Five characters, separated by four centuries, converge on Caravaggio's The Seven Works of Mercy, in Alessandro Giardino's first novel, The Caravaggio Syndrome. First printed in Italian in 2021, the book is now available in English in a translation by Joyce Myerson, published by Rutgers University Press.
, Giardino is a university professor, with expertise in Mediterranean Studies, Baroque, Italian and French literature and art, 20th century French philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He has made several publications on Caravaggio and Naples, including The Seven Works of Mercy. Love between Astrology and Natural Generosity in the Naples of Tommaso Campanella--a 2016 article where he posits that Caravaggio's painting was inspired, not only by the seven corporal works of mercy taught by the Roman Catholic Church, but also by the pagan and astrological teachings of the heretic friar, Tommaso Campanella.
Caravaggio and Campanella never met in real life, although they do in Giardino's novel, with Campanella breaking out of prison to see the artist. Inspecting The Seven Works of Mercy, he finds in it his ideas.
Giardino slides between the 17th century and the 21st, where the shadows of the two Renaissance figures loom large over Michael, an American art history student; Leyla d'Andria, his professor and an expert on Caravaggio and Campanella; and Pablo, her well-built lover. Pablo is found dead, Leyla finds solitude in Paris, where Campanella spent his final years, and Michael returns to the States with Leyla's son, Tommaso. Four centuries before that, Campanella dreams of being born in the 21st century by a woman named Leyla.
Leyla hints at the novel's general form early on by referring to the Greek etymology of "syndrome"--"convergence."
