Morning Market. Another blow-in. Lenders and collectors.
Masaniello arranges himself. What drovers saw. Convent at nightfall
Morning Market
Somewhere in Spain hangs a large panoramic painting of the Market Place in Naples. It was done just after the middle of the seventeenth century and showed a morning in spring. Trading was well under way. The air was clear, the sky a striking blue with a crisp dry tramontana sending shreds of beige cloud and some wisps of white haze scudding out of the picture past the mauve outline of Vesuvius, rendered with the clarity that in Naples came only when a tramontana blew. Dry sunny air and high barometric pressure meant energetic activity on the ground and revealed in unusual detail the choral business of the Market and its people. Detailed low life and large-scale topography melded into something that felt like real life. An odd mix of aims and genres came alive in the splendour of the weather.
Thieves were being arrested, or running off amid a clamour of Market women. Bare-legged and barefoot children were brawling in the dirt or picking a fortune teller’s pocket or crawling among buyers’ legs to steal fruit from the sellers’ shallow baskets. Monks slung heavy sacks over their shoulders, a priest proffered a holy image for adoration. A donkey mounted a mare. The mare seemed not to mind but the loaves of fresh bread in her saddle baskets went flying and a bystander sprawled on the ground. Order was restored with sticks, men looked on with interest, women scattered, one snatching a glance over her shoulder at the stallion’s attributes as she hurried off. A one-legged beggar importuned a pair of nearby drinkers and mounted police led off a couple of hunched and shrinking arrestees on foot.
The incidents were immersed in the fascinating ordinariness of a working morning. An old woman laid out her meagre offering of root vegetables on the ground with an artist’s care, their tails radiating from a hub of tops, grouped by type and flanked by mounds of rounder and smaller vegetables on the side. Her tiny still life became part of the picture. Knives were sharpened, cheese weighed out on scales, wine casks tapped while fussy buyers picked over produce. Little dogs skittered through the interstices, a dozen of them, leaping up at each other and at the children, hanging round the food shops, nosing the ground or keeping an eye on human movements.
A couple of them seemed to be having sex as a smaller third dog looked on. Animals were everywhere, donkeys bearing people and produce or waiting to be loaded up again, sheep and goats nuzzling the dirt for a blade of grass, oxen drinking from shallow tubs, donkeys drinking likewise on the other side, oxen pulling carts, horses ridden or pulling coaches, red-combed hens sitting in a basket on someone’s head. Some of the human drama—a brawl and a couple of people laid out cold on the ground—was rendered so faintly and from so far away that you could hardly see it.
The radiant sky and the purple hulk of the mountain invested the people and their dealings below with vastness and meaning. The low range of hills reaching inland from the volcano was where the Market sellers came from, and the hills’ rich soil produced the goods laid out. They were ordinary people and daily life as a benign and heavenly eye might see them. Or an eye with some human failings. The little foreground figures, picked out with a lot of red and blue, showed in the tiniest detail and behind them details gradually blurred, just as the colours faded toward the back of the Market Place and the handsome church with its jutting spire. Or a benign and distant monarch’s eye, gazing on an image of life in a part of his empire he would never visit. Or the eye of a viceroy, looking back from retirement in Spain at the peaceful busy productiveness he had once overseen, and his own deeply rewarding years of service in one of the most beautiful and entertaining places on earth.
The nearest sides of the rawly unfaced buildings framing the scene were still in shadow. Some parts caught the morning sun, all glowed with old sunlight trapped in the porous tufo. Washing on the rooftops, pots of herbs on ledges, women’s faces at windows, simple wood or canvas awnings over the shopfronts at ground level. In the square, the white canvas and the light battens protecting the wares looked like boats and sails on the sea of people. The painting of the Market fair in Naples is so delightful and curious that the eye never has enough of looking at it.
The Market Place in Naples had grown from a patch of flat ground on the outskirts of town where a stream ran into the bay. Sea and beach were just out of sight behind the row of tenements on the painting’s right. The church of the Carmine and the big Carmelite convent adjoining it were practically on the beach. The Market was supplied from the flat sandy beach where fishing boats unloaded their catch and market gardeners from around the bay brought their produce directly to point of sale by boat across the water. Many of the buildings lining the Market space in the painting had six storeys and one had seven. Naples was now a megalopolis of over half a million people and the Market was its belly.
The Market is perhaps the vastest space you can see anywhere in Italy . . . in this place every week on Monday and Friday buyers and sellers come together and a mass of food can be seen: grain, flour, stock feed, green vegetables, animals of all kinds for slaughter, according to the season, and every other kind of goods to meet human needs, so that its fame and size match any other fair held in our kingdom.
Two hundred years later it was still packed at all hours by people buying and selling food and other supplies . . . a variety of people, different cries ringing in your ears, a universal commotion, especially on Fridays and Mondays. Today it is a crowded desolation.
Domenico Gargiulo, who painted The Market, was called Micco Spadaro, being the son of a sought-after swordsmith in Naples who was keen for Micco to follow him into the business. Amenable Micco obliged, for years sadly cleaning swords, then beating and tempering them himself, to please his father. Forced to leave home for persisting with his art, he apprenticed himself to the painter Aniello Falcone. Salvator Rosa was another apprentice and close friend, who shared Gargiulo’s avant-garde interest in landscape painting. Like Falcone himself, neither had any interest in the grind of religious commissions.
Falcone was only a few years older than his students. He had learnt painting with Ribera and his first work was a grim study of a punitive Schoolmarm holding a raised whip in one hand and a book in the other and towering over two plain and wretched small boys in fearsome disproportion. Lucy Giving to the Poor was a sunny open scene on the edge of the city and its dispossessed had the monumental dignity of the architecture framing them. Falcone was famous for battle paintings and in the trade they called him the oracle of battles. The immensely rich collector Gaspare Roomer particularly liked these and got Falcone to fresco his magnificent new out-of-town villa on the sea with panoramic battle scenes. He sold Falcone’s war paintings all over Europe. They were always a battle scene without a hero, collective images of men fighting which showed not the fighting but the making ready and war as part of daily life . . . almost ordinary realism, real movements of horses and riders, vivid portraits and accurately observed clothes . . . figures fully and inwardly shaped, objects handled almost as in still life . . . some of the settings recognizably places around Naples . . . Falcone still seemed happier, and more himself, with a group of middle-class people improvising a Concert.
Gargiulo was comfortable in the social landscape of figures at work or play. His friend Rosa, except in the smouldering drama of a Self-portrait against a lowering sky, reduced human figures to near invisibility among forests, rocks, clouds, beaches. People for Rosa were details in the greater mineral, vegetable, meteorological scene, pretexts for a title. Gargiulo painted people tiny in their masses. Both started out painting real people where they lived and worked in the country and on the coast, and then diverged, one toward the landscape and the other toward its people. His main interest was real life, and so he often went out into the country in company with Rosa and sometimes with his master himself . . . soon the name of Micco Spadaro was famous. Gargiulo never left Naples. Rosa, a restless protoromantic ahead of his time, got away quick and hardly ever came back.
Gargiulo was fascinated by the work of his contemporary Jacques Callot, the French photojournalist of an age before photography. Callot made rapid, vivid sketches of the many figures in street life, festivals, performance improvisations of commedia dell’arte or the horrors of the thirty years’ war, then engraved and printed them for sale. In a working life of fifteen years or so Callot produced over fourteen hundred prints and a couple of thousand preliminary drawings. The prints set their many figures in the deep space of carefully rendered urban or landscape settings. Some were unbelievably complex. The Fair at Impruneta, done in Florence in 1620, included over thirteen hundred distinct single figures of people and animals in an image smaller than forty-five centimeters by seventy.
Callot the engraver, who never painted, died in his early forties in 1635. Gargiulo, a painter who never engraved, gathered as many of Callot’s prints as he could get his hands on and studied the energetic economy of the few lines Callot took to show a miniscule figure’s age, sex, class, activity, feeling and bring these together in a striking stance or a gesture, a calligraphic stroke that made everything one. Gargiulo thought about the ambiguity in Callot’s art, the way the eye danced over people seen as clearly defined individuals, however tiny, and saw the larger movements of social togetherness. The vastly panoramic little prints led your eye from single figures, pairs, knots, huddles, clusters—intimate, hostile, or momentary and inconsequential—to the larger crowds that were always coalescing and disintegrating, moving and re-forming and never the same, like the clouds gliding soundlessly overhead across the sky.
Gargiulo the Neapolitan came to understand the dynamics of crowds even better than the French master he never met. It took a while to show this in his art. Early in his career he formed a partnership with a northern Italian painter of his own age who worked in Naples and specialized in studies of monumental architecture and ancient ruins. These were fashionable among private collectors, who were often amateurs of antiquities. Viviano Codazzi would paint a monumentally inert scenography of mellowed antique pillars, steps, porticoes, rotundas, and Gargiulo would bring it to life by flicking in his little human figures sprawled on the steps or gesticulating in the street. As their partnership progressed, the human presences got tinier and tinier within their architectonic cage, more and more subversively alive. Less was more. Each painter liked what the other did and customers liked what they did together, Neapolitan images of darting low life framed by austere grandeur. Then in 1647, after nearly fifteen years in the city, Codazzi abruptly left Naples and never returned.
Beside painting fresco on the endless walls of the charterhouse of San Martino, along with other inevitable religious commissions, Micco Spadaro—people kept calling him the nickname from his greener years—did a lot of small paintings which went straight into private collections. They were quick, sketchlike capricci showing scenes of street life in the city and working days in the country and they kept him close to the photojournalist spirit of Callot. The point of these faits divers was implied in the paintings’ small size: to offer vividly recognizable images of moments in contemporary life, something the owner and the owner’s friends would see without that interference of history, religion or morality that grander art entailed. Gargiulo’s capricci had bite but no affect, elicited a small shock of recognition. The capriccio was a format in which a painter could be himself, and in attending to details of ordinary working life, Gargiulo was being himself.
He abandoned significance like a man throwing off pretentious and uncomfortable formal clothes. People being human together in public spaces were his subjects, not excluding street people, working people, the poor, children, panhandlers, petty criminals, even killers. Even his biblical and mythological scenes looked like real life events. He was a painter of energy and movement whose paintings were full of small momentary flares of violence. His Christian martyrdoms looked like outbursts at a country picnic, and when he had to do a massacre of the innocents what move[d] viewers were the mothers weeping over the little slaughtered bodies and other children in their death throes and others torn from the breast of their loving but horrified mothers. When he had to do formal horror, Gargiulo did the appalled witnesses best of all. They were himself.
A lot of the small paintings were later lost. Among the survivors were Women Washing Laundry in a country stream, which included a scuffle with some youths, molesting the young women as they knelt over the water or trying to steal the laundry. A scene of Fishermen Attacked bringing their catch ashore in a rocky cove at evening was a moment of violence by bandits trying to seize the fish. There was a scene of Criminals Punished led through the streets, one mocked with a paper crown and riding an ass to jail or hanging. There was a Riding Lesson for the younger nobility. Looking good on horseback as you went down Toledo mattered in Naples more than almost anything if you were a male aristocrat. In Gargiulo’s painting the young blood on his high-stepping white charger got no more attention than the trainer, the knot of onlookers and idlers, one tipping back dangerously in his chair, and hardly more than the tiny thread of other young riders on white chargers being led around the piazza in the distance.
All this fed into The Market Place. Transposed into a large panorama, Gargiulo’s intimacy with the ways of the people he was painting transformed the banal commission for a painting of record. It charged each tiny figure with its own energy and choreographed the swirling eddies of people into a celebration of their togetherness. The Market Place was an image of the choral theatre of Neapolitan life, and like the best Neapolitan art it filled an essentially static scene with a winning dynamism.
Another blow-in
Their new surge of dissatisfaction with old-school locals gave the San Gennaro deputies courage to think big again. This time they thought Domenico Zampieri, familiarly called Domenichino. Like Reni he was a Bolognese working between Rome and Bologna and at the peak of the profession. If the deputies couldn’t bring Reni back, they were now going for the closest thing. Though everyone in Rome advised him not to go to Naples, in the spring of 1630 Zampieri accepted the Gennaro commission by letter, and the next year he moved to Naples. Before leaving Rome, he received an anonymous death threat by letter from Naples, but he had a major contract to respect and went anyway. Like Reni, only more so, Zampieri was deeply shy and solitary, not a people person at all. Corenzio and his associates were no less hostile than before to incursions by prestigious outsiders. The workaday painters’ rancour was as strong as ever. Everything was in place for a replay of the Reni episode of nine years earlier.
His paintings were insipid but Zampieri the man was in his quiet way a lot tougher than Reni. As he left his room in the archbishop’s palace on the second morning after arriving in Naples with his whole family . . . he found a strongly threatening message advising him to go straight back to Rome and give up the work he had started. This was a shock, and knowing what had happened to Reni he went straight to the viceroy Monterrey. The viceroy reassured him enough to keep working, though after this he no longer dared go outside in Naples, and the only journey he ever made was to go from his rooms to his work, which was so close it was the same as not going out at all. A few months later Vesuvius erupted and Gennaro interceded, which was frightening but restored a sense of proportion and urgency to Zampieri’s work on moments in Gennaro’s life. Now the new viceroy Medina demanded he do a series of paintings for the king in Madrid. This meant failing to meet the contractual deadline for his work on Gennaro. The viceroy, having forced Zampieri to break the contract, then refused to help get him an extension. The deputies threatened to cancel payment for paintings not done on time.
In a rage Zampieri threatened to walk off the job altogether and the deputies let him go. He rented a horse at Aversa and rode day and night until he reached the Aldobrandi estate at Frascati—it was high summer—and ended up staying there over a year. In Naples the viceroy had the painter’s wife and daughter held under house arrest as hostages against his return. He did go back and work resumed for the now deeply hostile deputies, who never quite forgave him for leaving. The painters’ cabal hated him for coming back. They ran a campaign of slanderous whispers and anonymous letters and libellous pamphlets. Ribera and Giovanni Lanfranco—an old rival from Bologna and Rome who had arrived in 1634 and immediately aligned himself with the Ribera–Corenzio axis—were both determined to get commissions for Gennaro’s chapel, and they rode the anonymous agitation with attacks on Zampieri’s work. Ribera proclaimed that Zampieri was no painter because he didn’t paint from nature, only a good ordinary draughtsman. Ribera added that Zampieri didn’t even know how to use a paintbrush and that he spoiled the figures in his painting by overworking them.
Ribera at least was speaking as a painter. Everything he cared about in painting was opposed to Zampieri’s careful idealizations. Ribera had just painted the Bearded Lady Magdalena when Zampieri arrived and was not going to see his own fierce naturalism undermined by an interior decorator from Rome. He well knew that in Rome taste had already turned against the real, and that Zampieri’s imported elegance was a foretaste of what was to come in painting. Ribera had a vision of the real world to defend against Zampieri. Corenzio had only professional interest.
Zampieri’s painting was sabotaged. He would arrive in the morning to find his previous day’s work painted over during the night, or that ash had been added to the plaster so his painting fell off the wall when it dried. He kept at it, though the stress was unbearable and made worse by an ugly dispute with his wife’s family. Already uncouth and mistrustful by nature, he now turned against himself, went off his food, couldn’t sleep, alienated his wife . . . weakened and lost his energy. He had nearly finished when he died suddenly in 1641. His wife claimed his drinking water had been poisoned. The doctor advised her to keep quiet about it, since nothing could be done for him now. Poison was what Reni had been afraid of. Ribera and Lanfranco got their commissions: an undone altarpiece and the cupola that Zampieri had only begun to fresco. Ribera’s painting Gennaro Leaves the Furnace Unharmed took him five years to finish and by the time it was done Ribera had succumbed so completely to what one twentieth century art historian called the compositional rigour and richness of expression of the Roman-Bolognese tradition that another twentieth century art historian dubbed it Domenichino’s Revenge.
Eight fat cherubs did a well practised and elaborately synchronized aerobatic tumble with linked hands against a cloud-flecked sky of brilliant blue. Ribera’s Gennaro emerged from the furnace as a highly institutional churchman, prematurely middle-aged with a puffy—even slightly rabbity—face, fat clerical hands and a bluish shadow of beard showing through his well shaven and pasty indoor cheeks. He was splendidly coped and mitred in gold and making all the right moves with fingers and eyeballs, apparently unaware of the ropes still around him and the jet of white flame at his back. Ribera had painted more of a sashay from the sacristy than an escape from the furnace.
Only in the lower left, among the overwhelmed soldiery and the fleeing plebs, there was a Neapolitan scugnizzo, not terrified at all but yelling his lungs out in the wild drama of the moment, taking time in his lateral flight to look over his shoulder and out of the canvas with a look that wasn’t a hundred miles from the Clubfoot Boy’s—Look at me, Ma!—and affording a moment of instant recognition and connexion to anyone who might have just walked in off the street. By the time his painting of Gennaro was hung, Ribera was living under protection in the viceroy’s palace, but this was not where he’d been for most of his life.
Corenzio at eighty-three was too old to benefit personally from Zampieri’s death at sixty, though his people did.
When he died five years later nobody was surprised to learn he was immensely wealthy. Bernardo De Dominici wrote about these events a hundred years after they happened. De Dominici would be much disapproved of by twentieth century academics for extravagant errors and inventions in his lives of the painters, branded the counterfeiter as early as 1892 and sixty years later a purveyor of shameless lies and shameless mystification. De Dominici was a man of strong sympathies and exuberant imagination who had a way of shaping a painter’s life to fit his own acute perception of the art. And sometimes vice versa. In his account of Corenzio’s failure to render light in his painting, De Dominici wrote
his saints in paradise are surrounded by such dense clouds that the saints seem to be in the shadows of limbo rather than in paradise, where all is splendour. Unhappily he kept this darkness up almost every time he had to paint saints in glory.
He brought his telling of Corenzio’s life to a climax, after rising to it through the wars of Gennaro’s chapel and then maintaining suspense through a descriptive interlude, in Corenzio’s last and most wicked act of all. This was the murder of one of his own apprentices, a gifted young painter whose work was praised more highly than his own. De Dominici’s aria on the obscene spectacle of seething, devious senile jealousy concludes with the ancient painter’s death fall from high scaffolding, working to the very end.
Since Corenzio died in peaceful retirement, people later believed the poisoning too was certainly invented by the biographer.
But the young painter really existed and his name, variously given in the old sources, was Luigi Rodriguez. He was the second son of a Spanish officer stationed in Palermo, and born about 1580. When he arrived in Naples in 1594 he was put in the care of a slightly older Sicilian painter already working there. A few years later he was working alongside Corenzio and the most admired painters in Naples on one of the most important commissions in the city. Around 1600 he married and between 1601 and 1607 had three children. In these years he also did, on his own, a major fresco decoration. After this, he worked in Corenzio’s fresco team, sometimes alongside Corenzio’s other assistant Caracciolo, who was a year or so older and just starting out. Rodriguez died in 1609, when he was thirty at most, remembered as a notoriously hardworking, intelligent and fast-rising young painter in fresco, who had won major commissions when he was hardly more than twenty and had worked for Corenzio for several years. The fragments fit the murder claim. De Dominici had only the timing wrong. It happened thirty-five years earlier.
I first came across Rodriguez’s name not in De Dominici but in a multivolume guide to the buildings and art works of Naples written not long after Rodriguez died. Notizie del Bello dell’Antico e del Curioso della Città di Napoli, five volumes in its nineteenth century edition, was written in the late seventeenth century by a sober, unfanciful, unassuming, well-informed and extremely accurate cleric called Carlo Celano. Celano was not writing a study of sensibilities like De Dominici’s but simply assembling a compendium of facts for the serious tourist, and his facts have stood up very well. Perhaps a slight tremor registered at the mention of our Luigi Siciliano, who was Rodriguez.
Luigi was an assistant of Belisario Corenzio’s. The friars called on him to paint the church as mentioned. The master [Corenzio] inquired of these same friars why they had commissioned the assistant and not the master to do the work and was told it was because they thought the assistant was better at painting. Belisario waited until Luigi had finished the paintings in the lower part, and seeing that people commonly praised them as better than his own, he had him killed miserably in the flower of a youth that showed promise of doing marvels in art.
Celano was born in 1625 and lived in Naples all his life. He was a contemporary of Corenzio’s for his first twenty years and an informed historian of Neapolitan art and history. Celano was in a position to know. He was De Dominici’s source, telling essentially the same story and, in the one detail that matters, more convincingly. De Dominici had the perfidious old painter personally slipping poison to the young challenger. Celano said nothing about when it happened and wrote simply that he had him killed. Which was exactly what any boss in Naples would do.
Lenders and collectors
Gaspare Roomer was talked about in his lifetime and for quite a while afterward with great awe and described in that special tone people reserve for the unimaginably rich. A contemporary in Naples described him as
a Flemish gentleman . . . born in the famous city of Antwerp where his family are among the city’s leading gentlemen and some of the richest, with their business dealings all over Europe, a most distinguished family of infinite value . . . [Roomer] adds splendour to his virtue and his graciousness with such noble ways . . .
And this was long before his fortunes peaked. A later writer put it more succinctly.
Roomer . . . was so rich that they said he was worth two million and his name became proverbial. When anyone was asked for a really big amount of money, more than he had, he would immediately reply, Do you think I’m Gaspare Roomer?
Adding immediately that Roomer was
a lover of painting and very well informed about our art . . . owned pictures by the world’s best painters and spoke about them with such exquisite taste and judgement that all the other lovers of painting at that time followed his opinions.
Roomer was perhaps the richest man in Naples for a while. His ships ranged as far afield as Scandinavia and Egypt, but most of his business was carried on with his native Low Countries. He was one of those foreigners who were so much better at business than the Neapolitans, let alone the Spanish, and part of that nucleus of resident Genoese, Florentine, Flemish and Balkan financiers who ran the economy. Southern barons, living off the revenues of their huge estates, thought commerce beneath them, and so, disastrously, did the Spanish, whose thinking ran more on military, imperial, religious, dynastic, bureaucratic and racial lines. The ethos in Naples was non-commercial and outsiders exploited the opening. Increasingly, as the Spanish economy floundered, the vicerealm’s administration depended on foreign financiers to underwrite its operations and bail it out of crises. Before long Roomer was lending not only to the viceroy but to the Spanish crown in Madrid.
Roomer’s private collection of paintings was huge. By 1630 it was being housed in a series of twelve rooms. When he died in 1674 he owned more than eleven hundred canvases. Being Flemish, Roomer liked realism and he didn’t mind it rough. Being a businessman, he dealt in paintings like everything else. Buying and selling between Antwerp and Naples during his long collecting life, he was an influential channel for the movement of art between northern and southern Europe for most of the century. Neapolitan painters found buyers in the North through Roomer’s activities, and the Flemish work he brought south to Naples showed them what was happening on that other frontier of the real. Like the Spanish empire, only a lot more successfully, Roomer was engaged on two fronts: the Low Countries and the Mediterranean.
Roomer had bought don Marzio Colonna’s great palace in Naples after Colonna’s death. Don Marzio was the duke of Zagarolo, the Colonna who sheltered Merisi on his estate there in the summer of 1606 after the street killing in Rome, and who took Merisi with him to Naples at the end of that summer. His palace was probably where Merisi lived in Naples when he painted the Seven Works. For Merisi it was a minute or so from Piazza Carità on the edge of the Quarters, where nearly all the painters in Naples lived in a compact and densely intermarried community. Roomer had missed out on Merisi but he homed in on Merisi’s Neapolitan followers. He collected Ribera’s work with enthusiasm, even or especially the hardest paintings to like. It was Roomer who commissioned the repulsive Silenus and he also had Apollo Skinning Marsyas. He also bought Caracciolo, not quite so passionately. Roomer liked big scenes too, and went for Aniello Falcone’s panoramic and antiheroic battle canvases. And when Caracciolo died in 1635, Roomer was ready—the moment it appeared—to seize on the work of a near-unknown who was the newer generation’s very greatest painter. And when he died young, Roomer became very interested in the panoramic work of Domenico Gargiulo. He knew his painters.
Roomer had an associate, another Fleming called Giovanni Vandeneinden, who had arrived in Naples penniless—a very poor shipping clerk married to a collar starcher—and accumulated his immense wealth, financial power and aristocratic relatives entirely through his operations in the city. With money came art. Advised by Roomer, Vandeneinden built up his own huge collection of first-rate paintings, buying the work of painters in Naples and investing in outside art through his business network in Rome, Venice, Genoa and the North.
The strictly financial influence of Roomer and Vandeneinden and the other outsiders in the vicerealm was eclipsed spectacularly in the late sixteen thirties by the rise of a local—the most audacious businessman in the history of southern Italy. The vicerealm was by then in such deep financial trouble from the cost of Spain’s war in the Low Countries that the Roomer milieu held back from lending more. Bartolomeo d’Aquino certainly eclipsed Roomer as the richest man in Naples. For a while. He had started as a small businessman, one of three brothers who had a shop in Naples, and then made a lot of money fast through astute and lucky speculation in government bonds. When the usual financiers made themselves unavailable to the Spanish administration, d’Aquino was pressured—he claimed later—into helping out the government in 1636. This encouraged Roomer and the others to come back into play. Over the next eight years d’Aquino personally raised sixteen million ducats for the government in Naples, most of which went straight to Spain or to Milan, which was the operational base for Spain’s war in the Low Countries. The others raised another twenty million. The public debt trebled.
The effect on people in Naples and its hinterland of the arcane financial dealings involved in raising these funds for Spain’s war effort was not hard to see. In return for their credit the financiers were allowed, as the state’s contracted tax collectors, to extort new taxes on everything in sight. New export taxes on silk and oil—Naples’s main exports—new consumer taxes on oil, flour and salt, new sales taxes on everything bought and sold, imported and exported. A stamp duty on all contracts was rejected when the aristocracy objected. The tax contractors kept seventy per cent or more of the taxes they collected and d’Aquino’s agents deducted his cut before the money went to state or local government agencies. D’Aquino had made himself so necessary to the financial viability of Spain’s war effort that his requirements had priority over the government’s own.
After five years of this regime, the government’s tax office noted that mothers are selling their daughters because they can’t feed themselves. Men in great numbers were trying to join the clergy, which was tax-exempt. The thugs employed to extort payment did such damage on their raids that the king wrote to the viceroy from Madrid in some distress about their violence. The viceroy Medina, who had run the new financial regime for six and a half years, or had been run by d’Aquino, ended his term two years later in 1644. His successor, the admiral of Castille, resigned after less than two years as viceroy because he couldn’t raise in Naples the money Madrid was demanding. By 1646 the city and the vicerealm were squeezed dry. The thirty years’ war was still going, the Low Countries were still in full revolt.
D’Aquino later claimed that the system was missing beats as early as 1640 and that he had been forced to sell on his tax credits at a loss. He had to keep launching new speculations to keep up the flow of money north to the war front. Delays in payment were causing alarm and then panic in Madrid. D’Aquino was running a kind of Ponzi scheme whose only investor was Spain. The rest of the financial crowd started keeping their distance from him, but too many people were involved too deeply in his activities to let him go altogether. People did talk about how little of the actual money extorted from the people was reaching the war front, and how much of it went to d’Aquino and his associates. The new viceroy set up a commission of inquiry and at the end of it d’Aquino was arrested, mainly so none of the tangle of interested parties exposed would try to eliminate him. He was a convenient scapegoat, along with the previous Medina administration, though his rise had been enabled entirely by Madrid. The case had already dragged on for years when other events intervened.
After his fall, d’Aquino was reviled by everyone. The aristocracy had always loathed him as a low-rent upstart. D’Aquino was now seen as
stunted and ugly like his origins . . . a big spender . . . clothes and lifestyle more like an aristocrat’s than a businessman’s . . . full of squalid little faults . . . lived badly . . . loathsome vices . . . linked with men he made fortunes for in return for unmentionable sexual favours . . .
And so on. But even at the height of his wealth and power d’Aquino revolted the nobility. It was partly his getting above his station and partly the fact that d’Aquino was the viceroy’s man at a particularly intense moment in the power struggle between viceroy and baronage. One of the most turbulent and fiercely pro-French barons in 1640—and a brute to his vassals—was Gian Girolamo Acquaviva, the count of Conversano. The viceroy Medina and d’Aquino both thought, for quite different reasons, that a brilliant move would be for d’Aquino to marry one of the count’s young sisters. Her name was Anna Acquaviva and she was currently shut in a convent at Benevento. A marriage agreement with enormous dowry was fixed with another Acquaviva brother, who got a twenty per cent cut for negotiating the deal. The count heard of it and a posse of angry nobles gathered to block the marriage. The duke of Atri, who was yet another Acquaviva brother, called on d’Aquino to desist in his low proceeding. This marriage is costing me fifty thousand ducats, d’Aquino said, and I’d pay as much again not to have any discussion about it.
But several dozen aristocrats and their armed retinues rode in procession through Naples to the palace where the bride-to-be, released from the convent and brought down to Naples for the wedding, awaited her betrothed. A big crowd followed, eager to see what would happen. The viceroy sent a couple of senior judges with military escort to block their way. They were swept aside. The knights invaded the palace and the bride was escorted back to her convent in Benevento by her brother the duke of Atri, and the prince of Torella, who was a Caracciolo, and the duke of Maddaloni, who was a Carafa. The viceroy furiously convoked the ruling council the same night to issue a fierce reprimand. The council refused. The nobles showed a class solidarity worthy of the most demanding causes.
Masaniello arranges himself
Tommaso Aniello d’Amalfi, known around the traps as Masaniello, was born in the house on the corner of Broken Alley at the Market at the beginning of the summer of 1620. He was the eldest son of a shoe repairer called Cicco d’Amalfi and the woman he had married four months earlier. A brother was born two years later, another two years after that and a sister in 1626. The second of the three boys died quite young and soon their father Cicco too disappeared from the sparse records of the lives of the Market people.
Masaniello’s mother Antonia had been a prostitute around the Market. No longer being any good for that after starting a family, she then hawked the embroidered headscarves that married women wore in the Market district. The house in Broken Alley opened on to the Market square right by one of the excise posts where contractors exacted the duties imposed by Spain on produce bought and sold. This one exacted duty on grain . . . livestock . . . fresh meat and salt meat, fresh cheese . . . and every other kind of cheese. It was a circumstance people would remember later.
Tommaso Aniello grew up, as the son of a shoe repairer and a retired prostitute turned bonnet salesperson, outside the cycle of production and consumption. He quickly learnt to live by expedients. He was, the mass of anecdotal evidence converged in agreeing, unusually charming, spontaneous, opportunistic and yet principled, intuitively intelligent and deeply sensitive to the feelings of the people around him, amoral, joyous, unreflecting, histrionic. He was remembered as generous but vengeful, frank and complicated at the same time, sincerely modest and insanely vain, deeply penetrating in his awareness of his own world and somewhat clueless about the larger movements around it. He was a young male Neapolitan of his time and class with no formal education, an unusually attractive presence and an openness of nature that some people exploited but most responded to. His troubles were the usual ones of being poor and out of work. These did not diminish his loyalty to God or the king of Spain or their representatives in Naples. He was against bad government.
At first he was one of the swarm of Market kids, filthy, barefoot and often trouserless. Children who supplemented their meagre home diets with ripe fruit given or snitched among the Market sellers, who supplemented the family income with deft liftings from the pockets and purses of country visitors, tavern drinkers and busy dealers. Who watched the animals coupling and the prostitutes and their pimps and their clients and the motherly women who for a small fee brought people together. The card players, the drinkers, the cheats and conmen and the expert older thieves. They saw the comedians and the acrobats on their stages and the fishermen bringing their catch ashore down on the beach.
The children noticed the brutality of the excisemen, and the stratagems Market people used to circumvent them. They saw the ritual humiliations of minor criminals, and since the Market Place was also the site of public executions, they saw ritual death and its class distinctions, beheading for the aristocracy and hanging for commoners and worse for those who offended God or king. For them there was torture, mutilation, quartering and burning alive, and the Market children saw this too. They saw elaborate religious processions to the church of the Carmine and the clatter of military pomp around the viceroy’s weekly visit for mass. They went around in mobs, ignored by busy adults but closely monitored by their peers, and developed a powerful collective morality that mutated but did not vanish as they grew. Masaniello’s early life left no records. He was part of this formless mass.
Masaniello ran errands, learnt how to make himself useful and how to meet people’s not always licit needs. He learnt to make himself liked and to get himself trusted. He also found out how a young man with no social resources behind him could find his own trust abused by thugs or jacks in office who did have some power, and he resented it bitterly. He hated the excise contractors and their private armies of enforcers even as a boy, and he showed it. After his father died an uncle took him in for a while, but had to send him back home because his hostility to the excisemen made trouble for the uncle.
He hung around the fishermen and paid them little or nothing for small fish superfluous to their catch, and he hawked these cheap around the market in paper cones. He didn’t always get paid. Once he delivered a parcel of fish to the house of a wine merchant who took the fish and didn’t pay. When Masaniello went back later to collect his money the wine dealer told him to clear off or he’d fetch a hiding. It wasn’t the only time he was cheated of both fish and money. Another time he was beaten up by the duke of Maddaloni’s servants when delivering fish to the Carafas. It was a beating he didn’t forget. But he did manage to establish a connexion with the convent next to the Carmine church, where they always paid for his deliveries of fish.
He did other odd jobs too. He networked and made himself useful around the Market. The marchioness of Brienza’s estate manager, who was a priest and at the Market picking up a consignment of cheeses sent in from the country for the marchioness and her son the prince of Atena, asked Masaniello if he couldn’t manage to slip the cheeses past the excisemen. Masaniello could and did, in several sackfuls. He got a couple of cheeses out of it for himself as well as some cash. The cleric was glad to have avoided a punitive excise payment and Masaniello to have made a little money for the day. Hearing of Masaniello’s difficulties—he had a wife and child by then, and life was more and more of a struggle—appreciating his smartness and skill, the factor agreed to be Masaniello’s godfather. In the always fluid and ambiguous Neapolitan way, an informal but intensely personal connexion was being made across their differences of social class, and its purpose was to circumvent the extortionist state. Don Mercurio Cimmino was not Masaniello’s only godfather, but he was the least equivocal. Masaniello needed all the help he could get and the business of the cheeses seemed to represent a step up in the level of his activity, from being a small-time street seller and avoiding the excise collectors and their enforcers on his own account, to working for others, delivering contraband goods on commission.