral backdrop but part of the drama itself. Battistello is no longer concerned only with figures emerging from darkness. He is exploring the dramatic force of space.

This is where Sellitto becomes important again. Causa argues that Battistello was not alone in recognising the spatial force of the late Caravaggio. Sellitto, who died prematurely in 1614, had also grasped the importance of Caravaggio as a kind of painter-architect: a maker of bare, severe spaces in which human figures are dwarfed, pressured or held in suspense. Paintings such as Sellitto’s Santa Cecilia and San Carlo Borromeo suggest what he might have achieved had his career not been cut short. Battistello’s Lavanda dei piedi can therefore be seen as the mature outcome of a local Neapolitan exploration of late Caravaggesque space, not simply as an isolated response to Caravaggio.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Russo treats the Lavanda dei piedi as Battistello’s “capolavoro d’addio” to even this revised form of Caravaggism. After it, the Cristo alla colonna at Capodimonte belongs to a fully mature, post-Caravaggesque phase. In his analysis, Caravaggio’s Flagellazione from San Domenico Maggiore remains the unavoidable point of comparison, especially for the body of Christ at the column. But Battistello is no longer responding to Caravaggio in the heat of encounter. By this stage he has been to Florence and Genoa and has returned to Rome. The natural body is rethought through drawing, geometry, colder light and a more deliberately modulated space. The picture is less an act of dependence than a later meditation on Caravaggio: a measured reconfiguration of the body into a more structured and stylised image.

(Credit: Wikipedia).

By 1626, with the Adorazione dei Magi for the chapter house of San Martino, the most severe phase of Battistello’s Caravaggism begins to recede. The shift belongs to a broader softening of naturalism in Naples, visible also among the painters represented in the same decorative project: Simon Vouet, Paolo Finoglio and Massimo Stanzione. San Martino marks the point at which the hard early naturalism of Battistello’s generation begins to bend towards a more moderated Baroque language. Caravaggio has not disappeared, but he is no longer the sole organising force. The demands of institutional decoration, the continuing practice of fresco, the material pressure of Ribera’s painting, and the clearer, more expansive language emerging in Naples now begin to modify Battistello’s early severity.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Giuseppe Guida).

The great missed opportunity was the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. For Causa, this was one of the major artistic projects of seventeenth-century southern Italy, comparable in importance to the Certosa di San Martino. Between 1623 and 1625 Battistello was called by Fabrizio Santafede to collaborate on the decoration of the chapel, but the results did not satisfy the Deputation, and Battistello was eventually relieved of the commission. His role was therefore real but abortive: he entered the project, produced trial work that failed to win approval, and did not become part of the chapel’s final decorative language.

Causa therefore treats the Tesoro as a débâcle for local authorship. The decisive identity of the chapel was shaped instead by Domenichino, Lanfranco, Ribera, Fanzago and Finelli. Even Stanzione, when he later entered the chapel after Battistello’s death, did so through a response to Domenichino: his painting on copper, San Gennaro guarisce un’ossessa, made to replace Domenichino’s unfinished version of the same subject, becomes a lesson from painter to painter in the purist language of the Emilian master.

(Credit: author’s photograph).

The local school is therefore being formed under external influence: Emilian classicism, Roman and Lombard invention, Ribera’s Spanish naturalism, and the sculptural magnificence of Fanzago and Finelli. The bitterness surrounding the chapel, including the old stories of threats against foreign painters and the dark tradition around Domenichino’s death, should be understood in that context. The Tesoro was a civic-sacred monument of immense prestige; for Neapolitan painters to be displaced from it was a symbolic defeat.

This adds significance to Battistello’s work in the chapel of San Michele Arcangelo at Santa Maria la Nova, associated with the Severino, or Sanseverino, family. Since his contribution to the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro was rejected, lost or never properly realised, the decorations at Santa Maria la Nova become important surviving evidence of his continued activity within the public religious culture of Naples. They cannot replace the Tesoro in importance, but they show Battistello still working inside the city’s decorative tradition at the moment when that tradition was being reorganised around other masters.

The clearest starting point for understanding the San Michele chapel is Battistello’s intervention on Teodoro d’Errico’s San Michele, the altarpiece already occupying the space. This was not a commission in which he simply supplied a new set of decorations for an empty chapel. He was required to restore, or remodel, the lower part of an existing late-sixteenth-century panel damaged by candles, while also contributing frescoes to the surrounding chapel space.

The task placed him in direct material contact with a very different pictorial language: the brilliant, neo-Raphaelesque, late-Mannerist style of d’Errico, an Italianised Netherlandish painter active in Naples until the early seventeenth century. For Causa, the result is one of the strangest grafts in Caravaggesque painting. Battistello does not simply repair the older work; by remodelling its lower section, with the damned souls beneath Saint Michael, he enters into its inherited structure and reactivates its dialogue with antique sculpture, above all with the Laocoön.

The episode should have changed the way Battistello was discussed. Restoration evidence had allowed Raffaello Causa to recognise Battistello’s hand in the lower part of the older altarpiece, beneath the feet of Saint Michael, but the discovery remained largely attributional. Stefano Causa’s point is that its implications are wider. In this period, Battistello was not only moving from Caravaggio towards Ribera, Lanfranco and fresco. He was also physically engaging with the late-sixteenth-century painting still embedded in Neapolitan churches. By working inside d’Errico’s altarpiece, he came into contact with the “Naples without Caravaggio”: colour, decorum, classical quotation, neo-Raphaelesque structure, perhaps even memories of Bronzino. Briganti’s 1945 attribution of the picture to Marco Pino, in his book on Mannerism, was wrong as an attribution but suggestive in instinct, since the work does carry a strong late-Mannerist character.

The San Michele chapel therefore becomes an important site for understanding continuity as well as rupture. Battistello’s Caravaggism is not a clean break with the previous generation; it is grafted onto an older pictorial culture that remained visible and active in Naples. In this sense Santa Maria la Nova is not a marginal restoration episode, but one of the places where Battistello’s composite identity becomes clearest: not only as a painter formed by Caravaggio and later pressures, but as an artist still in dialogue with the late-Cinquecento world that Caravaggio did not erase.

By the time of the Sala Capitolare decoration at the Certosa di San Martino, around 1626, the original Caravaggesque matrix has largely exhausted itself. Causa invokes Bruno Schulz’s image of Neapolitan painting as a brown, smoky afternoon seen through a dark bottle only to reject it for Battistello’s moment. That aged, tobacco-coloured idea of the Neapolitan school does not fit the early second quarter of the seventeenth century, when the local masters are moving towards a striking brightening of colour and atmosphere. Battistello’s mature work should therefore not be read simply as late Caravaggism grown tired or obscure. It belongs to a changed field: brighter, more spatial and more influenced by Lanfranco, Ribera and the late-Cinquecento tradition.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

The comparison with Stanzione makes the difficulty of late Battistello clearer. The two painters are near contemporaries, but by the 1630s they seem to belong to different pictorial worlds. At the Certosa di San Martino, Stanzione is learning how to turn Ribera’s severe naturalism into bella pittura: a painting of surface, rhythm, shadow, pauses and controlled elegance. His Carthusian figures, with their deeply shadowed habits and carefully staged surfaces, point towards a relaunching of style. Causa calls this caravaggismo ben temperato: not raw Caravaggism, but Caravaggism absorbed into a decorous, stylish and publicly acceptable language.

(Credit: Wikipedia).

Battistello’s late phase looks less settled, but for that reason more revealing. At San Martino, often with considerable workshop participation, he seems to be negotiating between Ribera’s physical force, Lanfranco’s expansive mural language and the sculptural magnificence associated with the Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro. He remains important, but increasingly defilato, edged aside by the decorative and stylistic culture taking shape in Naples in the 1630s. The earlier wall paintings for the chapel of Porzia Caracciolo di Loffredo in Santa Teresa degli Studi, around 1616–17, had already shown him testing mural scale and measuring himself against Ribera’s first successes in Naples; by the later fresco cycles, however, the problem had become more complex. His Caravaggism becomes unstable when carried into fresco, public decoration, collaborative execution and the larger spatial demands of the Neapolitan Seicento. That instability should not simply be called failure. It shows a painter caught at the point where the first Caravaggesque revolution was being absorbed into a broader Baroque system that he helped to prepare but could not command as fluently as Stanzione.

The detached frescoes from San Diego all’Ospedaletto bring the same difficulty into focus. Causa uses the 1991 Battistello exhibition at Castel Sant’Elmo as a test case. In the main body of the exhibition, Battistello could still be made to “hold the course” as a Caravaggesque painter. The San Diego frescoes, however, made that course harder to maintain. They raise, among other things, the still open question of Neapolitan landscape painting before Micco Spadaro; more broadly, they show Battistello working in an artistic field not easily contained by Caravaggism alone, one shaped by fresco, workshop practice, decorative cycles, landscape setting and the organisation of mural space.

By the 1630s, the certificate of Caravaggism is badly faded. Neapolitan painting has moved on. Domenichino offers one kind of classicising and purist authority; Ribera’s followers another kind of refined, mannered naturalism. More decisively, mural painting in Naples is moving towards the spatially integrated world of Stanzione and Fanzago at San Martino, especially in the Cappella di San Bruno. Battistello’s late frescoes are therefore fascinating partly because they are hard to define. They do not show a simple decline from Caravaggism, but a painter being carried into a decorative and spatial culture that Caravaggio alone can no longer explain.

That difficulty is the point. Battistello’s career is not a straight road from Caravaggio to naturalism, nor from naturalism to decline. It is better understood as a field of influences, each of which altered what painting could do for him. Caravaggio gave him a new sacred naturalism: dark, compressed, immediate and grounded in the physical presence of ordinary bodies. Ribera intensified that inheritance through surface, density and physical force, while Lanfranco opened it towards amplitude, movement and narrative space. The older Neapolitan Cinquecento remained present as a source of colour, decorum and antique memory, and his experience of Florence, Genoa and Rome widened the field of reference still further. Fresco offered scale, workshop practice and public space; drawing gave him a way to test poses, transfer motifs and hold together experiences that might otherwise have pulled apart. Battistello stands between the Naples before Caravaggio, the first Caravaggesque revolution, and the more expansive Baroque language that would later be handled with greater ease by Stanzione and Giordano. His apparent elusiveness, therefore, is not a weakness to be explained away, but the sign of an artist working productively within the dense, living intricacy of Neapolitan culture.

Proceed to Battistello Caracciolo: Painting after Caravaggio in Naples, Part 3: Gallery. The bibliography is at the end of Part 3.

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Part Three: Selected Works by Battistello Caracciolo

Battistello Caracciolo, Due putti vendemmianti / Two youths with grapes, 1605–10; oil on poplar panel; 58.5 × 70.5 cm; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Raffaello Causa first brought this small early panel to scholarly attention in 1950, when it belonged to the Moretti collection in Rome. The following year it was exhibited at the Palazzo Reale in Milan in Roberto Longhi’s landmark Mostra del Caravaggio e dei caravaggeschi. Now in the Art Gallery of South Australia, where it is titled Two Youths with Grapes, it is one of Battistello’s rare profane or Bacchic subjects. Stefano Causa relates it to the youthful angels in the Santa Maria della Stella altarpiece and to other early half-length figures by the artist, seeing in its strongly cast shadows and close physical presence one of the earliest expressions of Caravaggism in Naples. He also singles out the bunch of grapes at the left, treating it not merely as an accessory but as an early indication of southern still-life painting. The picture can therefore be approached from two directions: as evidence of Battistello’s immediate response to Caravaggio, and as a small, unexpected Bacchic experiment in which the grapes point towards the emergence of still-life painting in southern Italy.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Giovanni Battista Caracciolo’s Immacolata Concezione con san Domenico e san Francesco di Paola was painted in 1607–08 for the chapel of the Immaculate Conception, the second chapel on the left in Santa Maria della Stella, Naples. The chapel had been acquired by Domenico Barrile on 16 July 1607. Signed in full in the lower part of the canvas, the altarpiece is Battistello’s earliest securely documented public painting in oil and his first sustained response to Caravaggio. He was not yet thirty. During the eighteenth century the painting was transferred to the sacristy, a move that saved it from the fire that devastated the church in 1944. It is now displayed on the rear wall of the presbytery.

The work presents the iconography of the Immaculate Conception in a fully developed form. The Virgin stands over a monstrous dragon emerging from the fiery mouth of hell, signalling her triumph over Satan and original sin, while Adam, holding the apple, and the skeleton beside him evoke sin and death. Around her appear the traditional Marian symbols of lilies, a mirror, thornless roses and a palm frond; above, God the Father takes her hand as she raises the other to her breast in a gesture of humility. At lower left are Saint Dominic and Saint Francis of Paola, the latter linking the image directly to the Minims of Santa Maria della Stella. The figure of Adam, who holds the apple in one hand and points with the other to Battistello’s signature, has also been read, since Longhi, as a self-portrait. The suggestion is strengthened by the self-referential gesture and by the pronounced humping of the shoulders, traditionally associated with Battistello’s own physical appearance.

Although Due putti alla vendemmia / Two youths with grapes shows Battistello already working through Caravaggesque adolescent figure-types in a private, profane register, the Immacolata Concezione is his earliest securely documented public statement in the new idiom. Causa sees the painting not as a simple act of Caravaggesque conversion, but as an attempt to renovate an older Neapolitan sacred altarpiece formula, associated above all with Fabrizio Santafede and still indebted to neo-Cinquecento compositional habits. The painting is densely threaded with references to Caravaggio’s mature Roman and Neapolitan works, but those references are absorbed into a more traditional public, devotional structure. The result is therefore neither purely Caravaggesque nor merely local and late-Mannerist, but an early attempt to make Caravaggio’s language function inside the established traditions of the Neapolitan altarpiece.

Modern criticism, from Raffaello Causa to Ferdinando Bologna and Stefano Causa, has emphasised the painting’s many references to Caravaggio’s Roman and Neapolitan works, including the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, the Madonna of the Rosary, the Seven Works of Mercy and the Vienna David with the Head of Goliath. The closest model appears to be the Madonna of the Rosary, from which Battistello adapts the general grouping, the upward movement of the figures and details such as the head of Saint Dominic. Yet his composition is less tightly concentrated than Caravaggio’s: the movement rises along a broad diagonal from the two saints at lower left, through the angel with the palm, to the Virgin at upper right, while the subsidiary angels and their separate illumination create a more dispersed arrangement of forms.

Spinosa also singles out the carnations held by the angel as a small but striking still-life insertion, and one of the early signs of the Neapolitan taste for natura in posa. Technical examination has revealed significant pentimenti in the Immacolata Concezione. In the lower part of the composition, traces of dark wings suggest that Battistello first planned an angel in the area later occupied by the two saints; the Virgin, too, was revised, her hair apparently having been first conceived as falling loose over her shoulders.

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The Battesimo di Cristo is one of Battistello’s most concentrated statements of early Neapolitan Caravaggism. Its debts to Caravaggio are evident: Christ’s loincloth recalls the Flagellation formerly in San Domenico Maggiore and now at Capodimonte, while the close structural affinity with Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula of 1610 suggests a date shortly afterwards. For Stefano Causa, the work is one of the “hard” masterpieces of Caravaggism, establishing Battistello as the leading local interpreter of Caravaggio before the new upheaval caused by Ribera’s arrival in Naples in 1616.

Against a dark, almost unfathomable ground, Saint John baptises Christ as the dove of the Holy Spirit enters the scene. The two figures are caught by a cutting lateral light that slips between the Baptist’s fingers, spreads across his arm, and casts the shadow of the reed cross onto Christ’s chest. Battistello turns away from the contemporary colourism of Francesco Curia towards an almost bronze tonality, reducing the subject to an intense, mute exchange between Christ and the Baptist. The painting’s force lies in this stripping down: no narrative digression distracts from the dialogue of bodies, light and shadow. For Causa, the result marks a decisive acceleration in Neapolitan painting, opening the way to the city’s later naturalism.

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Battistello’s fresco cycle in the Palazzo Reale marks an unusual moment in his early career: a large-scale secular history subject, painted for the ceremonial spaces of viceregal Naples rather than for a church. The cycle celebrates Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the “Gran Capitano”, whose victories over the French led to his appointment as the first Spanish viceroy of Naples. The 2022 Capodimonte/Palazzo Reale chronology gives the cycle a working date of 1611 and describes it as one of the rare historical fresco cycles in Neapolitan painting of the early seventeenth century. The fuller account explains the basis for that dating more broadly: the arms and devices of Don Pedro Fernández de Castro, VII Count of Lemos, probably place the frescoes within the years of his viceroyalty, between 1610 and 1616.

The frescoes narrate episodes from the Spanish conquest of the kingdom: the taking of Calabria; the assault on the French at Barletta; the Duello con La Palisse a Ruvo di Puglia, which refers to the Spanish assault on Ruvo; the meeting with the Neapolitan ambassadors offering the keys of the city; and the triumphal entry into Naples. The same account records that the cycle was extensively repainted in the mid-nineteenth century and restored in 1990, so its present appearance has to be treated with some caution. Even so, the frescoes remain important evidence of Battistello’s ability to translate Caravaggesque naturalism into a monumental public language.

The account also stresses Battistello’s use of portraiture within the historical scenes. In the Incontro con gli ambasciatori di Napoli, the face of a man with dark moustache and pointed beard, visible between two figures near the centre of the composition, is identified as Caravaggio and read as a tribute to the painter whose example had been decisive for Battistello. Whether treated cautiously as an identification or accepted as a deliberate portrait, the detail is suggestive: it places Caravaggio’s memory inside a dynastic fresco cycle, and reminds us that Battistello was one of the few Caravaggesque painters to test Merisi’s innovations in fresco.

(Credit: Catalogo Generale dei Beni Culturali).

The Madonna col Bambino in gloria, now at MARCA in Catanzaro, has had a complicated attributional and critical history. Recorded in the early museum inventories as a work by Mattia Preti, it was reassigned to Battistello by Longhi in 1943, though Stoughton later treated it more cautiously as a work close to Caracciolo’s school. The official catalogue now gives its provenance as the church and convent of the Cappuccini of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Catanzaro. It also records that the painting entered the Museo Provinciale after a request made in 1872, at which point it was still listed as a Preti. Earlier scholarship had left the provenance less securely defined, even allowing for the unverified suggestion that the painting may have come from a church in Taverna which had been closed or suppressed.

The painting survives in a damaged and reduced state. The lower part has evidently been cut away, leaving only the heads of two female saints at the lower right; Giorgio Leone has suggested that the surviving canvas may be a fragment of a much larger altarpiece. This helps explain the compressed appearance of the lower-right figures and the unresolved questions around the original commission and iconography.

The dating of the Madonna col Bambino in gloria has also been debated. Vincenzo Pacelli proposed an early date, between 1607 and 1610, relating the Virgin and Child with angels to Caravaggio’s Sette opere di misericordia and to the lost Radolovich altarpiece of 1606. Stefano Causa preferred a date around the middle of the second decade, seeing in the softened colour and richer handling an effect of Battistello’s encounter with Orazio Gentileschi in Rome. The later date does not mean that the painting has moved away from the influence of Caravaggio. It suggests, rather, that Battistello was modifying a Caravaggesque foundation through a softer chromatic range and a richer handling of the painted surface.

The technical evidence helps make this distinction clearer. As Giorgio Leone notes, diagnostic examination shows that the Catanzaro painting was constructed from a dark preparation layer. Battistello did not begin with a pale ground and then model the forms by adding shadow. He allowed the dark ground to remain active in the deepest parts of the image, then brought the forms forward by adding lighter passages over it. The figures are therefore made to emerge from darkness through a relatively rapid and economical addition of light, a procedure close to Caravaggio’s mature practice.

Angela Cerasuolo’s wider studies of Battistello’s technique help prevent this from sounding like simple imitation. She presents Battistello as one of the earliest and most sensitive interpreters of Caravaggio in Naples, but not as a passive follower. His Caravaggism had its own technical character: a stronger attachment to drawing and preparation, a preference for light, thinly applied paint layers, and a personal way of adapting the dark ground and strong chiaroscuro inherited from Caravaggio. In the Catanzaro painting, the underlying construction remains Caravaggesque, while the softened colour and fuller surface help explain why Causa placed the work after Battistello’s Roman contact with Orazio Gentileschi.

The painting nevertheless remains deeply rooted in Caravaggio’s Neapolitan invention. The Virgin clasps the Child to her breast and enters the scene amid restless angels, adapting the apparition-like upper group of the Sette opere di misericordia. In the Catanzaro picture, Battistello’s late-Mannerist Neapolitan formation under Imparato and Santafede is redirected through Caravaggio’s realism and sharp contrasts of light and shadow, producing a sacred image that is both more immediate and more graphically forceful.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Caracciolo’s Qui vult venire post me / Cristo e Simone da Cirene is now generally understood as a documented work of 1614, executed for the Genoese patron Marcantonio Doria. It appears in the Doria inventory of 1620 as “Qui vult venire post me con la croce in spalla del Battistello”, a title that gives the image a broader meaning than the more usual descriptions as a Via Crucis or as Christ and Simon of Cyrene. Rather than representing only one episode from the Passion, Battistello expands the subject into an image of Christ’s injunction in Mark 8:34: “If anyone wishes to follow me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” Christ points to the cross with the index finger of his right hand while turning towards the kneeling figure beside him. Around them, a small group of bystanders, including a ragged boy at the left, turns the Gospel address to the crowd into a concrete encounter with figures drawn from Battistello’s own world.

The Doria provenance is central to the work’s meaning and history. The painting is signed with Battistello’s monogram on the front, and inscriptions formerly recorded on the reverse apparently included both the artist’s name and a cross with the letters M.A.D., standing for Marcantonio Doria. The same initials appear on the reverse of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, also owned by Doria and now in the Gallerie d’Italia, Naples. Marcantonio Doria’s patronage of Neapolitan artists is well documented, and the 1620 inventory listed a substantial group of works by Battistello. Rediscovered by Roberto Carità in a house at Casale Monferrato, the painting was published in Paragone and entered the Piedmontese collections in 1952, perhaps on Longhi’s advice. Its subject was long misunderstood until the 1984 exhibition Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli restored the importance of the Doria title; for Stefano Causa, Thierry Radelet’s 2018 restoration was another critical event, allowing the painting to regain its place among the sharpest Caravaggesque inventions between Rome, Naples and Genoa.

The painting’s Caravaggesque debts are precise, not merely generic. The foreground man adapts the kneeling figures before Saint Dominic in Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Rosary, with the soles of the feet turned towards the viewer, while the boy’s torn breeches recall the kneeling child in the same work. The shadowed profile of the man in Qui vult venire post me has been related to the executioner on the left in Caravaggio’s Flagellation of Christ of 1607, and the expressive power of the scene suggests Battistello’s close understanding of Caravaggio’s late works, especially the Denial of Saint Peter and the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. At the same time, the painting remains tied to Battistello’s own development: details of physiognomy and modelling recall the Immacolata Concezione of 1607–8, while Causa links the whole foreground structure to the Liberazione di san Pietro of 1615, almost anticipated here in horizontal format.

The 2018 restoration sharpened the painting’s physical presence and pictorial structure. Causa draws attention to three compelling details: the child in ragged clothing, the small hand painted directly over the red patch of drapery, and the illuminated back of the kneeling foreground figure, which becomes one of the visual centres of the scene. Taken together, these details seem to intensify the Gospel episode by making it bodily, immediate and contemporary. The ragged child brings the sacred scene into contact with the visible poverty of the modern street; the hand over the red drapery gives the image a sudden tactile immediacy; and the strongly lit back of the foreground figure helps draw the viewer into the group of bystanders at Calvary. The face of the old woman may suggest some early awareness of Ribera, but Battistello’s paint does not yet have Ribera’s dense material weight. Instead, the handling opens into long strokes and patches, especially in the hair of the ragged figure seen from behind. For Causa, this handling points forward both to the young Velázquez and, in Naples, to Andrea Vaccaro. The young woman at the left, with her revealed décolleté, helps set the group in motion and suggests Battistello’s contact with Orazio Gentileschi in Rome around 1614. Causa notes that this passage was later partly concealed beneath a painted strip, appearing covered in older black-and-white reproductions before becoming visible again after restoration.

The close framing is itself a strategy of involvement. The viewer is drawn into the group of bystanders rather than placed at a detached devotional distance. Causa connects this device not only with Battistello’s chamber pictures, but also with his mural work, especially the Storie del Gran Capitano Consalvo di Cordova in the Palazzo Reale, Naples, of 1611, and in particular the scene of the taking of Calabria. In this sense, the painting’s Caravaggism is not only a matter of quoted motifs or dramatic lighting; it also depends on compositional experiments Battistello had already tested in fresco.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Still in situ in the first chapel on the left of the church of the Pio Monte della Misericordia, Battistello’s Liberazione di San Pietro dal carcere belongs directly to the charitable programme of the institution. Its subject corresponds to the work of mercy of visiting prisoners, already evoked by Caravaggio in the Sette opere della misericordia on the high altar through the ancient exemplum of Caritas Romana. As Caravaggio had translated the abstract idea of the works of mercy into terms of lived human experience, so Battistello presents the miraculous liberation of Saint Peter as something close to an episode from ordinary life. The darkness almost effaces the angel’s wings; only the luminous white satin of his robe declares the divine nature of the intervention. Peter’s strongly characterised face becomes a realist portrait of stunned incredulity, with wide-open eyes and an open mouth showing the tongue and lower teeth. Taking Peter by the hand, the angel leads him silently past the sleeping soldiers towards the open doorway at the left, from which light enters the prison and illuminates the scene.

The commission had first been given to Carlo Sellitto on 2 June 1613 for one of the lateral altars of the church, but after Sellitto’s death in 1614 it passed to Battistello. He was already at work on the painting when he received the first of two recorded payments, on 6 June 1615, promising that the work would be finished by the end of the following month. A second payment, on 15 September 1615, was made when the painting had already been completed. The Liberazione di San Pietro is therefore Caracciolo’s second securely dated oil painting, eight years after the Immacolata Concezione for Santa Maria della Stella. Nicola Spinosa adds an important social and intellectual dimension to this history, noting that the transfer of the commission to Battistello took place through the intervention of Giovan Battista Manso, marchese di Villa: one of the promoters of the Pio Monte, founder in 1611 of the Accademia degli Oziosi, and a figure connected with Giovan Battista della Porta, Tommaso Campanella and Galileo Galilei. Battistello himself also had links with members of the Accademia degli Oziosi, so the commission belongs not only to the devotional and charitable programme of the Pio Monte, but also to a cultivated Neapolitan milieu.

The work is intensely Caravaggesque in its chiaroscuro, its individualised faces and its realist interpretation of the miracle. Spinosa places it among the most important examples of Battistello’s still lucidly Caravaggesque direction after 1610, relating it not only to Caravaggio’s Sette opere della misericordia in the same church, but also to the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew in San Luigi dei Francesi, the Negazione di Pietro, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the lost Resurrection formerly in the Fenaroli Chapel in Sant’Anna dei Lombardi, known through early descriptions and later visual echoes.

More specific visual echoes reinforce the connection. The nude soldier at the lower right acts as a repoussoir, recalling the naked beggar at the lower left of Caravaggio’s Sette opere della misericordia: in both figures the dirty soles of the feet are turned towards the spectator. Battistello’s soldier on the left also wears a helmet very close to that worn by the soldier in Caravaggio’s Negazione di San Pietro. There is a comparable play, too, between the illusionistic space of the painting and the real space of the viewer. What Caravaggio had done in the San Matteo of the Contarelli Chapel, by projecting the stool beyond the lower edge of the composition, Battistello does with the mat on which the nude soldier sits, letting it hang over the edge of the stage-like space in which the action takes place.

For Stefano Causa, however, the painting is not simply a sharpening or continuation of Caravaggio. Battistello’s problem was how to extract the theme of visiting prisoners, drawn from Acts 12:1–19, from the enveloping Caravaggesque precedent of the Pio Monte altarpiece and give it an independent pictorial form. Causa’s essential point is that Battistello finds the necessary authority by stepping back to Raphael. Almost exactly a century after Raphael’s Liberation of Saint Peter in the Stanza di Eliodoro, Battistello’s painting becomes, for Causa, the most authoritative attempt to relaunch the Raphael myth in seventeenth-century Naples. The comparison is not merely iconographic: in gestures, poses and the gleam of armour, Causa sees Battistello measuring himself against the Vatican fresco. His phrase “reculer pour mieux sauter” catches the logic: Battistello retreats to the canonical authority of Raphael in order to make a new leap within the altered conditions of post-Caravaggio Naples.

Both Causa and Spinosa also connect the painting with Battistello’s contact with Orazio Gentileschi in Rome around 1614, if not earlier. The suspended atmosphere, the slower and more caressing movement of light, the elegant draperies and the polished reflections on the armour all suggest a new refinement of surface and illumination. Spinosa especially stresses the precious effect of light on fabric: the angel’s white robe, Saint Peter’s red garment, and the play of illumination across draperies and armour. The chiaroscuro is no longer only starkly dramatic; it has become more elegant, controlled and spacious. The angel and Saint Peter move within a dilated, almost unfathomable darkness, with only the prison grating visible in the right background. For Spinosa, this points to Orazio’s model of a caravaggismo riformato, a reformed Caravaggism in which the force of Caravaggio is softened, clarified and made more precious. Causa recalls that the young Longhi had already intuited this Battistello–Orazio connection when he attributed Orazio’s Salita al Calvario in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, to Caracciolo, while defining Orazio as a sartor di lusso, a “luxury tailor” of Caravaggesque painting.

Battistello signed the picture in an unusually discreet way, with initials painted in black against a dark brown ground and therefore only noticed relatively recently. Stoughton reported two sets of initials on the painting, although the more recent Capodimonte material records the lower-left monogram simply as GBCA. In either case, the signature confirms Battistello’s authorship of a work that was already completed by September 1615. The painting has also been connected with a possible Roman stay around 1614, since no document places him in Naples between 7 February 1614 and the first payment for the Liberazione di San Pietro more than a year later.

Nicola Spinosa also notes that the Louvre preserves a drawing connected with the figure of the sleeping soldier. This is, almost certainly, a reference to a drawing, Guerrier à demi étendu, de dos, et main tenant un objet (INV 17838, recto), now catalogued as anonymous Italian but with a proposed attribution to Battistello by Marina Causa Picone. The Louvre note records Causa Picone’s view that the sheet contains preparatory studies for the Liberazione di San Pietro at the Pio Monte della Misericordia. The connection is especially suggestive for the half-recumbent soldier seen from behind in the foreground of the painting.

https://collections.louvre.fr/ark%3A/53355/cl020205327

Credit: GrandPalaisRmn (Musée du Louvre) / Thierry Le Mage. Source: Musée du Louvre, Guerrier à demi étendu, de dos, et main tenant un objet, INV 17838, recto.

(Credit: Wikipedia).

Battistello’s Trinità terrestre, painted in 1617 for the church of the Pietà dei Turchini in Naples, is one of his major altarpieces from the years immediately following the Liberazione di San Pietro. It is also known in guide literature as a Sacra Famiglia, but the more specific title points to the unusual structure of the image. Below, Mary and Joseph lead the young Christ by the hand on the journey into Egypt; above them, God the Father, the Holy Spirit and a dense company of angels transform the scene into a vision of the Trinity. The earthly family is therefore set beneath, and implicitly joined to, its heavenly counterpart. Commissioned together with its frame by Sebastiano and Santolo Manso, the painting still occupies the chapel for which it was made. Stoughton places the work among Battistello’s large, multi-figure altarpieces of around 1615–20, in which the painter continued to think through the monumental Neapolitan models left by Caravaggio, especially the Sette opere di Misericordia and the Madonna del Rosario. At the same time, the picture belongs to the moment just after Jusepe de Ribera’s arrival in Naples. Causa identifies the head of St Joseph as a direct response to Ribera’s San Pietro in the Quadreria dei Girolamini, suggesting that Battistello was already absorbing the Spaniard’s more tactile and materially emphatic pictorial language. The result is not a departure from Caravaggism so much as a broadening of it: Battistello adapts the vertical drama of Caravaggio’s Neapolitan altarpieces to a tender subject, while giving the figures greater bodily weight and a more worked, tactile surface.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Battistello’s Noli me tangere shows the pivotal moment of recognition after the Resurrection, when Mary Magdalene encounters Christ outside the tomb and at first mistakes him for a gardener. Christ is therefore shown wearing a broad hat and resting his right hand on a working tool, perhaps a spade of a kind also found in Lavinia Fontana’s Noli me tangere in the Uffizi; in that painting too, Christ wears an almost identical hat. Battistello’s version, however, is more compressed and confrontational. The two figures are brought close to the front of the canvas, seen from a low viewpoint that makes Magdalene’s head and shoulder rise sharply into the foreground while Christ’s extended arm cuts across the space between them.

Causa describes the Prato painting as one of the most memorable Caravaggesque treatments of this subject, stressing its half-length format, dramatically lowered viewpoint and intense exchange between Christ and Magdalene. The format does not merely crop a larger scene: it turns the encounter into an almost immediate dialogue of gesture, gaze and interruption. The horizontal proportions of the canvas, together with the upward viewing angle implied by Magdalene’s head, led Stoughton to suggest that the picture may originally have been conceived as a sovrapporta, an overdoor painting. That possibility helps explain the boldness of the composition: it was designed to be seen from below, with the sacred encounter pressing outward into the spectator’s space.

The painting also carries traces of its own making. Caracciolo signed it on the ointment jar in the foreground, a detail Causa takes as evidence that the painter recognised the success of the invention. X-rays have shown that the canvas had previously been almost entirely covered by another, now unidentified, composition before the present painting was laid over it. There are also visible changes in the figure of Christ: a pentimento in one finger suggests that his left hand was first placed slightly higher, while a restored loss at the edge of the torso indicates that this line too was modified. These technical details reinforce the sense of an image actively worked into its final, tense arrangement.

The dating remains slightly fluid. Although the picture is often given as around 1618, Stoughton preferred a somewhat later placement, perhaps between 1620 and 1625, on the basis of its softer modelling and less severe contrast of light and dark. He connected it with Battistello’s earlier two-figure compositions, such as the Ecce Homo at Capodimonte and the Baptism of Christ in the Quadreria dei Girolamini, while also noting affinities with the Miracle of Saint Anthony of Padua. For a general account, the exact year matters less than the painting’s position within Battistello’s development. It belongs to the moment when he was transforming the Caravaggesque language of close-set figures, dark spaces and heightened gestures into a more concentrated chamber painting, in which narrative is activated by the intense relation between two bodies brought close to the viewer.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

For Causa, Battistello’s Salomé con la testa di San Giovanni Battista sul piatto is the most important seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting preserved in Florence. Its status, however, was not always secure. Once treated as anonymous in the Uffizi, it was restored to Battistello by Hermann Voss in 1927, and then consolidated in the modern literature through Evelina Borea’s 1970 Florentine catalogue Caravaggio e caravaggeschi nelle gallerie di Firenze and the 1991 Naples exhibition catalogue Battistello Caracciolo e il primo naturalismo a Napoli, curated by Ferdinando Bologna. Causa describes Salomé’s gaze as the painting’s “hook”: she arrests the viewer with a face of pitiless, polished smoothness. He also sets the Uffizi canvas beside another Salomé by Battistello, now in a Neapolitan private collection, suggesting that the two works, if hung together, would form a small exhibition in themselves.

The two Salomé paintings also help to clarify the artistic world in which Causa places Battistello during the second decade of the century. This was not a simple movement from Naples to Florence, or from Caravaggio to one local follower. It was a more complicated exchange between several centres: the Rome of Orazio Gentileschi and Antiveduto Gramatica, a Naples newly altered by Ribera’s arrival, and a Tuscan setting into which Caravaggesque painting had begun to intrude, not least through Battistello himself. The dating of the Uffizi picture has therefore varied slightly. Older catalogue records tend to place it around 1618, often in relation to Battistello’s brief stay at the grand-ducal court; the Zeri catalogue gives 1614–1618, while Causa’s more recent chronology broadens the range to c. 1615–1620. That broader dating is useful because it prevents the Uffizi Salomé from being treated simply as a product of Battistello’s Florentine stay. It allows the painting to be seen instead within a longer phase in which he was reworking Caravaggio’s late inventions while responding to artistic pressures from Rome, Naples and Tuscany.

The painting’s early Florentine history strengthens its significance. Elena Fumagalli discovered a mention of Caracciolo’s painting, under another title, in the 1638 inventory of Palazzo Pitti, where it was recorded in a room of the apartment of the young Prince Leopoldo de’ Medici, already an attentive collector. Fumagalli also suggested that the painting may have come from the inheritance of Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who died in 1627. These archival discoveries establish a terminus ante quem and give the painting a secure early place in the Florentine reception of Neapolitan Caravaggism. For Causa, however, the style of the work itself argues for a date in the later 1610s: it is a high point of mature Caravaggism, and one that was recognised as such by the twentieth-century rediscoverers of the Seicento, from Voss to Longhi and his circle.

The starting point is Caravaggio’s Madrid Salomé: the compact group of figures, the dark and indeterminate interior, and the violent subject compressed into a half-length scene. Battistello preserves the basic arrangement of a small group of figures enclosed in an undefined room, but he sharpens the formula in his own way. The figures are pressed close to the front of the canvas, so that the viewer is not allowed the safe distance of historical narrative. Salomé, the old woman, the ruffian and the severed head of the Baptist form a group in which looking, receiving and presenting become part of the same disturbing action. Causa gives particular importance to the figure of the scherano, or ruffian, who animates what might otherwise be a constraining scheme. He seems to have entered the scene like a set photographer adjusting a pose: an illusionistic device that Causa links to the solution Battistello had already tried in the Disfida di Barletta in the Palazzo Reale.

Light entering from the left cuts through the dark tonality of the canvas and reveals the wine-red garment of the man in the feathered hat. Causa sees this figure as anticipating Mattia Preti, whose own Caravaggesque formation would be sharpened through works of this kind. The same light also brings out the still-life-like puffs of the young man’s sleeve, where Battistello’s virtuosity of surface enters into competition with Orazio Gentileschi, whom he had known in Rome around 1614. Gentileschi becomes, in Causa’s phrase, the painting’s true “guest in silk”: a presence felt above all in the polished handling of the fabrics. The result is a work in which brutality and elegance coexist: a scene of execution transformed into a theatre of glances, textiles, flesh and implicated spectatorship.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

This powerful chamber painting, Giuseppe e la moglie di Putifarre, belongs to the group of early mature works in which Battistello turned biblical narrative into a close, psychologically strained encounter between half-length figures. The subject comes from Genesis 39: Joseph, resisting the attempted seduction of Potiphar’s wife, leaves his garment in her hand and is later falsely accused. Battistello concentrates the story into the instant of refusal. Joseph turns away, caught between withdrawal and alarm, while the woman’s outstretched arm and grasping gesture give the scene its dramatic impetus.

Nicola Spinosa justly connects the painting, on stylistic grounds, with works that document Battistello’s brief activity at the grand-ducal court in Florence in 1618, especially the Riposo durante la fuga in Egitto in the Cappella delle Reliquie, Palazzo Pitti. The comparison is useful because the Rau painting is not simply a stark Caravaggesque confrontation. Its dark ground, compressed space and abrupt moral drama still belong to Battistello’s naturalist formation, but the splendid fabrics, more elaborate pose and heightened elegance suggest the more refined language he absorbed during the Florentine interlude.

The painting appeared at Sotheby’s, London, in July 1988, without a stated provenance, and was later shown in the Battistello exhibition curated in Naples by Ferdinando Bologna, with the collaboration of Stefano Causa, in 1991–92. Spinosa also records that two related drawings have been connected with the painting, one in a private collection and the other in the Scuola Superiore di Belle Arti, Porto.

Causa further noted the painting’s importance for later artists. Its treatment of the subject influenced painters such as the still-anonymous Maestro di Fontanarosa, Pacecco de Rosa and Andrea Vaccaro, who returned to the same biblical episode in different ways and, at times, with fairly direct dependence on Battistello’s invention. That later reception is significant. It shows that Giuseppe e la moglie di Putifarre was not merely an isolated exercise in Caravaggesque drama, but a memorable composition within Neapolitan painting: a compact model for staging temptation, recoil and accusation through the tense choreography of bodies, hands and fabrics.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Battistello’s Madonna di Ognissanti, traditionally known as the Paradiso, is one of the most ambitious public altarpieces of his mature Caravaggesque phase. Painted in Naples in 1618–19 for the high altar of the Duomo of Stilo in Calabria, it translates the painter’s naturalist language into a vast devotional image of Paradise. The Virgin and Child preside over an assembly of saints, angels and holy figures arranged in two superimposed registers: the Church Triumphant above and the Church Militant below. As Nicola Spinosa notes, it is also the composition with the greatest number of figures that Battistello ever painted on canvas.

The attribution and dating of the painting were clarified only gradually. After having been treated in the early twentieth century as the work of an unknown Neapolitan artist, the altarpiece was first assigned to Battistello by Roberto Longhi in 1943. After a restoration carried out in 1976, it was thought to belong to a later moment in Battistello’s career, after the Lavanda dei piedi in the choir of the Certosa di San Martino, dated 1622. Payment documents discovered by Michael W. Stoughton later fixed its execution instead in 1618–19. These documents connect the commission to Tiberio Carnevale, a physician from Stilo, and record payments for the Madonna di Tutti i Santi in November 1618 and April 1619.

Carnevale was not merely a local donor. Born into a noble family in Stilo in 1574, he had achieved standing in Naples as a physician and moved in literary and philosophical circles, not least through his long association with his fellow Calabrian Tommaso Campanella. His relationship with Battistello seems to have been personal as well as professional: more than fifteen years later, in his will, the painter left a painting to Carnevale, described as his “patron and physician.” The Stilo altarpiece therefore speaks not only to local piety, but also to Carnevale’s wish to affirm his own prestige and that of his family, whose history had included involvement in the anti-Spanish conspiracy of 1599.

The painting occupies a crucial place in Battistello’s career. It was made after his activity in Genoa for Marcantonio Doria, including work on the now-lost fresco cycle of the Stories of Abraham for Doria’s casino at Sampierdarena, a project later completed by Orazio Gentileschi, and after his second stay in Florence at the Medici court. In this sense the Madonna di Ognissanti marks his return to Naples after important experiences beyond the city. It also stands at the threshold of the painter’s mature grande maniera: a broader, more monumental and more complex mode in which his Caravaggesque foundations are expanded by a fuller command of space, colour and pictorial orchestration.

The altarpiece is carefully organised without the help of architecture. Dense masses of cloud support the heavenly register, while the lower section gathers the saints into a crowded but controlled field of figures. At the centre of the upper register, Mary looks down while supporting the standing, blessing Child. Below, Peter and Paul occupy a commanding position as compositional and spiritual pillars, associated with the idea of Maria Chiesa — Mary understood as an image of the Church. Around them are the Evangelists, the Doctors of the Church, apostles, martyrs and female saints, only some of whom can be securely identified.

One of the lower register’s most compelling details is the open book held by Saint John, where the words In principio erat verbum give the image its doctrinal centre of gravity. Causa and Giuseppe Mantella emphasise the importance of this inscription, linking it to the painting’s Counter-Reformation meditation on the Incarnation. The text does not simply identify the Evangelist; it points from written word to divine presence. John’s upward glance, the mediating figure of the Baptist, and the blessing Child above create a visual movement from the Gospel text to the Word made flesh. The presence of Carlo Borromeo, identified after cleaning by his profile, aquiline nose and red dress, sharpens the post-Tridentine significance of the image. The work is not simply a crowded parade of sanctity; it is an altarpiece organised around Church, doctrine and intercession.

Stylistically, the painting shows Battistello moving beyond the taut, half-length dramas of his earlier Caravaggesque production. The figures retain his taste for strong physical presence and individualised heads, but the scale is more expansive, the lighting more varied, and the colour richer. The brown-earth tonal base is animated by reds, blues and yellows, sometimes of considerable brilliance, while the light gives weight and volume to flesh, drapery and cloud. Scholars have also pointed to Battistello’s study of Roman models, especially in the figures of Peter and Paul, which recall Aristotle and Plato in Raphael’s School of Athens. A drawing in the Uffizi, connected with the head of one of the saints in the lower right of the canvas, gives further evidence of his preparatory process.

What makes the Madonna di Ognissanti so important is this combination of documentation, scale and artistic transition. It is a securely dated work, tied to a named and intellectually sophisticated patron; it records Battistello’s return to Naples after Genoa and Florence; and it shows him adapting Caravaggesque naturalism to the demands of a large, learned and public altarpiece. Its complexity is not incidental, but neither is it merely recondite. The heavenly assembly, the Gospel inscription, the figure of Maria Chiesa, and the presence of Carlo Borromeo all serve to turn a devotional image of All Saints into a carefully structured and dramatic theological meditation.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Painted in 1622 for the choir of the Certosa di San Martino, Battistello’s Lavanda dei piedi belongs to the great Eucharistic programme of the Carthusian church. The official San Martino/Capodimonte material describes the choir as the heart of the monastic complex, whose decoration developed from the 1589 commission to Cavalier d’Arpino for the vault frescoes to Ribera’s Comunione degli Apostoli of 1651. Stefano Pierguidi has likewise analysed the choir as a long-developing iconographic programme, only gradually brought into coherent form around the theme of the Eucharist. Within that setting, Battistello’s canvas was commissioned by the Carthusians in April 1622 and placed on the left wall of the choir in September of the same year.

The subject is taken from the Gospel of John: before the Last Supper, Christ kneels to wash the feet of his disciples, turning an act of physical service into an image of humility, purification and sacramental love. The San Martino/Capodimonte account describes the scene as set in a vast room immersed in smoky shadow, with Christ in a scarlet robe, girded by a white cloth, kneeling before the troubled Peter. Around them, the apostles respond through looks and gestures that register the dramatic importance of the act. The bread placed on the table behind Christ is therefore not a casual accessory, but an explicit Eucharistic sign, tying Battistello’s canvas to the larger programme of the choir.

Nicola Spinosa, following Raffaello Causa, treats the painting as one of the decisive works of seventeenth-century Neapolitan painting. Causa called it «il caposaldo di tutta la pittura del Seicento napoletano», and Spinosa explains the judgement by pointing to the sustained and sumptuous monumentality of the figures, which seem almost like sculptures cut out of stone by a light of Caravaggesque intensity. At the same time, Spinosa notes that the painting is not untouched by the example of Giovanni Lanfranco in Rome. That reference is important: by 1622 Battistello’s Caravaggism has become more spacious, monumental and deliberately constructed, absorbing Roman examples into a language that is no longer simply Caravaggesque.

Spinosa also warns that the painting is now considerably altered in its original colour and almost illegible in some details. Even so, he finds that it still preserves, beside the statuesque quality of the foreground figures, remarkable passages of what he calls natura in posa. This is important because it links Battistello not only to the monumental history painting of early Seicento Naples, but also to the formation of the Neapolitan still-life tradition. In Spinosa’s account, Battistello, like Sellitto, Ribera and Finson, could reach a very high level in the treatment of such object passages, well before Giacomo Recco and Luca Forte gave the genre its later independent development.

The canvas therefore gathers several of Battistello’s mature strengths into a single large composition: Caravaggesque light, sculptural figure construction, Romanising breadth, and a Neapolitan attention to the palpable physical presence of things. Its Eucharistic setting sharpens rather than reduces these qualities, since the naturalist handling of objects — above all the bread on the table — becomes part of the painting’s sacramental meaning.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Battistello Caracciolo’s Miracolo di Sant’Antonio da Padova is a large altarpiece painted for San Giorgio dei Genovesi in Naples and now in the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte. The subject is one of the miracles of Saint Anthony of Padua: the saint raises a murdered man from the dead so that he can testify to the innocence of his father, who has been wrongly accused of the killing. The accused father appears at the lower right, kneeling with his wrists bound. De Dominici later described the work at some length, though without great enthusiasm, as an altarpiece showing Saint Anthony’s miracle, with a small glory of angels above.

Spinosa clarifies the painting’s original position within San Giorgio dei Genovesi, the church of the Genoese community in Naples. Only from D’Afflitto’s guide of 1834 do the sources begin to record its exact location: the second altar on the left, in the Serra chapel, not counting the niche of the baptismal font. The earliest of the two inscriptions there is dated 1639 and belongs to the tomb-slab of Ottavio Serra, placed by his son Giovanni Battista. Some confusion over the altarpiece’s location arose because another work by Battistello, the now-lost Baptism of Christ with Angels, was also in the same church and had originally stood on the first altar to the right. Fondazione Zeri’s record likewise confirms the present Capodimonte painting as a deposit from San Giorgio dei Genovesi.

The dating of the Miracolo di Sant’Antonio da Padova has caused understandable difficulty, with proposals ranging from around 1607 to the early 1620s. At one end, the painting was once brought close to the period of the Liberation of Saint Peter; at the other, it has been associated with the moment of the Washing of the Feet, documented in 1622. Spinosa favours the later dating, especially in the light of comparisons with Battistello’s Madonna di Ognissanti for the church at Stilo, on which the artist was working in 1618 and for which the final payment was made the following year. Causa also dates the painting to the early 1620s and sees it as a severe masterpiece from Battistello’s mature phase, when the Caravaggesque system was beginning to loosen and recombine with fuller, more complex groupings and a more monumental handling of the altarpiece format.

For Causa, the recent possibility of examining the canvas in very close detail through Capodimonte’s digital resources has changed the way the picture can be understood. The painting’s making was anything but straightforward, and its difficult evolution remains visible in the pentimenti left on the surface, above all in the angel wrapped in drapery. That figure seems to bring together memories of Caravaggio and Curia, while also marking the point at which the final painting moved beyond the simpler structure preserved in the preparatory modello. Causa stresses the dense physical quality of Battistello’s handling: a synthetic, modelling brushwork which reminded Longhi not of Ribera, whose “lenticular” precision he disliked, but of the young Velázquez. If the chronology is accepted, this smoothness of touch can be followed through contemporary works shown in the exhibition, from the Longhi Trasporto di Cristo to the Cristo e la Maddalena at Prato, before reaching its culmination in the Lavanda in the choir of San Martino.

The wider context is important. Causa presents the Miracolo di Sant’Antonio da Padova as the work of a painter operating at a moment when mature Caravaggism was being reconfigured between Rome and Naples. Ribera’s rise in Naples from 1616, and the arrival of Simon Vouet’s Circumcision of 1622 for Sant’Arcangelo a Segno, helped redirect the attention of Neapolitan painters moving out of Caravaggism, above all Stanzione and Vaccaro. Battistello, however, also seems to be looking towards a major statement of the classical ideal: Domenichino’s Communion of Saint Jerome of 1611–14, painted in Rome for San Girolamo della Carità, and soon regarded as one of the normative achievements of modern religious painting.

The preparatory modello is central to both Spinosa’s and Causa’s account of the work. Usually dated to around 1620, the small canvas is catalogued in the 2022 Capodimonte exhibition as Miracolo di Sant’Antonio da Padova, oil on canvas, 44.5 × 33 cm, private collection, cat. 38. It differs from the final altarpiece in two significant respects: the angel in the upper part of the composition is absent, and Saint Anthony is not yet marked by a halo. B. T. D’Argaville suggested that the smaller work might be a contemporary, non-autograph copy made before the angel was added, but Spinosa rejects this, arguing that the bozzetto is unmistakably by Battistello and should be understood as a preparatory study. The differences between the two works are precisely what one would expect in a working modello rather than in a replica. Capodimonte’s later Battistello material similarly describes the bozzetto as autograph and specifically notes its lack of the upper section with the angelic apparition.

Spinosa’s comparison with Battistello’s Sorrento bozzetto, Sant’Ignazio in gloria e le opere dei Gesuiti, usually dated around 1629 and now in the Museo Correale, gives the argument a wider methodological point. A preparatory sketch does not have to correspond exactly to the completed work. The Sorrento bozzetto for the lost Carminello altarpiece apparently omits portraits of the church’s founder that are mentioned in descriptions of the final painting. By the same logic, the absence of the angel in the Miracolo di Sant’Antonio da Padova modello is not evidence against its autograph or preparatory status. It is one of the changes Battistello introduced between sketch and final altarpiece.

Nor, for Spinosa, should the angel in the completed painting be dismissed as a later addition on stylistic grounds. It appears to belong to the original painted surface and, more importantly, derives from an earlier and highly significant model: Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy. Battistello reflects the two-tiered organisation of Caravaggio’s composition, with a supernatural upper zone set above the dense human action below. Although his angel is physiognomically distinct, and is characterised as individually as the figures beneath him, the downward extension of the right arm and open hand repeats a corresponding detail in Caravaggio’s painting. The angel is also wrapped in a magnificent sweep of drapery, whose curving movement likewise depends on the Caravaggesque model. The absence of the angel in the modello therefore does not make the study suspect, and the angel in the final painting is not an afterthought. It is central to the way Battistello builds the altarpiece out of Caravaggio’s precedent, translating its vertical division between earthly action and heavenly apparition into his own miracle scene.

Causa also notes a partial copy of the Miracolo di Sant’Antonio da Padova, formerly on loan from Capodimonte to the Museo del Sannio in Benevento and now in the Capodimonte deposits. This version lacks the upper section with the angel and is slightly extended on the left. The copy belongs to the later reception of Battistello’s altarpiece from San Giorgio dei Genovesi, a work Causa treats as a significant turning point in the Neapolitan painting of the 1620s. It is also relevant to the circle of the artist first isolated by scholarship in 1991 under the conventional name Maestro di Fontanarosa, and now commonly associated with Giuseppe Di Guido, a Neapolitan painter usually dated, with caution, to around 1590 and active in the first half of the seventeenth century. The copy therefore belongs to the painting’s afterlife, whereas the autograph modello belongs to the earlier process by which Battistello arrived at the final composition.

The modello and the completed painting had already been brought together in the section devoted to Caracciolo in Ferdinando Bologna’s exhibition on Neapolitan naturalism. Their comparison served not only to reaffirm the autograph status of the modello, which had at times been questioned, but also to resist a more negative reading of it. Its sketch-like character should not be taken as exposing some underlying Mannerist scaffolding, or as evidence of a decisive retreat from Battistello’s naturalist phase. On the contrary, it belongs to the disciplined preparatory life of the San Giorgio dei Genovesi altarpiece and helps clarify how Battistello arrived at the more explicitly miraculous structure of the finished work.

Without this disciplined use of the modello, Battistello could hardly have reinterpreted, in his own terms, so commanding a precedent as Domenichino’s rapidly canonical Communion of Saint Jerome (1611–14). More broadly, as Causa suggests, the history of the bozzetto in Naples — from Battistello to Stanzione and Vaccaro, and even to talented lesser figures such as Agostino Beltrano — offers a valuable index of the working practice of local masters. The Miracolo di Sant’Antonio da Padova therefore stands not only as a major altarpiece of Battistello’s maturity, but also as a document of invention: a work in which Caravaggesque structure, classical ambition, local devotional setting and the concrete procedures of the studio all remain visible.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Battistello’s frescoes in the Cappella Sanseverino at Santa Maria la Nova belong to a less familiar but important phase of his career, when the intense Caravaggism of his earlier canvases was being drawn into more open, decorative and architectural settings. The cycle, usually described as the Storie di san Michele Arcangelo e corolle di putti, is documented between 1622 and 1625 and should be understood as a chapel decoration rather than as a single isolated work. Its subject centres on the Archangel Michael, but its effect also depends on the angelic figures and clusters of putti placed high in the chapel’s structure.

For Stefano Causa, this is one of the lesser-known trials of Battistello’s “outgoing” Caravaggism. That phrase is useful: the frescoes do not abandon the physical gravity, sharpened contour and dramatic habits associated with his earlier work, but they translate them into a brighter and more dispersed decorative language. In Santa Maria la Nova, Battistello appears not simply as a follower of Caravaggio, but as a painter negotiating between naturalistic force, fresco practice and the demands of a complex chapel ensemble. The result is a useful reminder that his career was not confined to concentrated oil paintings, but also extended into the public, architectural and devotional language of mural decoration.

(Credit: Wikipedia).

Formerly identified as the Vocazione di san Matteo, or The Calling of Saint Matthew, this painting has also been more cautiously understood as a broader Predica di Cristo ai discepoli. In the account given by Nicola Spinosa, the revised title allows the subject to be connected not only with the calling of Matthew, or Levi, son of Alphaeus, but with several passages in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in which Christ warns his followers against the spiritual danger of money. The old title is therefore not simply wrong, since the painting still turns on the tension between Christ’s summons and worldly attachment, but the alternative identification gives the scene a more allusive and meditative character.

That moral pressure is concentrated in the apostle in the foreground at the right, who carries a small bag of coins in his left hand with visible embarrassment. The Met’s own reading of the picture usefully stresses the placement of this money bag at the very front of the canvas, almost within the viewer’s reach. The choice offered to Matthew, whether to follow Christ or cling to wealth, is therefore turned outward towards the spectator. Battistello uses a Caravaggesque half-length format not simply to dramatise recognition, but to create a moment of ethical pressure.

The painting was originally in the Doria collection in Genoa, later in the Arenberg collection in Brussels, and then in a private collection in Germany, before passing through Matthiesen Gallery, London, and several subsequent collections and dealerships. It entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2016. Published by Ferdinando Bologna in 1993, it was dated by him to after 1625 and closer to 1630. Spinosa confirms its place in this phase of Battistello’s activity, noting its affinities with works of the same period, especially in the monumental treatment of individual figures wrapped in large, flowing draperies. Comparisons have been made with the Giudizio di Salomone in the Serlupi collection, Florence, and above all with the Madonna and Child with Saint Anne in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, both in Stefano Causa’s monograph and in Wolfgang Prohaska’s catalogue entry for Ritorno al Barocco. Da Caravaggio a Vanvitelli, Naples, 2009, cat. 1.2.

Seen in this way, the painting belongs to Battistello’s later Caravaggesque language rather than to the more abrupt naturalism of his earlier work. The figures are still close, cropped and morally immediate, but their scale, draperies and slower rhythm give the scene a more monumental gravity. Christ’s gesture, the apostle’s uneasy possession of the purse, and the sharply foregrounded bag of money together make the painting less a simple narrative of vocation than a meditation on renunciation, embarrassment and the difficulty of release from worldly things.

Decorazioni e dipinti per la Certosa di San Martino, c. 1622–35; oil on canvas and fresco; Certosa e Museo di San Martino, Naples.

(Credits: Wikimedia Commons).

Battistello’s work for the Certosa di San Martino was not a single commission but a sustained relationship with one of the most important religious complexes in seventeenth-century Naples. Beginning with the great Lavanda dei piedi of 1622, treated separately here, his activity at the Certosa extended across more than a decade and included both large canvases and fresco decoration. Among the principal works were the paintings for the Sala del Capitolo, including the Adorazione dei Magi, San Giovanni Battista and San Martino, followed by later interventions in the chapels of the Assumption and of San Gennaro.

The importance of San Martino lies partly in the way it shows Battistello moving beyond the concentrated Caravaggesque idiom of his earlier years. The drama of light and shade, the weight of bodies and the gravity of gesture remain central to his language, but they are increasingly adapted to more expansive, architectural and devotional settings. In the Sala del Capitolo and the chapel decorations, the figures are no longer pressed into the kind of close, dark space associated with his most intense early paintings. They belong instead to a broader decorative field, in which colour, movement, drapery, putti and the surrounding architecture all help to organise the religious meaning of the ensemble.

Stefano Causa treats this later phase of Battistello’s career as a crucial complication of the usual Caravaggesque label. At San Martino, the painter is still marked by Caravaggio’s lessons, but he is also responding to other pressures: the monumental demands of fresco, the ceremonial dignity of Carthusian devotion, the prestige of large-scale chapel decoration, and the more classicising or luminous examples offered by painters such as Domenichino, Guido Reni and Lanfranco. The outcome is not a rejection of Caravaggism, but its transformation. Battistello’s art becomes more open, more spatially ambitious and more decorative, while retaining the physical seriousness that gives his figures their authority.

Taken together, the San Martino works show Battistello at full maturity. They are especially useful because they prevent him from being reduced to a painter of dark, dramatic canvases. At the Certosa he appears as a painter able to work across media and scale: in oil and fresco, in single images and larger programmes, in intimate narrative scenes and public devotional spaces. San Martino therefore offers one of the clearest views of Battistello’s later ambition, where the inheritance of Caravaggio is absorbed into the richer, more various language of Neapolitan Baroque decoration.

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I have relied on the following publications, but any errors are mine.

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