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

In July 1647, the Neapolitan populace rose in arms against the government of the Spanish viceroy. The revolt is named after its first leader, Masaniello, a poor fisherman in his twenties whose meteoric rise to fame was matched only by his rapid fall from favor with the Neapolitan people and his assassination ten days after the insurrection began. Masaniello's followers were opposed by the combined forces of the Neapolitan aristocracy and the Spanish administration, led by Philip IV's illegitimate son Don Juan of Austria, who eventually succeeded in entering the city. in April 1648. He quickly suppressed the rebellion and restored the status quo, bringing to a close what, from the point of view of the establishment, would be remembered thereafter as an infamous nine months of violence and misrule.

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

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

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

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