The Guardian of Mercy: how an extraordinary painting by Caravaggio changed an ordinary life today
TERENCE WARD

Terence Ward works in documentary films and his book is written by one who thinks in screenplays. He describes heels “clicking crisply on stone-laid medieval alleys”, and light that “illuminates the dining room that faces the rippling great bay”. Scenes are nicely set and settings are well framed. There is also a personal story folded within this encounter with a great religious painting. Ward and his Italian wife moved from Manhattan to Florence, then to Naples. On their second day in Naples, a friend shows them the Duomo of San Gennaro, the city’s patron saint, and then a much more modest church, where they are bowled over by Caravaggio’s enormous canvas, The Seven Acts of Mercy.

“I’ve never seen a painting like this,” writes Ward. “Startling. Magnetic. Strange … I don’t understand.”