Monumental complex Purgatory ad Arco

This guide to the Monumental Complex Purgatory ad Arco in Naples opens in 1661 with an unproven young painter named Luca Giordano, later nicknamed Luca Fa Presto for painting fast, handed a whole side chapel inside a church whose facade is carved with skulls and crossbones. It follows his Death of Saint Alessio, an old man dying beneath a staircase recognized too late by his own family, and the visible debt its swirling drama owes to his teacher, the Spanish painter Jusepe de Ribera. Upstairs, painters Massimo Stanzione and Andrea Vaccaro filled the church with the color and movement that set the standard Giordano had to match. Look up at Stanzione's altarpiece before turning to the chapel he was given to fill.