Domenico Gargiulo, known as “Micco Spadaro”

A reconstruction of the historical figure of Domenico Gargiulo has of necessity to take its cue from Bernardo De Dominici’s Lives (c. 1745), a crucial work – despite the rather flowery, anecdotal style typical of the author – on account both of its sharp critical appraisal of the artist’s career and of the place it occupies in the artistic context of the time¹.

De Dominici tells us that Domenico was born in 1612 to Pietro Antonio Gargiulo, a “spadaro”, in other words an armourer specialising in the manufacture of swords (whence the artist’s nickname), whose workshop was in a Neapolitan street known as Visitapoveri. The register of the parish of San Giacomo degli Italiani, however, mentions only two babies named Domenico Gargiulo born on or around the date given by De Dominici, the sons of Giovanni Giacomo Gargiulo and Paolo Gargiulo who were baptised on 16 April 1609 and 1 April 1610 respectively². Even the origin of the nickname “Spadaro” is uncertain. Writing in 1692, Canon Carlo Celano suggested that it might have been a result of the painter’s penchant for arms³.

Returning to the profile delineated by De Dominici, reflecting a fairly frequent literary ploy, Domenico is reported to have soon turned his back on his father’s trade in order to pursue an irrepressible calling to become a painter. He initially nurtured this calling as a self-taught artist by practising on the graphic work of traditional masters and later, after coming of age, by joining Aniello Falcone’s workshop, where he is said to have made a name for himself with his original and ironic take on a landscape genre based, however, on study from life.

His gradual specialisation in the depiction of landscapes and crowded cityscapes, rendered with meticulous description and a chronicler’s interest in the details of street life, appears to be the result of a marked interest in the printed work of Jacques Callot, which enjoyed widespread circulation in Naples just as it did elsewhere. This figurative specialisation also meant that Gargiulo’s career tended to fall back essentially on private collectors (with the significant exception of his substantial fresco work in the Certosa di San Martino in Naples, and other sporadic episodes such as a Last Supper for the church of Santa Maria della Sapienza in Naples, for which he was paid in 1641 and which is currently on permanent loan to the local Prefettura, or an altarpiece with the Madonna of the Rosary in the church of San Domenico Soriano in Naples, which I have attributed to him on stylistic grounds)⁴. A qualitatively important and far from secondary part of his output was the product of a partnership – sponsored, again according to De Dominici, by the Flemish merchant and collector Gaspar Roomer – with the quadraturista Viviano Codazzi on the basis of a tried and tested formula involving the addition of Gargiulo’s lively little scenes to a perspective setting by Codazzi, a solution occasionally adopted also as a background to a number of compositions that emerged from the workshop of Artemisia Gentileschi.

Given the dearth of dates, the crucial turning point in Gargiulo’s substantial catalogue, given its definitive shape by a monographic work published in 1994 and by an exhibition held in Naples in 2002⁵, lies in his very well documented work for the Certosa in Naples. Gargiulo is reported to have begun working there in 1637, probably taking over from Belisario Corenzio to complete the frescoes in the church porch, before moving on to the more demanding decoration of the Old Treasury, the lay brothers’ choir (1638–40) and the so-called Prior’s Quarter, begun in 1642 and completed in 1646. He also produced a considerable number of easel paintings for the monks which are systematically mentioned in inventories, in particular a Thanksgiving After the Plague of 1656 dated the following year and still in the museum attached to the Carthusian complex, a work that documents in the archive suggest marked the end of his relations with the monastic community.

Despite De Dominici’s difficulty in arranging the painter’s output in chronological order, he nevertheless provides us with a crucial topographical list that offers us a key of the utmost importance for understanding the world of art collecting in 17th century Naples. Definitely identified as being by Gargiulo’s hand we have the Eruption of Vesuvius in 1631 and the celebrated Masaniello’s Uprising, both in the Museo di San Martino and formerly in the home of Antonio Capece-Piscicelli, to which we can also add, in a kind of ideal triptych of tragic historical events in 17th century Naples, the depiction of Largo del Mercatello during the Plague of 1656, also in San Martino.

Gargiulo’s career after the terrible plague in the middle of the century is not very well known. On the basis of information supplied once again by De Dominici, it seems plausible that he was in contact with with Andrea and Nicola Vaccaro and, above all, with Luca Giordano, this latter encounter confirmed by clear stylistic affinities and by his participation in the cycle of canvases between the large windows in the nave of the church of Santa Maria Reginao Coeli in Naples.

De Dominici informs us that Gargiulo died from a fall in 1679, but his assertion is not confirmed by any surviving documentary evidence, thus on the basis of a reliable hand-written note compiled by Pietro Andrea Andreini in 1675⁶, it seems more likely that the date of the artist’s death should be brought forward to 1672.