It was certainly not the first time something similar had taken place. Masterpieces of Italian, Flemish, “Oriental,” and other traditions of art have been transported from one museum to another on countless occasions. There was something particularly interesting about this time, though—interesting enough to warrant a few pages and draw inspiration from it for a book.

In the summer of 2014, a painting by Michelangelo Merisi, also known as Caravaggio, became embroiled in negotiations among a group of institutions and representatives of civil society. The talks concerned the possibility of its temporary transfer. The painting in question was The Seven Works of Mercy, delivered by Caravaggio to the Confraternity of the Pio Monte della Misericordia of Naples on January 9, 1607 and rarely moved since then.¹ The negotiations—which lasted for several weeks, at times sparking off public debate—focused on the possibility of transferring Caravaggio’s iconic masterpiece from Naples to Milan, specifically for the 2015 Universal Exposition. The institutions involved in the talks included the Vatican State and the Italian Republic’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Activities and Tourism.² The possibility weighed by the lay and religious institutions was that of exhibiting the seventeenth-century work inside the pavilion of Caritas: the pastoral body of the Italian Episcopal Conference for the promotion of charity; but also the Italian branch of Caritas Internationalis—one of the largest nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the world, whose humanitarian activities spread out over dozens of countries.

As will be explored in greater detail, Caravaggio’s painting is a powerful representation of the iconographic theme of the corporal works of mercy, which every good Christian is expected to perform in aid of the needy by providing basic necessities such as food, water, clothing, shelter, and so forth. The reasons behind the request to borrow the painting can therefore be found in the Expo 2015 theme—“Nourish the Planet, Energy for Life”—and even more so in the humanitarian campaign launched for the occasion by Caritas called “Divide to multiply” and its global action campaign “One human family, food for all: it’s our duty.”³

Despite the authority of the institutions involved, the idea came to nothing. The painting remained where it was. The pavilion had to manage without Caravaggio’s work or, at best, refer to it indirectly. As soon as news of the painting’s possible transfer came out, protests erupted in Naples—not so much because of the risks associated with transferring any work of art, or even because of potential issues bound up with introducing Caravaggio’s painting into a contemporary humanitarian framework. The demonstrators demanded that the historical and artistic heritage of southern Italy be defended from a predatory attitude on the part of political and cultural institutions in the north. As it turned out, the vision of the Minister of Cultural Heritage, Activities and Tourism, Dario Franceschini, would ultimately promote an idea of Expo as a journey along the Italian peninsula in discovery of its cultural and culinary delights.

At the beginning of 2016, Caravaggio’s The Seven Works of Mercy found itself enmeshed once again in a controversy, also involving several institutions and a possible transfer: this time, from Naples to Rome. The idea was to display the work inside the Palazzo del Quirinale—the residence of the President of the Republic and a symbol of the power of the Italian state—during the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, which was inaugurated by Pope Francis on December 8, 2015 and ended on November 20, 2016. This was a tribute to the desperate condition of migrants attempting to reach Europe along the Mediterranean routes and, by extension, to everyone suffering from the hardships of war or natural disasters.⁴ At first it seemed as if the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, was personally involved in implementing the proposal. However, not long afterwards the Presidency was forced to specify that a group of people linked to the Pio Monte of Naples had put forward the idea of the loan for the Jubilee, so it was not the Quirinal who had spearheaded the initiative.⁵ As a matter of fact, a few days earlier the President of the Republic had been addressed in an open letter published in the newspaper Corriere del Mezzogiorno, in which intellectuals and art historians, including Paolo Isotta, Aldo Masullo, and Tomaso Montanari, had asked him to give up on the idea of exhibiting the masterpiece. They reminded him that in 1613 “the Founding Members of the Pio Monte established the ‘perpetual immovability’ of the painting because the chapel, on whose main altar it is preserved, was created specifically for Caravaggio’s masterpiece: the architecture, the context, is complementary to and inseparable from the extraordinary pictorial work.”⁶

From the Expo to the Jubilee, then, this time too, prompted by its relevance to a large public event with a strong symbolic impact, someone had the idea of moving the same painting by Caravaggio. Then controversies arose and everything stayed where it was. In both cases, the arguments aimed at preserving the painting in the artistic and historical context in which it was created. The polemics, it should be noted, remained largely indifferent to any in-depth examination of the social and political issues involved in the transfer: the fact of allying the religious theme of mercy with the mostly secular field of contemporary humanitarianism; the ethnocentrism potentially implied in the gesture of associating the work of a master of Italian painting with the conditions of people assisted by NGOs located around the world; the risk of creating a sort of forgetfulness or, at the very least, of upstaging the real sufferings of individuals affected by catastrophic events by giving center stage to a work of art.

Anybody who goes to Naples does so to plunge into the maze of streets that make up the city’s enormous historic center. One climbs up and down streets coming from the Spanish Quarters, crosses via Toledo and takes Spaccanapoli or the Decumano Maggiore, which cuts the city in two: it is a long alley that, in terms of place names, coincides with today’s Via dei Tribunali. At number 253, there stands a building with a large loggia. Since 1602, this structure has been the seat of the Pio Monte della Misericordia, a registered charity founded by seven Neapolitan noblemen; an institution linked to the values of the Counter -Reformation but conceived from the outset as a lay organization.⁷ It is one of the most active associations in the city as well as the owner of a picture gallery, the Quadreria, that is endowed with a priceless collection. The paintings displayed in the chapels located inside the octagonal church of the Pio Monte della Misericordia alone, which take the theme of mercy in multiple directions, include works by artists Giovanni Bernardino Azzolino, Fabrizio Santafede, Luca Giordano, Giovanni Vincenzo Forlì, and Battistello Caracciolo . Caravaggio’s painting hangs on the left side of the entrance, mesmerizing visitors and bringing them to a halt.

During Expo 2015, as during the Jubilee, anybody who went to Naples to see The Seven Works of Mercy might have been surprised by what was exhibited for the occasion on all sides of the Caravaggio : not only the paintings by the artists mentioned earlier but also a series of works in different media. These were contemporary art pieces installed inside the various chapels of the church. They formed part of the “Seven Works for Mercy” project, developed in 2011 from an idea by Maria Grazia Leonetti Rodinò, a cultural heritage management consultant. The idea she had was simple and original: to invite seven artists every year to freely engage with the theme of mercy, showing its topicality on the contemporary scene.⁸ Among the works of the 2016 edition, those of Rachel Howard and Olaf Nicolai create an explicit link between the theme of mercy and contemporary tools for emergency management: in Howard’s mixed media piece, Controlled Violence, she folds and stacks white sheets stained with red. The German artist uses instead seven disposable isothermal blankets, like those currently employed by NGOs: he spreads them out and plays with their color scheme, creating a relationship with Caravaggio’s painting and in particular with the Christian duty to “clothe the naked.”⁹ The works by artists from previous editions now form part of the Confraternity’s collection and can be viewed in the Quadreria gallery: from Jannis Kounellis, who crosses and nails five men’s shoes, to Anish Kapoor; from Mimmo Jodice to Joseph Kosuth; and from Francesco Clemente to Douglas Gordon.

Anyone disappointed by the failure to transfer Caravaggio’s painting to the Caritas Pavilion at the Milan Expo or to the Quirinal in Rome and who managed to visit the marvelous spaces in the Pio Monte della Misericordia would have surely picked up on the ironic associations to be made between these aborted projects and the act of installing contemporary pieces in its home location. “If Caravaggio won’t come to contemporary events, then contemporary events will just have to go to Caravaggio,” a slightly cynical spectator with a dry sense of humor might well have remarked while exiting the Pio Monte. This is a way of encapsulating the “topicality of Caravaggio” in a simple sentence or motto: the continuous references to the artist and to the composition of his paintings (the intensity of the passions, the spectacularity of the composition, the chiaroscuro), as if the secret of contemporary communications were locked up inside them...